On Jan. 20, 2010, Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard delivered his 23rd State of the Judiciary address to a Joint Session of the Indiana General Assembly. An excerpted version follows.
For the first-time, the State of the Judiciary was broadcast to a statewide audience. Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations produced a half-hour special devoted to the State of the Judiciary. It aired on eight Indiana Public Broadcasting television stations the week of January 24th: WTIU-TV Bloomington, WNIT-TV Elkhart/South Bend, WNIN-TV Evansville, WFYI-TV Indianapolis, WYIN-TV Merrillville, WIPB-TV Muncie, WFWA-TV Fort Wayne and WVUT-TV Vincennes. The address was also carried live on four Indiana Public Broadcasting radio stations including, WNIN-FM Evansville, WFYI-FM Indianapolis, WBST-FM Muncie and WVUB-FM Vincennes.
Video of the speech and the full text of the 2010 address are available online. Visit courts.in.gov/supreme/state_jud.html for all addresses since 1988.
Like many, I have lived through economic downturns, but none so serious as today’s and none so challenging for government servants. Just as demands on our service peak, finances restrain our capacity to respond.
This gloomy reality is also felt by the third branch. Our new filings are at record numbers – a tangible marker of a society under stress: more businesses short on cash flow suing people who cannot pay, more divorces, more abused children. If it’s bad and you can put a name on it, it shows up in our courtrooms.
Still, what strikes me about our court system is our colleagues’ ingenuity and energy at lifting up the legal system. Even as our trial judges plan our future, judges and lawyers and court staff have summoned the energy, the focus, the tough-mindedness to ramp up the system even in the midst of crisis.
We are nearly overwhelmed by mortgage foreclosures. Last year, we joined the mortgage foreclosure prevention effort led by Lieutenant Governor Skillman. I promised we would train more judges, lawyers and mediators, anywhere in the country in law and economics and the mechanics of modern foreclosure to better assist people in need.
With leadership from Judge Melissa May, and the State Bar, ICLEF, local judges, pro bono committees, and law schools, we exceeded our goal and trained 1,112 people.
What difference does that make? While in Hendricks County to thank lawyers who have volunteered to help families in need, a young lawyer named Traci Twait said she had volunteered to represent two families in foreclosure. “We haven’t reached a settlement in either case, but they’re still talking and so far nobody’s been thrown out,” she said. A few weeks later she told me they succeeded in rewriting the loan in one case and were still talking in the other. That’s progress.
Our next objective will be to energize the settlement sessions required by the 2009 legislation before a foreclosure can be carried out. We will begin placing facilitators in three counties this winter using a temporary fee on mortgage foreclosure filings.
A recession puts other kinds of pressure on families. Last year divorces surged. We are also encountering more children who are neglected or abused. The good news is the number of new volunteers trained as court-appointed special advocates in 2009 was up 26% over 2008, and 2008 was up 51% over 2007.
Speaking of protecting the vulnerable, a recession generates more domestic violence. Last year, the Supreme Court’s Judicial Technology and Automation Committee (JTAC) was energetically installing the electronic protective order registry so that law enforcement agencies would be notified immediately when an order of protection was filed. Today all 92 counties use this tool for protecting vulnerable women and children.
The work we do with law enforcement agencies has also improved through technology. The electronic citation system developed by JTAC, called eCWS, is used by 5,000 law enforcement officers who have issued 1.7 million citations. Officers and drivers are safer because they spend less time by a busy highway; officers spend more time on patrol.
The new twenty-first century case management system that links all this together, a private enterprise product called Odyssey, is likewise being deployed. It’s now in some 50 courts in 18 counties. Since September we began using it in Hamilton, Huntington, Blackford, and Madison counties. Allen County will be online later this year. At any given moment more counties ask for installation than our teams can reach.
Among the weaknesses in Indiana’s criminal justice system has been that we mostly use very dated assessment tools to estimate the relative risk of offenders. Advances make it possible to assess the risk involved with criminal offenders with far more precision. After several years’ work the Indiana Judicial Conference adopted a new statewide tool for assessing juvenile offenders. We did most of this without any general fund money and because we are using public software, most counties will save the money they now spend on less effective assessment tools.
This is one of many initiatives we’ve pursued notwithstanding the recession. Another one is to assure that we have fair and representative juries. We have created a jury list that combines data from the BMV, the Department of Revenue and the Postal Service. It’s the most accurate annual list of who’s living in each county ever created. A representative who presented a national award to us for this project said simply, “Indiana sets the standard.” This makes for a genuine jury of your peers, but it also means less time and postage wasted on sending jury notices to people who have died or moved.
To make sure juries do their business better once they’re in the courtroom, we have developed a project called “Plain English” jury instructions. It involves a new set of instructions, legally accurate, but written with the help of English teachers so jurors can more easily comprehend them as opposed to the nearly impenetrable instructions of the past.
And as for understanding law, we used the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln to partner with the State Bar to send lawyers and judges to classrooms to talk about Lincoln the lawyer and the benefits of the rule of law. It succeeded well beyond our expectations and won three awards after about 500 lawyers and judges gave talks to 33,000 students.
Another program designed to give promising students a boost reached a real milestone. The Indiana Conference on Legal Education Opportunity works to help minority and other disadvantaged students become lawyers. In October, Governor Daniels appointed a member of the inaugural CLEO class, Rudolph Pyle III, as Judge of the Madison Circuit Court. He’s the first CLEO graduate to become a judge in a court of record. The first CLEO judge in any court was Eduardo Fontanez, in the East Chicago City Court.
I want you to know that the judiciary will do its part to aid in the budget crisis. For example, we’ve stopped doing something we’ve done for 193 years. Instead of mailing our decisions to lawyers, we will now send them by e-mail, saving $39,000 this year alone. We decided to postpone regional meetings we’ve conducted with trial judges every spring for at least two generations, saving about $16,000. We have held open senior staff positions at a savings of $227,000 in State Court Administration. These numbers are modest by comparison to the state budget but the whole court system is a very small part of the budget.
I suggest three topics that might be the subject of legislation and collaboration between the branches.
First, we should be doing everything we can to collect all the revenue the law says is due as the result of court operations. In some cases we leave money on the table that ought to go toward state and county budgets. Capturing all this revenue is partly a matter of changing practices and partly a matter of legislative authorization.
Second, the recession produced record filings in 2008 and 2009, right at the two million mark. Record caseloads means that our ability to give people a hearing has become terribly squeezed. In today’s climate we cannot ask for more judges. We already use Senior Judges who work part-time. I hope you would let us use retired magistrates as well to meet these caseloads.
Third, among the most effective strategies we have available are drug courts and re-entry courts, and the General Assembly has enacted laws to help courts make these techniques work. After eight years of war we find people in court with special disabilities and needs that flow from the pressure of their military service. I ask you to give us a framework to establish veterans’ courts, and other problem-solving court programs as the need arises. The Commission on Courts has endorsed this idea. None of these ideas cost much and may even bring in new revenue.
Finally, I’d like to describe the extraordinary experience I had recently at Emmerich Manual High School. The Indianapolis Star’s stories about this challenged inner city school has generated an enormous response. The Star wrote, “If you want to show you care about these kids, come to the choir and band Christmas performance next Tuesday at 6:30.” As my family turned the corner on Madison Avenue you could see headlights all the way up the hill to the next stoplight, cars lined up hoping to get into a parking lot long before filled to capacity.
The two teachers who played key roles in making that miracle happen were center stage, though obviously not alone. But they’ve dedicated their careers to helping young men and women learn music, yes, but also to giving those students the self-confidence to face the world, to stay in school, and build better lives. That thousands of citizens came to cheer them on was simply thrilling.
I can tell you that there are plenty in our court system who, like those persistent and unshakable music teachers, even in this dark hour, are unwilling to roll over and play dead. They’ve decided to stand their ground, “to spend and be spent” in the cause of building and rebuilding a place worthy of the fine name Indiana.
