HOW TO REOPEN THE COURTS

The Courts, and by that we mean those who run them, have been quiet on re-opening. Much like a sealed motion filed by the prosecution, we do not know what is going on. 

Here are some problems our intrepid robe wearers will need to address and settle: 
El Chapo Café- Open?  Social distancing? Let's say we get everything else in place, it's a Monday at lunchtime, people are streaming downstairs to eat. How are the hungry masses accommodated? 

Courtrooms. It is not our current judges' fault that our beloved REGJB was built circa 1960. Some courtrooms are downright tiny germ-spreading factories. Think about the ones in the back hallways. In Corona-world we cannot have people standing in those narrow hallways waiting to come in to court. Even the regular sized courtrooms have bench seats that crowd people together. None of this works 2020 Corona-world. 

SOLUTION#1- Close the small courtrooms in the back hallways and use the courtrooms on the first floor now being used for traffic calendars.  It brings less people deeper into the building. Misdemeanor participants can enter, walk right into the courtroom on the first floor,  and leave without using an elevator or escalator. This one is easy and a no-brainer. We expect it to be implemented immediately. 

We need to innovate, which just happens to be our middle name. 

SOLUTION# 2: The C word. CALENDERING.  
Dear Judges Soto and Sayfie. We have had our differences in the past. You did not like the pressure we exerted to close down the courthouses. We in turn, did not fully grasp the pressures you were under and how hard it was to just shut it down. Let's move beyond our differences. Please listen to us. This is important. THE DAYS OF 9 AM CALENDARS ARE OVER. oVER. over. Over. Anyway you spell it. O..V..E..R. 

Judges need to work from 8:30-5:00. Arraignments from 8:45-9:30. Miscellaneous matters from 10:00-11:00. You need a half hour space to empty the building between calendars. 11:30-1 lunch. You need to give people time to eat off-premises. No jurors in building until 1:30. Jury trials from 2 pm on. Change of pleas on Friday afternoons (which gives lawyers in trials Fridays off and avoids the dreaded Friday verdict-syndrome Rumpole abhors). 

No longer will inconveniencing jurors be the guiding principle in pushing jury trials to quick conclusions. Safety. Space. Efficient use of time to schedule and handle hearings will be the new guiding principles.  


Solution#3: Calendar calls Can Be Done By Zoom. Repeat. Lawyers do NOT need to come to the courthouse to announce ready for trial or not. Two weeks before trial date, a Zoom calendar call is scheduled. Hold them during a Thursday evening cocktail hour and you may see more resolutions than normal. 

Solution#4: Saturdays and Sundays are just days in the week. We have all been home for several years now. Or at least it seems that way. There is no rule that says motions to suppress cannot be handled on Saturdays. We will all need to work more to catch up. Judges will need to use the time available to safely space out hearings. 

Here is the guiding principle- we cannot--- cannot---cannot just schedule everything for 9 am, jam people into our courthouse and then work until it is done. To their credit, the Feds have been scheduling their time efficiently for a long time now. State court needs to catch up. 

Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their court system. Judges need the calendaring tools to be able to schedule matters at 2:30 and 4:00 pm. To the court systems' credit, their tech department stepped up and instituted Zoom quicker than you can say it's safe to open tattoo parlors in Georgia.  Lawyers will be inconvenienced. We all need to change the way we do business

Solution#5: Move Traffic Court.  Dade County has lots of office space. Move traffic court off-premises from the courthouse. Commercial real estate is being crushed. You can rent a storefront office on Coral Way for nothing. Marias- a gathering place for REGJB lawyers ever since Janet Reno would stop off for dinner in the 1980's, has sadly closed. That space can be rented. It has street parking. Set up satellite traffic courts all over Dade County, even Hialeah (Motto: "Where the streets have six names"). Add a dollar user fee to each ticket to pay the rent. In Corona-world 2020 and beyond,  it is all about managing the flow of people. Less people in larger spaces=safety.

There will be no WWII to bring this economy back from the coming depression. But maybe there will be a few trillion dollars invested in infrastructure. And that means new public buildings redesigned to eliminate crowds, and the  infections that come with crowds. The new Miami Sy Gaer Criminal Justice Center that can be built in 2025 will be a giant step towards solving these problems. Until then we need to use all the hours in the day, six days a week, to handle the cases in our criminal court system. 

A well intentioned reader may well email us that we did not discuss the civil court system. "How about civil court Rumpole? 

Oh, that's easy  we respond. 
"Jam them all together. The world can use less civil lawyers."

Solution#6:  "I thank you good people. There shall be no money. All shall eat and drink on my score. ...The first thing we do, let's kill all (the civil) lawyers." 
Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, scene 2. 

Drop the mike and walk off the stage. 

Coming next: By Any Other Name.  (hmmmm, what could that be  about?)