30 Minutes to Nowhere

"I don't know of any court in the country that does business on this assembly-line basis," complains U.S. District Judge George Hart of Washington, D.C. So clogged are Washington's federal courts that 950 defendants currently cannot beg, borrow or steal an available judge to try their cases. Courts in other parts of the country have tackled their backlogs with such new devices as computerized assignment of trial dates. But Washington's have tried something else: the "30-minute alert," which may be a good example of how not to solve court congestion.

Under the "alert" system, a defendant must sit around every weekday in a waiting room, while his lawyer and all witnesses in the case are required to be within half an hour of the court room. In theory, a judge can thus immediately fill an unexpected hole in his calendar; but despite good intentions, the idea has often failed abysmally, notably in the case of Charles Harling. Charged with participating in a 1965 armed robbery that netted items worth a total of $29.10, Harling refused to plead guilty, demanded a trial, and thought he was making progress last March when his case was finally put on 30-minute alert. Then nothing happened--except that Harling had to spend every day in court.

As Harling's court-appointed lawyer, Noel Thompson, put it after his client had been effectively jailed by day in a waiting room for three months: "Delays caused by congested court calendars, busy prosecutors and the like cannot and should not serve as adequate justifications for denying the accused his constitutional right to a speedy trial." Sympathetic, the judges have taken Harling off alert for the moment. He has been promised that when he goes back in two weeks, his will be the first case called.

Meanwhile, the 30-minute alert continues its mysterious workings. After hearing of Harling's situation, four judges recently complained that they had spent the previous day sitting around without a single case to try. Court officials attributed it all to missing witnesses, prosecutors busy in other courts, and plain bad luck.

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