North Carolina District Attorneys call for a pause of multi-million dollar eCourts system

The North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts hopes to have its eCourts system running in 49 counties by the end of the year.

There’s one big problem though: The NC Conference of District Attorneys wants the program halted.

On Thursday members of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety heard repeatedly how the technology intended to modernize the courts was making the caseloads for prosecutors much more difficult than when they relied on paper.

Johnston County was among the four counties to pilot the system in February 2023. More than a year later, District Attorney Susan Doyle said the amount of time it takes to access a case file and its contents in the new digital system is unacceptable.

“Yesterday afternoon, I documented by video the amount of time that it took for me to pull up one case through typing in a case file number,” Doyle explained. “It took two minutes and four seconds to pull up one case in the Odyssey system. Tomorrow, we have 748 cases on our disposition court calendar. That would take more than 24 hours to address every single case on that calendar at that speed.”

Doyle said because of the increased time that it takes to complete a task or just to continue a case, the function of the job of a prosecutor has changed significantly.

“Prosecutors have much less time to actually try cases and to manage the backlog of our dockets. Instead, prosecutors have turned into data entry clerks, typing away on their computers for hours at a time,” this district attorney shared.

Doyle said it no longer works to schedule just one assistant district attorney to work a district courtroom. She needs two.

“It requires a tag team approach because the system is so cumbersome and so slow. While one ADA is waiting to pull up a file, another ADA can be working on a plea.”

A recipe for human error

Three hours to the west, District Attorney Spencer Merriweather wasn’t any happier.

Seven months after the start of eCourts, it takes more people more time to accomplish less than it did before, according to the Mecklenburg County D.A.

“Something that used to take 30 seconds with one step, now can take six to seven steps for a full five minutes. That’s fine, maybe for one case, but in a district like mine, which sees hundreds of cases come through its courts in a day, five days a week, it’s a recipe for delay, and more importantly, it’s a recipe for increased human error.”

What Merriweather said should really trouble lawmakers is the expanded accessibility of litigation information.

“Officers and clerks must now redact contact information in some criminal cases involving domestic and sexual violence,” he explained. “But if that victim is the complainant in a case, the clerk still must enter their information and contact information into the system for all of the world to see, including information accessible to the very assailant from whom that victim may be trying to protect herself. In other cases, officers may attach detailed affidavits on violent crimes that includes witness information that could be published on a public portal.”

The most sensitive identifying information might be redacted, but if it’s missed, victims and witnesses can be exposed to harm, D.A. Merriweather said.

“I’m very concerned about this idea that witness information would be made public. Are there incidents now where people are at risk for having stepped up and being willing to be a witness in crime, because I had not heard that?” asked Senator Natasha Marcus (D-Mecklenburg).

Merriweather said there’s always been public information, but it was a lot harder to come by.

“These are the types of things that were not rectified before we rolled out a system in the largest county in the state,” said the D.A. “So it’s not surprising to me that I’ve got domestic violence victims, survivors, who are calling my office extremely upset because they counted on the justice system to keep them safe and to keep them protected, and they see their information pulled up on the internet.”

“That’s unacceptable,” Marcus said incredulously.

Chuck Spahos, General Counsel for the Conference of District Attorneys, said more recently that his office has become aware that the method of accessing records of pending cases and convictions between counties that are using the new system and those that have not rolled out eCourts is not reliable.

Earlier reports have blamed glitches in the system for wrongful arrests.

“Stop forcing the rollout until these deficiencies are addressed,” Spahos urged.

Additional work requires additional court workers

Michelle Ball, Clerk of Superior Court for Johnston County, told lawmakers she considers herself a fan of the system, but she said it’s far from perfect.

“For example, this morning, we lost our ability to file, stamp and sign documents, because one of the tools on the toolbar was not functioning.”

That functionality was restored while Ball was listening to others give their presentations.

But mastering a system that takes more keystrokes will require help for the understaffed clerks offices statewide.

“Clerks have never suffered under the illusion that eCourts would make our work faster or easier or that it would make the number of court clerk staff needed less,” said Ball.

“At the present time we are 219 clerks understaffed to do the work that our workload says that we need. And this is even before the Odyssey eCourts rollout that requires additional work.”

The Conference of Clerks of Superior Court wants staffing to be a priority during the upcoming session.

Ten new counties set to launch this month

As for pumping the brakes on the eCourts rollout, that decision does not lie with the General Assembly.

It’s up to the Administrative Office of the Courts.

Years in the making, the AOC signed a ten-year contract with Texas-based Tyler Technologies in 2019 to create the electronic statewide court system.

AOC Director Ryan Boyce told legislators many of these problems are being addressed by his office and the software developer, but a pause in their technological progress would not be prudent.

“These old legacy mainframe systems we’re dealing with are on 1959 technology. Every day we have those systems is more of a risk than our cloud-based systems,” said Boyce.

When one of those legacy systems went down last week, Boyce said, court clerks couldn’t enter anything for almost a full day.

“That’s a huge problem as we deal with outdated technology that is degrading every day.”

Ten counties — Alamance, Chatham, Durham, Franklin, Granville, Guilford, Orange, Person, Vance, and Warren — are slated to go live with the Odyssey eCourts system on April 29.