By Jason W. Armstrong
Daily Journal Staff Writer
This article appears on Page 3

RIVERSIDE - The Superior Court here tossed out a record 25 cases passing speedy trial deadlines last month in a new surge of dismissals brought on by a shortage of judges.
The dismissals have jumped since the June departure of the chief justice's "strike force" - a six-member team of retired and sitting judges from other parts of the state who pitched in to help clear Riverside County's oldest pending criminal trials.
Court officials also peg the increase in tossed cases on several vacant judicial positions and a new case management system that is more quickly pushing matters to a stage where they must be tried under statutory time limits.
Since January 2007, county supervising criminal court jurists have dismissed 83 cases. Of those, 48 were misdemeanors and 35 were felonies.
Last month, Judge Helios "Joe" Hernandez, who supervises the court's western criminal division, dismissed 25 cases, saying he had no courtrooms to route them to.
That number was the most cases ever tossed in a single month in Riverside County, and eclipsed the previous July record of 22 dismissals.
So far this month, Hernandez has thrown out nine cases - six misdemeanors and three felonies.
Prosecutors immediately re-filed all the felonies except for one, which they decided to handle as a parole violation. Legally, prosecutors can re-file felonies once. They cannot re-file misdemeanors.
The dismissals have involved offenses such as drug possession, child molestation and assault. None of the cases have been murder charges.
"We need more judgeships," Presiding Judge Richard Fields said Wednesday. "With our judge shortage and with vacancies, we're not able to have courtrooms for all of the cases that could go to trial."
The county has one of the worst judicial deficits in the state. The court has 58 judgeships and 18 commissioners, but the Judicial Council has said it needs nearly double that number to adequately handle the county's filings.
Last year, Chief Justice Ronald George sent in the strike force of visiting judges to help drive down hundreds of pending trials that were several years old. When they weren't dealing with old trials, the team helped Riverside judges clear out so-called "last-day" criminal cases, or matters that were about to exceed statutory deadlines to be heard.
By law, felony cases must be tried within 60 days of arraignment unless the defendant requests a time waiver. Misdemeanor cases must go to trial within 45 days of arraignment if the defendant is out of custody and within 30 days if the defendant is in custody.
Hernandez dismissed a handful of cases during the several months of the strike team's tenure, but the frequency increased after the visiting judges left in June.
Fields said the court had hoped to fill the gap with seven more judges the county was slated to get under state legislation providing additional jurists statewide. But the state's budget woes postponed that plan at least a year.
"We lost six full-time judges," Fields said. "We anticipated they'd be replaced, and they were not."
Also fueling the dismissal uptick, he said, is vacancies of six of the court's 58 judgeships because of retirements or the recent election of jurists who haven't taken the bench yet.
In addition, a new case management system is "making cases come up for trial faster," Fields said. If they're ready for trial and there's no courtroom to accommodate them, he said, they could be dismissed.
The district attorney's office disagrees with the dismissals.
"As an office, we're frustrated that some serious felony cases are being dismissed," Chief Assistant District Attorney Sue F. Steding said. "Even if they can be re-filed, that interferes with speedy justice."
The office also has faulted the court's decision not to send criminal matters to juvenile, family law or probate courtrooms before tossing them. Court officials contend they don't have to send criminal matters to such courtrooms, and an appellate court has agreed.
The court already routes criminal trials to civil trial judges. Though the court has had to dismiss some cases coming up for trial because of unavailability of judges, Fields said the bench has whittled its felony trial backlog considerably.
Countywide, in March, the court had 2,271 pending trials. As of Aug. 15, that number had dropped to 1,336, Fields said, largely because of increased settlements and streamlined case management operations.

jason_armstrong@dailyjournal.com