A new community outreach court and expanded outreach from the Medford Police Department's Livability Team are some of the ways officials are trying to get people off the streets but also out of the criminal justice system. JPR鈥檚 James Kelley spoke with Municipal Court Judge Virginia Greer. She says her office has been responding to a steady rise in misdemeanor cases since the pandemic.
Virginia Greer: In 2022, when things kind of started coming back, we shot up from 2,400 cases to 4,100 cases, and last year we were at a little over 4,800 cases. This year we are on track to have another rise in the case numbers. I鈥檓 not sure what that鈥檚 going to look like by the end of the year, but right now we鈥檙e on track for a pretty substantial jump again.
James Kelley: And what types of cases are these, generally speaking?
VG: These are all misdemeanors. So A, B and C misdemeanors, Trespasses, Prohibited Campings, Theft 2, Theft 3, Disorderly Conduct, Assault cases, Harassment, Menacings, Criminal Mischief, that type of thing is what makes up the majority of these.
JK: Tell me a little bit about what that day-to-day looks like now.
VG: So, we have some pretty large dockets at this point for arraignments and for pretrials. We try to keep our pretrial dockets more reasonable because we, like everywhere else, have public defender limitations. I wouldn鈥檛 say a crisis, because we do have two public defenders who work with our court and they鈥檙e phenomenal. They鈥檝e taken on a large number of clients in order to facilitate our court working as efficiently as it does. We do try to be very cognizant of the fact that they not only work here, but they have private practices and have other clients that they need to pay attention to. So, our pretrial dockets we try to keep down to a reasonable level. Our arraignment dockets have gotten very large over the last year. Last week or the week before, I think we had 130 people scheduled for arraignment, which is a very large docket. We had a little under half show up, which is also a very large turnout. Our courtroom is reasonably small. It can only accommodate 55 people with seats and we definitely exceeded that capacity.
JK: Why do you think these numbers are growing so much?
VG: I think part of it is just the nature of our population right now. For most of the cases that I see, there seems to be a drug or alcohol component attached to it. But also, the Medford Police Department鈥檚 Livability Team expanded, and they鈥檙e contacting significantly more people than they were before, and I think that鈥檚 having an impact. You can look around town just to see it鈥檚 having an impact. The illegal camping sites have gone from everywhere that you look down to almost nonexistent, and that is definitely a function of the work they鈥檙e doing on the greenway鈥攃onnecting with people, and through them and through additional mechanisms that they鈥檙e using when people are in jail, getting them services while they鈥檙e in jail. And then through the court we try to follow up with them and do those wraparound services, not only through the attorneys but in court itself and then through outreach court as well.
JK: Does this seem manageable? Is there anything that can be done moving forward to mitigate the crazy caseload?
VG: So, I don鈥檛 necessarily know that mitigation is the goal. I think that handling it in an effective, proactive way is the goal. And for us, what that looks like is dealing with the cases that are in front of us and really working as best we can with the Livability Team and with our community partners to get people out of the criminal justice system so that they鈥檙e in a stable position and are contributing back to society, rather than continuing to be in the criminal justice system. We have seen some success with the program, and we鈥檙e hoping to expand those in the future and try to refine our process so that we can make it more efficient as we go along.
