Beehive State News

The U.S. legal system will be hit with a huge backlog of cases from the COVID-19 shutdown that may have serious financial implications for court systems, a judge said, based on his professional experience and what is happening in his state of Utah.

“What's happening is you have this building up of cases that need to be dealt with and it's going to hit," former Utah Judge Kevin Allen told Legal Talk Today in July, "unfortunately, at a time when the states just don't have the money to deal with it.” 

The backlog is linked to the fact that courts in Utah have given priority to hearings involving the most serious cases during the COVID-19 pandemic, Allen told Legal Talk. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have given priority to the most severe cases while sidelining less significant crimes, Allen said.

"For obvious reasons, but this has created a sort of a building of cases that those involved in [the] legal profession know are just going to hit as soon as we're able to open up the courts," Allen told Legal Talk. 

However, this backlog has the potential to strain the legal system's financial resources in Utah. The retired Utah First Judicial District judge referenced a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that forecasted that state budget shortfalls driven by the coronavirus could reach $500 billion. If that does indeed happen, it likely will result in funding cuts that may make tackling a cumbersome caseload more difficult. 

“I know here in the state of Utah, right off the bat, the word went out in talking with my colleagues to be prepared for a 20% reduction in your budget across the board,” Allen told Legal Talk. “And that's not even counting for next year when the revenues continue to fall. And so we're just not going to have the money to deal with this huge wave of cases.” (2:58.)

Courts need to confront the backlog now instead of waiting until policymakers potentially start cutting budgets, the judge said. To reduce the judicial caseload, solutions include decriminalization of certain crimes, the use of specialty courts and technology-based approaches to monitor violators rather than putting them in prison.

"I think there's evidence to show that decriminalizing marijuana possession for personal use just should no longer be a criminal offense," Allen told Legal Talk. "And as a judge, I cannot tell you how frustrating it was for me to on a packed court calendar at the time of dealing with murders and rapes, I have to take 10 to 15 minutes to deal with a kid who's there on his third possession of marijuana for personal use."

Decriminalizing marijuana would save “millions, billions of dollars and we're really not going to be any worse off,” he told Legal Talk. 

The veteran judge, however, recognizes that solutions go beyond the decriminalization of certain crimes. Anecdotally, he said that he handled cases with repeat shoplift offenders and in the majority of those cases the individual had an underlying disability such as being bipolar. He said that jailing the individual isn't going to help them understand they are committing a crime in that instance. 

"I think it's clear that putting people in jail and spending houses and thousands of dollars, once you move them all through the criminal system, it doesn't work," Allen told Legal Talk. "So let's spend a fraction of that money to try and get them the help they need and hopefully stem the tide of some of these smaller crimes."