Disorder in the court: Computer system hampers Fort Worth

By Yamil Berard

yberard@star-telegram.com

FORT WORTH -- Mary Pounders of Fort Worth got pulled over three years ago by a patrol officer who said she was driving while her grandson was out of his safety seat.

The officer didn't give her a paper ticket, but many months later, she received notice of the citation in the mail.

When she contacted the Municipal Court to settle the matter, she was told that she had another ticket to pay, this one from 2005, or she could end up in jail.

Today, years later, Pounders still doesn't have a court date in the 2009 incident. On Oct. 28, a judge dismissed the 2005 charge after she showed him documents proving that she was in the hospital at the time.

"They make it so hard," said Pounders, who has rheumatoid arthritis and uses a walker.

Pounders' experience is a familiar one at the Fort Worth Municipal Court, where thousands of cases go into a digital wasteland thanks to a bungled computer system.

In 2005, the city paid $1.7 million for a municipal court system that promised to keep track of thousands of tickets a year for traffic violations, code compliance problems and lesser crimes.

The technology, known as CourtView, was supposed to offer full automation and help the city collect millions in fines.

But seven years later, the system remains a cyber hiccup, with numerous violations falling into "virtual limbo," according to an independent assessment conducted for the city this year. It is sluggish and relies on manual input of cases by clerks, the report found.

An examination of caseloads by the Star-Telegram showed that the docket is jammed with tens of thousands of outstanding violations dating to 1994.

In addition:

The system does not purge old cases, which is required by state law.

It does not archive cases to enable smoother operations.

It doesn't always account for financial transactions, so fees are sometimes lost or distributed to the wrong account.

Court officials acknowledge that the case management system has been plagued for years but they say upgrades have improved its performance.

"CourtView can be a little tedious," Court Director Deidra Emerson said. "With a system as large as ours, we would prefer to have something that's less cumbersome in some instances."

But performance issues have been addressed. "That's not to say CourtView is operating as it should," she said.

The city has no plans to scrap it, she said.

Critics, including other North Texas court administrators, clerks and a retired city information technology analyst, say it's time to unclog the dockets and try something more user friendly.

"The whole thing is just a huge mess," said Travis Farral, board member of the Cowtown Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association, who reviewed court documents for the Star-Telegram.

Upgrades haven't fixed the long-running problems, he said. "It's just this huge inefficient system that they've patched up with Band-Aids," said Farral, a security systems analyst for a top Fort Worth employer.

To get a sense of the backlog, the Star-Telegram reviewed the court docket for one recent four-week period.

There were 17,256 violations scheduled for court hearings from Aug. 17 to Sept. 13.

Almost half those violations, 45 percent, were from 2010 or before, about a quarter were from 2009 or earlier, and hundreds were from 2005 or earlier.

Emerson said city officials are playing catch-up on cases from years ago.

Compared with five years ago, the system is doing better at moving those cases along, Emerson said.

"We want to get those cases off of our docket. ... The city of Fort Worth has a large system," Emerson said. "Our court system, our volume, is extremely large and it takes time to hear those cases."

But critics say the court can't uphold justice and collect fines if its computer system can't keep pace.

Taxpayers lose out when fines go uncollected. City officials say they can't estimate the impact of uncollected fines. But losses to a city the size of Fort Worth can be significant, critics say.

"They'd be collecting millions more if they had an efficient system," Farral said.

Around for years

The court's primary role is also compromised when cases linger for years. As cases get older, they become harder to adjudicate. Evidence is more likely to disappear or become outdated.

"There's very little evidentiary value in testimony of a 5-year-old case unless you have a violation video and the officer is able to testify to that video," Lewisville Municipal Judge Brian Holman said.

Holman said judges can dismiss cases older than five years under a process allowed by law, and should.

What happens when a case gets too old?

One balmy August afternoon, the docket showed that Joe Govea of Fort Worth was scheduled to appear before a municipal judge. A local man with the same name told the Star-Telegram that he didn't know that he was due for court. How could he know? The seat belt violation was almost two decades old.

"They had seat belts back then?" he asked the newspaper. "No, I think you have the wrong guy. I don't remember that."

That story was familiar to John St. Lawrence, one of the city's information technology business analysts who grappled with CourtView issues for three years. He retired from the city in December.

Situations like Govea's "happened all the time," he said.

Assistant Court Administrator William Rumuly said officials will look at other options as they continue to evaluate the system. "Will we be able to continue to use this system or do we need to look at something else?"

Rumuly and others have identified top priorities for the system, said Kevin Bade, general manager for CourtView Justice Solutions in Ohio. And CourtView officials are helping with upgrades to improve efficiency, he said.

In addition, court officials in the fall issued a Request for Information for new vendors to determine whether the software needs to be changed. Responses from vendors were expected early this month.

The independent consultant's report, at a cost to the city of $134,750, will also be used to help make decisions about future uses of CourtView.

That assessment, by The Azimuth Group, showed that CourtView has "not met the promises of a truly 'paperless' court."

It noted that incomplete cases can result from wrong or unknown violations.

Because the issue is not corrected, the record is in virtual "limbo," the report stated.

Also, data entry is so cumbersome that ticket and identity information is "often limited, incorrect and/or illegible."

Data entry clerks, like most other employees, aren't fans of the system, the report stated.

"Virtually all court personnel contacted expressed high degrees of frustration with the technology, including difficult system navigation, sluggish performance and lack of functionality," the report said.

To St. Lawrence, the assessment was "a complete statement of everything that's going wrong with the court, at least what can be freely disclosed to the public."

Frustration builds

The clogged court system makes for unhappy people who are just trying to pay a ticket or set a court date.

It's frustrating, said Perry Ash, a marketing executive, who received a speeding ticket. "I felt like I was being treated like a juvenile delinquent."

He said he received the ticket outside the city limits, so he appeared at the courthouse to schedule a trial to contest the matter.

He was told that he had to wait to see the judge to schedule a court date and that he couldn't read a book or text on his phone. The bailiff wanted to make sure he heard his name when it was called.

After 21/2 hours of staring at the wall, he saw the judge and "the judge, in turn, stated she was there to set a date and nothing more."

Bail bondsman Wes Brown has stacks of files on defendants he bailed out of jail who waited two years to receive court dates.

"That's just too long," Brown said. "That's ridiculous. You can't expect these people to show up. They are changing and moving from apartment to apartment. They change cellphones in the area."

That costs more money as the ticket mill ramps up, which computes into more jail time for defendants who can't pay, he said.

"Nobody wins on that," Brown said.

And the court doesn't always make it easy for those who want to comply.

Even if you pay your fine, the Rev. Wendell "Buck" Cass says, you can get in a bind. The computer system often can't track payment of fines outside of a payment plan.

Cass said he has mailed in fines, only to be told that his case was pending.

"It's double jeopardy because you lose your money when you mail it in," he said.

Other court coordinators say the city could ease its load with hand-held ticket writers.

In Grapevine, the paper load was becoming unmanageable until the ticket writers were introduced, Director Marilyn Robinson said.

"You have a ton -- a ton -- of paper, and to eliminate the process of having to manually enter those citations into the system makes a world of difference," she said.

In Fort Worth, each time a police officer stops a driver, he or she must write the ticket on a piece of paper.

Those slips of paper are collected in a box and delivered to court clerks, who manually enter each ticket into the computer, St. Lawrence said.

Dakisha Boone, the court's assistant director, said the court is moving quickly to have the ticket writers interface with the court system.

"The purpose of that interface would be to be totally paperless between the ticket writer and our system," Boone said.

It should be ready by the end of the year, she said.

The Fort Worth Police Department has one ticket writer, Sgt. Pedro Criado said.

A patrol officer uses it, but it doesn't sync up with the court, he said.

Police must print out the data in the ticket writer, he said.

Criado said he expects more ticket writers to be delivered in January. But the devices won't automatically have the capacity to sync up with the court, he said.

When officers write tickets by hand, errors are more likely, according to the Azimuth assessment. It recommends using hand-held ticket writers to "improve data quality."

Many tickets had to be tossed out or contained "fatal errors" because of problems associated with the lack of automation, the report said.

St. Lawrence said the hand-held devices are common in smaller cities.

"How does a smaller city like Watauga have them and Fort Worth does not?" he said.

Yamil Berard, 817-390-7705

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