Lane County court no-shows soar.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

The number of defendants who fail to appear for court in Lane County climbed 40 percent from 2002 to 2005, according to a report by the local Public Safety Coordinating Council.

The number would be even higher, but for changes in prosecution and police policies that reduce the number of lower-level crimes prosecuted and thereby reduce the potential for missed court appearances.

The study also found the cost of issuing arrest warrants for those no-shows has risen about 50 percent over three years - to an estimated $4.9 million annually in Lane County. The cost is calculated from estimates of salaries and operating costs for courts, prosecution and defense lawyers, police, jail and other law enforcement services that are diverted to deal with the problem.

The figures illustrate a criminal justice system staggering under a lack of jail capacity to hold offenders accountable, officials said. It also shows a widespread disregard for the system. For example, 32 percent, 1,896 out of 5,884 defendants, failed to appear in Lane County Circuit Court in 2005. The percentage is higher in Eugene (1,707 out of 4,305) and Springfield (866 out of 2,223) municipal courts - 40 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

"This is just one more thing reducing the level of (justice) system efficiency," Senior Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner said.

State court officials do not track FTA (failed to appear) rates statewide, in part because courts in other circuits record their statistics differently, making the numbers difficult to track by computer, said Nori McCann Cross, special counsel for the state court administrator's office.

Lane County's FTA number probably would be much higher but for budget cutting that forced the district attorney to stop filing charges for more than 100 low-level property crimes. Fewer charges means 1,000 to 1,500 fewer defendants annually, a number of whom would also fail to appear for court, the report says.

The number would be higher still, but local police agencies increasingly are writing citations instead of arresting suspects because police know there is no room to hold non-violent offenders in the Lane County Jail, state Pre-Trial Services Manager Brooke Marshall said.

It's no secret to inmates, either, Marshall noted.

With too few jail beds, jail managers are forced to release the lowest-risk inmates. Because skipping a court appearance is such a minor crime and carries no real consequences, released inmates have little incentive to attend court as scheduled, officials said.

In fact, many low-level offenders are so familiar with the jail release system that they use correct jail jargon to inquire about being "CBR'd," the jail staff slang for the "capacity-based release" decisions that are required when the jail population exceeds its legal cap, Marshall said.

"We see instances where somebody gets CBR'd and 24 hours later they're back in jail because they didn't show up in court or they committed a new crime," Marshall said. "One inmate, a couple of weeks ago, failed to appear 25 times in a relatively short period of time."

Criminal justice experts estimate a community needs 2.5 jail beds per 1,000 population, Gardner said. That would mean Lane County should have about 830 jail beds, instead of the 375 beds available. The number of available beds is actually lower than 375 because about 100 are dedicated to federal inmates or used by municipal courts.

The FTA problem is only one symptom of the county's overwhelmed criminal justice system, says Tim Laue, a longtime Eugene Police Commission chairman who headed the FTA task force.

A discussion of jail capacity ignores the needs for treatment and crime prevention programs that offer a longer term approach for reducing crime, Laue says. The fact the county's criminal justice system has a lot of get-out-of-jail-free cards is no news to savvy criminals.

"These things tend to be perceived on the street faster than in the community at large," Laue says.