Public Defenders Continue To Fight Back Against California's Broken Case Management Software

from the CRIMINAL-JUSTICE-SYSTEM-has-crashed.-Restore-from-backup? dept

In California, the future of criminal case management is now. But the future appears to be broken, and "now" is looking much worse than the recent past. Odyssey is the state's buggy new case management software -- one that's been keeping people from being released, putting people with dismissed charges in jail, and otherwise making the criminal justice system even more horrible than usual. Tyler Technologies, the creator of the software, has called this transition "challenging." (It's also called this rolling cockup a "transition," so…)

Public defenders -- already overworked when things are normal -- are the ones being tasked with sorting out a long stream of erroneous computations and attempting to make things right for the human beings on the receiving end. This is an additional workload public defenders didn't need.

Since [December 2016], the public defender’s office has filed approximately 2,000 motions informing the court that, due to its reportedly imperfect software, many of its clients have been forced to serve unnecessary jail time, be improperly arrested, or even wrongly registered as sex offenders.

The court's response to multiple pleas by public defenders to force someone in the Californian government to clean up this mess? Shit happens. Deal with it.

Although the court recognizes that Odyssey has resulted in unlawful arrests and searches, clerical errors that affect a defendant's Fourth Amendment right to privacy will occur regardless of the case management system used by the court.

Understandably, this non-redress of grievances failed to satisfy public defenders. Cyrus Farivar reports they're headed back to court to appeal the court's do-nothing order.

“These delays and errors violate Government Code § 69844’s express requirement that Superior Court clerks enter judicial orders ‘forthwith,’ as well as the constitutional right to a complete and accurate record on appeal and the Fourth Amendment prohibition upon unlawful arrests and illegal searches,” Charles Denton, an assistant public defender, wrote in his April 10 brief.

The more significant point of the filing [PDF] is this: without pressure from the courts, the problems created (and exacerbated) by the new case management software's rollout will continue to snowball.

For, as we have noted, respondent’s staff concedes that, without a change in software or staffing, it will never be able to “provide a complete and fully accurate record of court proceedings”... The numbers bear this out. The bottleneck in processing commitment orders for the more than 100 state prisoners languishing in county jail is months long, and, seven months after Odyssey’s rollout, there is an ever-growing backlog of more than 12,000 “paperless” files that are missing minute orders, filings, and transcripts.

At this point, being booked in Alameda County is to be forcibly subjected to a malfunctioning criminal justice slot machine. Maybe it will pay off for a few people, but the odds are still on the house. A system that's already largely broken doesn't need assistance from outside vendors' buggy software.

Filed Under: california, case management, criminal justice, public defenders
Companies: tyler technologies

Court Case Management Software Upgrade Results In Bogus Felony Convictions, Wrongful Arrests

from the patch-notes-to-be-entered-as-evidence-in-inevitable-civil-lawsuit dept

Software updates are seldom painless. The history of the Windows operating system is littered with stories of computers/programs bricked by auto-update patches and OS iterations. They're not much fun on the IT end either, especially when businesses depend on functioning computers/programs for pretty much everything. An enterprise-level OS upgrade can take days or weeks -- and that's not counting the aftershocks which continue for months after as every interdependent application finds new and exciting ways to clash with the upgraded system software.

Days, weeks, months chewed up by an upgrade. It's horrible, but hey, at least you're still relatively free to step outside periodically and/or exit the building when you've had enough for one day. It could be much much worse.

Take the example of Andrew.

It was Saturday and he was woken up with a start by his mother. There were four officers at the front door and he was about to be arrested.

"I’d only had four hours sleep and I’m only wearing gym shorts,” he recalled.

“I’m thinking, what happened? I was completely confused.”

Unbeknown to his parents, 24-year-old Andrew - not his real name - had recently finished a six-month drug programme after he was caught in possession of marijuana and ecstasy.

Which is why he was so confused. It was his first offence and he had done the course as asked. A judge had then told him the case had been dismissed.

“I did what I was supposed to."

But the court’s new computer system had other ideas and Andrew was put into a police car and driven off to jail.

The computer system is Odyssey, California's new case management software. So far, attempts to integrate it with the existing system have resulted in multiple rejections of the donor. If this had only resulted in a less smoothly-flowing bureaucracy, that would be one thing. Instead, it's ruining people's lives.

The company behind it -- Tyler Technologies -- calls the transition "challenging." That's one way to put it -- a way that only those not adversely affected by the transition can put it. To those on the receiving end of a raft of new case management errors, the transition can more accurately be described as "nightmarish." In addition to the case described above, the upgrade has resulted in wrongful arrests, incorrectly extended sentences, and misdemeanor offenses being reclassified as felonies.

Nothing on this list of problems could be considered a harmless error. The last one on the list could result in job hunters, prospective tenants, parents in custody battles, etc. being kicked to the curb when their moving violations show up in background check systems as serious felonies.

On the plus [?] side, Odyssey's malfunctioning software has also managed to produce a few criminal justice "winners."

Alameda County is not the only area to have struggled with Odyssey. Similar problems have been reported in Tennessee and also in Indiana - where prosecutors have had a perhaps more troubling issue of inmates being mistakenly released early.

The software will continue to be upgraded and lives will be bricked. Those the software has determined need more time served or felonies added to their record are pretty much on their own. Alameda County public defender Brendon Woods is fielding as many cases as he can, but he seems to be one of the only ones interested in assisting victims of a "challenging" system upgrade. The county itself isn't offering anything to these victims and the software company certainly doesn't want to open itself up to liability by admitting any culpability in this debacle.

The criminal justice system barely works. The last thing it needs is software that makes this even worse.

Filed Under: arrests, case management, felonies, odyssey, software, software updates
Companies: tyler technologies