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Rarely Do I Agree with the Governor, but…
1:54PM ON
07/03/2008
BY
Ariel Werner
I understand one of his many vetoes this legislative session: the courthouse construction bill, a piece of legislation pledging $88 million to the construction of a new Blackstone Valley courthouse. According to the ProJo, Carcieri said in his veto message, “Never, not even once, has any Rhode Islander — save a legislator or a judge — ever spoke to me of the pressing need to build a court-house in the Blackstone Valley.”
On the urgency of the project, however, Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams declared in an April speech:
The need to better serve our citizens in northern Rhode Island and to decongest a severely overcrowded Garrahy Judicial Complex in Providence by building a Blackstone Valley Courthouse is not going to go away.
As a legal intern with the RI Office of the Public Defender, I may not be privy to every aspect of life at the Garrahy complex. I do, however, work there 4 days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and I’m a bit perplexed by the congestion with which the Chief is concerned. In fact, things can get pretty slow around there, and I’ve taken to reading The New Yorker in between Judge Higgins’ arraignments in Courtroom 4C, where I am usually stationed.
Granted there is a major delay in the scheduling of trials, and the judges at Garrahy might not have gigantic offices but (from my lowly perspective) in the grand scheme of the Rhode Island judiciary, these are the least of our problems. The Public Defender’s office, for example, has been understaffed for years. I haven’t been able to get a definitive answer, but my colleagues have estimated that we are short somewhere between 5 and 20 attorneys. The General Assembly and Governor have consistently refused to give the Office funding to hire replacements for those who have retired, gone on maternity leave (without pay!), become judges, or just plain burned out. And without hiring more PDs, AGs, judges, clerks, sheriffs, etc., I’m not quite sure how useful a new courthouse would be. And we know how the Gov. loves creating more state jobs…
Meanwhile, Carcieri also vetoed a couple bills that would have saved the Judiciary and the State a significant sum of money, including legislation that would have eliminated Rhode Island’s costly and inefficient mandatory minimum sentences and ended the incarceration of people charged with parole/probation violations despite being found innocent of the crime by which they allegedly violated the conditions of their release. If we stopped putting innocent people in prison, cut the length of sentences, and emphasized treatment over incarceration, we would have less congested courthouses, more money, and more justice.
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9 Comments on “ Rarely Do I Agree with the Governor, but… ”
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:34PM
JOE BERNSTEIN Says:
Ariel-I addressed this on Anchor Rising,but there probably isn’t a huge crossover readership,so what I said there is that a new courthouse in Lincoln would be inaccessible to the people who most often have to go to court-lower income folks who may lack cars,or hte money for gas.Public transportation between Lincoln and Providence is inadequate and sporadic.
Lou Pulner suggested that expanding the Garrahy Complex into the adjoining parking lot and building a garage might work better.and don’t forget Kennedy Plaza is the state’s transport hub and it’s only blocks away.
From 1971-1976 I was a NY State Court Officer(similar to a Sheriff) and the courthouses there dispensed with any luxuries for judges or anyone else.
Judges often shared offices in the lower courts.Old robing rooms were used for hearings.The system worked ok.Judges don’t need to be pampered and catered to.They make good money and shouldn’t complain.
I thought the Governor should’ve signed the probation bill.The probation system in RI is really bad,aside from the fact that innocence should be a defense.The probation terms are too long and too loosely supervised due to monster caseloads(the officers aren’t the problem here)-shorter terms with more intensive hands on probation would yield greater returns.
Mandatory minimums is something I can’t speak to because I haven’t read the bill.Traffickers should do serious time.RI has a problem with its drug laws insofar as every drug possession charge of any substance other than marijuana is a felony.There should be a misdemeanor level drug possession charge available for any drug,so a person doesn’t get their life ruined with a felony first time out of the box.I’m not a liberal at all,but with 26 years in law enforcement,9 of those in narcotics enforcement,I have come to some informed conclusions.Society benefits from someone who can make use of a chance to change their behavior,rather than hit people with a “one size fits all”approach to the drug problem.
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July 4th, 2008 at 12:04PM
ConcernedStateWorker Says:
This is a simple issue.
The Garrahy building is a bad building. People who work there get sick more often than normal. The court wants our money to move to another building without admitting they have been forcing people to work in a building that, for years, has contributed to a higher than average illness and -miscarriage- rate!!!!
I hope they are forced to do something about it themselves, they have a large budget and don’t need more money from us, especially when the Governor is already trying to force Furlough days upon state workers. (Right after he gives his cronies over $100k in raises). There are other large, problematic issues with our Governor, such as his intense gutting of our state treasury, much like he did to Cookson and Old Stone.
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July 4th, 2008 at 3:44PM
Ariel Werner Says:
It’s possible that the people who work there get sick more often than normal because the people who come into the building–namely, defendants–cannot afford proper health care and are not separated from the building’s many occupants. The people I see in the PDs office suffer everything from the common cold to the fatal infection MRSA. The many people I see with fairly severe psychiatric problems–bipolar, schizophrenia, manic depression–are usually held overnight or over the weekend without being given the medications that keep them stabilized. They, therefore, require more intense handling by the court employees (mainly sheriffs) because they are more likely to become upset or rowdy. They also are clearly prevented from remaining clean during their time in the court’s holding cells…when I interview people, they still smell like whatever they were drinking when they (allegedly) committed the crime in question.
The miscarriages I cannot speak to and was unaware of.
I think there are other steps that could be taken to fix up Garrahy without spending millions on a new courthouse. If you think Garrahy is unsanitary, building a new building won’t change that.
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July 4th, 2008 at 3:50PM
ConcernedStateWorker Says:
I agree with you that the contact with the public is probably not helpful in preventing spread the of disease there….
However, I am talking about all employees of the building, not just that are in contact with the public.
I think that the courts should be responsible for the fixing of the building not the people (hence: find it in their budget, don’t ask for it from us).
My main point is that our RI courts are hiding an almost dire need to do something about the condition of the building without telling us its a big problem. If they did, they would be open to lawsuits from the employees within.
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July 4th, 2008 at 3:51PM
ConcernedStateWorker Says:
damn …. no edit button … my apologies for poor grammer
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July 4th, 2008 at 7:49PM
JOE BERNSTEIN Says:
Ariel-your entry reminds me of a funny story-the courthouse at 100 Centre Street was located near the Bowery,formerly a location for derelicts(this being around 1971)-I had weekend court duty and got in very early one Saturday -I had to negotiate three locked doors to get into the officer’s locker room,and what was there?A passed out alky who had managed to complete all his normal body functions while lying on the floor.
In Brooklyn we had a dead guy on the courthouse steps for a few days before someone noticed he wasn’t just passed out.
Talk about not getting medicated-in Brooklyn Supreme Court(equivalent to Superior here)we had one courtroom where we had criminal competency hearings every morning -an average court had three officers-we had seven when I was assigned there-it seemed that when the inmates were moved from the state institution to the city detention center in Brooklyn,there was no full time doctor available,so they couldn’t force the inmates to take meds.By the time they got to court it was a week or two off thorazine or mellaril,etc and they were often having full blown psychotic episodes-it was like bedlam every morning-you would have thought it was a WWE show.One inmate ripped the toilet out of the floor and threw it at us.The judge excused his physical appearance in court :).
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July 5th, 2008 at 1:24PM
Ariel Werner Says:
Ah, the humanity.
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July 6th, 2008 at 12:35PM
Double Jeopardy | Providence Daily Dose Says:
[...] I mentioned in a prior post about the Garrahy Judicial Complex, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in that [...]
July 9th, 2008 at 1:54PM
Ariel Werner Says:
Time for me to eat (some of) my words. A long talk about this issue with my colleagues in the PD’s office today revealed that Garrahy is, by definition, a “sick building.” One of our most skilled attorneys, apparently, took a very long medical leave earlier in the year, having had his lungs and respiratory tract severely damaged by the mold content of the air in the building.
Congestion? No. Especially given that we could redistrict some people from the Garrahy (6th District) to the Kent County building, which is incredibly under-utilized. But sick and unsafe, yes. Very much so.
So, my apologies for my overly-vehement convictions about the condition of the building. Here’s to my not getting sick by the time school starts again in the Fall…
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