Should have given some of it to House of Butter, we would have spent it wisely!
The Assembly reports
On February 13, the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC) rolled out eCourts, its long-delayed, $100-million digital records system, in Wake, Harnett, Johnston, and Lee counties.
That same morning, Christopher Clegg pleaded guilty to second-degree trespassing in Wake County District Court and was sentenced to the one day he’d already served in jail. But he wasn’t released. Nor was he released a week later, after he returned to court a second time, again pleaded guilty to the same crime, and was again sentenced to time served.
Defense attorney Molly O’Neil said an eCourts glitch kept Clegg behind bars for almost a month.
“For whatever reason, [Clegg’s] information was not marked,” O’Neil told The Assembly last week. “His judgment was not transferred to his jail paperwork.”
Clegg—who, coincidentally, last year became the first defendant to win an appeal in North Carolina on the grounds that prosecutors had excluded potential jurors because of their race—wasn’t released until March 9, O’Neil said.
Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman says the error wasn’t eCourts’ fault—at least not directly. Instead, she said the judge failed to sign a document instructing jailers to release Clegg, and clerks delayed getting another document to the jail—in part because they were figuring out the new eCourts system.
Since it went live six weeks ago, lawyers in the four pilot counties have complained that eCourts is a time-sucking, error-ridden trainwreck. But from the outset, court officials have insisted that, a few bumps notwithstanding, everything is fine. Three days after its launch, NCAOC Director Andrew Heath told WRAL that he considered the eCourts’ introduction a “successful rollout.” (The next day, Heath announced that he was decamping to the law firm Nelson Mullins.)
More than a year behind schedule and $15 million over its original budget, eCourts is supposed to replace North Carolina courts’ archaic paper-based records regime with a cloud-based system called Odyssey, designed by Texas-based Tyler Technologies.
In 2019, Tyler beat out six companies, including Thomson Reuters, to land the $100 million, 10-year contract—the largest software-as-a-service deal in the company’s history. Its “enterprise justice software,” already used by courts and police agencies in 27 other states, is supposed to move North Carolina’s court system to the cloud within the next two years.
eCourts was expected to launch in July 2021. But digitizing decades of paper records took clerks much longer than initially projected. The NCAOC also says that tailoring Odyssey to the state’s courts and developing eWarrants, an online statewide warrant repository, set things back.
eCourts’ four-county pilot program was delayed until later in 2021, then to October 2022, and finally to early 2023. Groups of counties are supposed to join every few months going forward, with the entire state on board by 2025.
But that plan has already gone off the rails. Due to “application issues and product defects,” Odyssey’s scheduled May 8 expansion to Mecklenburg County has been delayed, according to the Mecklenburg County Bar Association.
There were signs that the rollout might not go smoothly. During an online training session for legal professionals ahead of eCourts’ launch, an instructor couldn’t get the software to operate, according to two people who participated. And the Friday before eCourts went live, North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby, who oversees the NCAOC, sent an email to the state’s nervous judges imploring them to seek divine favor.
“The AOC staff and those of the pilot districts have done all we know to do to make the go-live successful,” he wrote. “Obedience is ours, outcomes belong to the Lord. Please pray for God’s blessing on this project.”
“Transitioning over to a system like this is inherently going to have glitches and problems under the best circumstances, and lawyers as a whole are very tech-unsavvy group of people,” said a criminal defense attorney who spoke to The Assembly on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing judges.
“Lawyers are also kind of an ornery group. So I expected a lot of grumbling,” said the lawyer. “All of that is to be expected. The level of issues and problems with this is insane.”
