‘Starting in January, the Lancaster County court system is planning to launch a “dry run” of procedural changes designed to fast-track selected lower-level cases, President Judge David Ashworth said Wednesday.
His comments came during the county’s monthly Prison Board meeting, and came in response to an inquiry from Kent Kroehler of the advocacy group Have a Heart about the progress of a committee headed by Judge Merrill Spahn.
In April, at Ashworh’s direction, Spahn’s group began studying how to promote the quicker resolution of minor offenses, which would speed up operation of the court system as a whole and reduce the length of pretrial detention. The game plan is coming together, Ashworth said.
The aim, he said, is to identify cases that “can and should be resolved on a more expedited basis.” The district attorney’s office and defense counsel would then work together to exchange evidentiary information promptly and negotiate a mutually acceptable plea agreement. Spahn and Judge Dennis Reinaker would handle the resulting guilty plea lists on Fridays.
Those cases would come off the court’s regular trial list, ideally resulting in a list all or mostly consisting of cases that are indeed proceeding to trial.
“This is going to require the cooperation of all of the players involved,” Ashworth said. The majority of cases are resolved through negotiated pleas, he said, and if everyone is encouraged to discuss those cases earlier, they can be addressed earlier.
District Attorney Heather Adams said her office has put staff in place and will have a set of cases identified ahead of the planned January start. The Clerk of Courts, too, has assigned a staff member to be present at those court sessions.
“We’re ready,” Adams said.
Kroehler asked about bail. That’s a separate issue, and not one that Spahn’s committee is tasked with addressing, Ashworth said.
Asked what types of cases will be fast-tracked, Ashworth said it will depend crucially on individual facts and circumstances: “It’s not a cookie-cutter kind of thing.” The DA and public defenders’ offices will weigh in on the selection.
The court system’s plans come amid ongoing debate over the size of the correctional facility that Lancaster County should build to replace the outdated County Prison.
Prison populations depend on the number of commitments and length of stay. According to data compiled for the project’s needs assessment, the County Prison has much longer average stays than the national average — 58 days versus 35 days as of 2022.
The majority of county inmates are being held pre-trial, so getting more of them to trial earlier should reduce headcounts. When the county courts previously reformed its procedures in the early 2010s, the resulting decrease in pretrial wait times helped to reduce the County Prison population from more than 1,300 to the low 700s. As of Wednesday, the headcount stood at 813, Warden Cheryl Steberger said.
Local advocates have called for sharply reducing the use of cash bail, saying it is counterproductive and unjust and that reform would allow a smaller correctional facility to be built.
Bail policy is not the county courts’ purview, Ashworth has maintained: It is set by law and the state Supreme Court. Locally, individual bail decisions are made based on those guidelines, and defendants can always challenge them.
