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DURHAM, N.C. — Three law school interns sit at a big conference-room table in the Durham County courthouse, sifting through boxes of unserved criminal warrants.
Worthless check. Worthless check. One after another, they find allegations of someone getting food, gas, beer, clothes and other merchandise with too few dollars in the bank. Occasionally, there are accusations of someone failing to return a rental video.
But only rarely do the unserved warrants allege felonies. Occasionally there’s a shooting case or simple assault, but even most of the felonies involve forgery or obtaining property by false pretenses.
The law students have been assigned to the tedious process of reducing Durham County’s much derided backlog of 60,000 unserved warrants. This summer, they’ll spend most afternoons tending to a chore that highlights the need for compatible computer systems throughout law enforcement offices and the courts.
Without uniform systems, law enforcement officers cannot tap into one central location and search for outstanding arrest warrants from other counties or other states.
The deficiency stymies other aspects of crime control. Prosecutors have trouble pulling up criminal records for sentencing phases, and probation officers cannot always track the criminal activities of their charges.
It can even be a problem within a single county. In Durham County, the four public offices creating and tracking warrants — the police department, sheriff’s office, the clerk of court and the magistrate’s office — all use different, incompatible software.
On the national level, a series of newspaper stories by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed how thousands of felony fugitives were able to elude arrest because the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database and state and local law enforcement warrant databases are not compatible.
When state and local law enforcement officers across the country fail to enter fugitive warrant information into the FBI database, dangerous criminals have been able to get away with crimes by stepping across state lines where no one knows they are on wanted lists.
Many of the fugitives tracked by the newspaper had been stopped for other crimes, but not served with the felony warrants that made them fugitives — because the arresting officers had no idea the warrants existed.
Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, introduced a bill in Congress recently to address the problem. In his Fugitive Information Networked Database (FIND) Act of 2008, Biden recognized that many jurisdictions were not entering felony arrest warrants into the national database because they did not have the time or resources to update and validate entries they had already put in their own systems.
Biden suggested setting aside $25 million in fiscal 2009 and 2010 for grants that states could use to upgrade their systems.
It is unclear whether any of that money would be available to Durham.
District Attorney David Saacks is not waiting to find out. To reduce the Durham backlog, he has agreed to dismiss many misdemeanor charges that are more than five years old as long as no violence is alleged. The prosecutor knows that people who faced a judge for similar crimes might feel pangs of injustice.
“You have to draw the line somewhere,” Saacks said. “I’m willing to give up the lowest level.”
On a recent afternoon, interns Amber Cronk, 27, of N.C. Central University law school, Troy Cronk, 25 (not related, as far as they know), of Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich., and Jessica Major, 24, of NCCU law school, returned from a late lunch to tackle hundreds of warrants.
Major is creating a computer file with all the dismissals so the clerk of court and two Durham law enforcement agencies can enter the data into their systems.
Each assistant district attorney has agreed to dedicate at least one afternoon a week to the monotonous process.
Saacks went through a box recently, and only 17 of the 200 warrants he saw were for anything other than worthless checks.
“Most of the checks, they’re usually like $20,” said Luke Bumm, an assistant district attorney.
Worthless-check cases divert time and resources from more serious crimes, Saacks said, and civil courts provide other remedies for merchants trying to recover money.
In an effort to alleviate the need to prosecute each worthless check case, the legislature created the Worthless Check Program in 1997 in Columbus, Durham and Rockingham counties. Wake County joined the group in 1998. Johnston County has since come on board, but Orange and Chatham counties are not among the 34 that offer the service.
Merchants can file a complaint and the bad-check writer can settle up to avoid prosecution and pay court fees.
“The system that we have here in Wake County works very well,” said Wake District Attorney Colon Willoughby. “It really is a cost-saver for the taxpayers and a benefit for the merchants.”
In the first five months of this year, Willoughby said, Wake County sent back nearly $120,000 to merchants for 1,170 checks.
Jim Woodall, the district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties, has not set up such a program.
“Volume-wise, we don’t really have enough to justify doing it,” Woodall said.
Across the state, worthless check charges have been on a general decline since 2000 with the 132,772 charges from eight years ago dropping to 46,391 in 2007.
With the use of bank cards so prevalent now and fewer people writing paper checks, Saacks said he expects to see worthless check charges disappear at some point.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be unserved warrants in the future. Even if the interns make a big dent in the problem this summer, there still will be people trying to elude arrest by giving police phony addresses.
In Durham, the city and county have agreed to invest more than $350,000 in the creation of a Central Warrant Control office. But to get all the law enforcement communities across the state and country talking to each other will take a tremendous investment in computer software and hardware, Saacks said.
“The state needs to take this on,” he said. “Nobody wants to scrap billions of dollars of computers to just start new. But it’s such a huge issue.”
