The Blakely costs and court crisis

This law.com article, tellingly titled “Courts on the Edge of Financial Crisis,” documents a dire “funding crisis, unprecedented in the last two decades,” now being experienced by the federal courts.  In the piece, insightful court scholar Arthur Hellman notes the potential impact of Blakely:

The Supreme Court’s June decision in Blakely v. Washington, 124 S. Ct. 2531 (2004), a state sentencing case, has increased the workload because it threw into doubt the constitutionality of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Courts and prosecutors have been scrambling to anticipate what the impact on sentencing will be.

“The one consequence of that is many sentencing determinations before the Supreme Court decision that would have been routine and non time-consuming are now requiring huge amounts of time and attention by judges, assistant U.S. attorneys and defense attorneys,” said Hellman. “That pushes other cases further down the line.

“Even if the caseload had remained the same, when you have an upset like this, just the sheer amount of human resources the court system has to devote to a large class of cases increases,” he explained. “Even with a steady budget that would be difficult.”

This disconcerting article confirms a lot of what I heard when I had a chance to  speak last month with federal District Court Clerks and Executives (discussed here and here).  Put simply, the federal courts were overloaded and underfunded before Blakely, and the impact of Blakely (even if it does not ultimately get applied to the federal system) is to make a bad workload situation much worse.

Of course, at least in the criminal law arena, one should not lose sight of what might be called the federalism solution to this workload problem.  If more criminal prosecutions, especially local drug crimes, were simply left to the states, the caseload burdens in the federal courts would be somewhat alleviated (although then the states would bear even more of the brunt of our swelled criminal justice system).