SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Faced with bone-deep cuts in Gov. Brown's proposed budget, the judicial hierarchy in California has resorted to old methods in trying to persuade the Legislature to undo the damage. One of those tactics, circulating a petition among presiding judges, has run into a strong objection from a judge in Northern California, while another old move, creating a committee, has been blasted by a Los Angeles judge.
A petition circulating last week for signature by presiding judges and head clerks throughout California said the proposed cuts "threaten to dismantle our system of justice entirely" and "will have catastrophic, far-reaching impacts on our ability to preserve equal access to justice for all Californians."
But Presiding Judge John Kennelly of Sierra County Superior Court questioned the effectiveness of the petition and wisdom of trying to get all the state's presiding judges into lock-step.
"The governor and the legislature have stopped listening to our whining," wrote Kennelly, expressing what many trial judges have been saying privately for months.
"Why?" Kennelly asks. "Because we have not gone hat in hand to them and admitted what a fiasco and mistake CCMS was to our branch financially, that we are sorry we spent approximately $540 million of taxpayers money and it has not achieved what we promised it would, it won't happen again and in the future we will provide a proper accounting of where our money goes."
Kennelly is referring to the Court Case Management System, an IT system that was terminated a month ago after a half-billion dollars was squandered on the project.
Kennelly, from a two-judge court in Gold Rush country in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, also put in writing what many trial judges have been saying, that there continues to be no explanation of how and why the CCMS fiasco went on for so long and what measures will be taken to ensure it cannot happen again.
"This letter does not acknowledge that the Branch should take its fair share of responsibility for the predicament we are in," in his email. "We need to look at this from the governor's and legislature's perspective, which is that somehow we spent $540 million on a program that will not be used as it was intended."
"They will not be sympathetic to our situation until they have confidence we will not do this again," he continued. "By the way, how did this happen? I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer about how CCMS got this far with no benchmarks or accountability."
In an interview, Kennelly said that it is not in an independent judge's nature to simply go along with group think and bureaucratic orthodoxy.
"One of the things is that we have spent our whole professional career advocating and disagreeing, but that's what we're built to do," said Kennelly in the interview. "Then we become judges, and there's some expectation that all 58 courts are supposed to be on the same page, all the time."
He added that he agrees with the position taken by other courts in opposition to the governor's proposal to wipe out all the reserves that each court keeps, a bit like a checking account, to manage their budgets.