COVID bottlenecks clog the courts

As the coronavirus shifted from distant possibility to dire reality in March 2020, chief judges in federal courts nationwide acted quickly to stem its spread.

Chief U.S. District Judge James Bredar reluctantly suspended nonemergency hearings and canceled jury trials in Maryland only after its governor announced he was activating the National Guard and closing public schools. At the same time though, Judge Bredar worried his order curtailing court operations would run afoul of criminal defendants' constitutional rights and lead to a caseload clog.

"Unquestionably when we come out the other side of this event, dockets will be very crowded, and we will need to make up for lost time," he told Law360 in March 2020.

Now, with his court having returned to normal operations, Judge Bredar says the backlog was manageable.

"It wasn't as though there was a three-year accumulation of cases, because the pandemic was experienced, at least in our court, very much in waves," he recently told Law360. "A backlog still accumulated, just not a terrible one."

In fact, Maryland's weighted caseload — a statistic the federal judiciary calculates by analyzing each district's docket for complexity, then dividing the result by the number of allotted judgeships — is lower now than it was before the pandemic. In the year ending on March 31, 2020, there were an average of 426 weighted filings per judgeship. As of March 2023, there were 379.

That reflects a nationwide shift. By the end of March, the U.S. average for weighted caseload was the lowest it's been in five years.

But even with fewer cases on judges' plates, the pace of justice has slowed.

By the end of March, civil litigation lasted nearly three months longer than before the pandemic, marking a 29% increase, and criminal felony case durations spiked 64%, taking more than four months longer to resolve, according to new statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Though the coronavirus public health emergency has ended, its aftershocks are still being felt in federal courts, leaving both litigants and criminal defendants in a holding pattern. Advocates worry access to justice may depend on what year litigation was filed or when a defendant was arrested.

It's a phenomenon that defense attorneys like Nellie King have noticed, as criminal clients wait months longer for their day in court amid a "flood and a frenzy to get this backlog cleared."

"They're sitting in jail or out on release for extended periods of time," said King, who practices in West Palm Beach, Florida, and serves as president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "When we have a presumption of innocence, and you can't clear your name or get back to your family or your work life in a somewhat timely fashion — so that it is not years down the road as far as resolution — then you're just kind of in limbo."