You probably know what it’s like to repeatedly ask a coworker to get you something, like a document or maybe an email address, and that person just ignores you. Or maybe a coworker constantly makes errors, affecting your ability to do your own job. It’s frustrating, right? Well, some federal judges are feeling frustrated with attorneys at the North Carolina Department of Justice over the same sort of thing and the consequences can be more significant than a bit of irritation. Like the delay of a trial by more than a year in one case. Jeffrey Billman is one of the reporters who wrote about it for the Assembly. He joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry.
Marshall Terry: You start your piece with U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Numbers II. Who is he and what exactly is he frustrated by?
Jeffrey Billman: Judge Numbers is a magistrate judge. They're essentially appointed to assist federal district judges, who are the judges that are confirmed by the Senate. Judge Numbers has been frustrated by a section of the State Department of Justice that handles a couple of departments of the state government: the State Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Adult Correction, and also Department of Public Safety, the State Highway Patrol. They defend them when these departments get sued. Most of their litigation has to do with lawsuits filed by prisoners.
Terry: And what sorts of things are these attorneys doing that frustrate Numbers and other judges?
Billman: They miss deadlines. They sort of just misinterpret instructions. They are sloppy. They mishandled discovery. On their own, these things would be kind of forgiven, but they happen so often that judges throughout the state really have, over the last five years gotten very upset with this section. They fined them. They've lashed out at them in written orders. Judge Numbers finally just had it. He issued this order in October that called out the entire section and called out the Department of Justice for not reining them in.
Terry: So, how do these attorneys who keep getting called out explain their performance?
Billman: What they've said is that they are overworked. The section is under-resourced. There are a lot of prisoner lawsuits. In 2017, when Gov. Stein had just become attorney general, the General Assembly cut a very significant amount of the Department of Justice's budget. Essentially, the public safety section has been hamstrung ever since and they've been struggling to keep up. One of the sort of side effects of that is it's been really hard for them to keep good attorneys in that section. It's also been really hard to find managers to do it because the managers themselves have high caseloads.
Terry: Gov. Josh Stein was head of the state justice department before becoming governor earlier this year, when he was attorney general. What does he and current Attorney General Jeff Jackson say about this? And is there any effort to rectify it?
Billman: Gov. Stein basically told us that this was a resource issue, that the General Assembly didn't provide resources. They appealed for more money year after year and didn't get it. Attorney General Jeff Jackson, who took office in January, essentially one of the things that Judge Numbers ordered in October, basically said, You have to fix this, or I'm going to do it. He gave him until Dec. 1 to come up with a plan. Jeff Jackson basically told him here's what we're going to try and do.
One of the things was he said we're going to bring in former state Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jackson, who is going to provide some supervision. He said he'd overhauled the section's leadership. They fired one of the attorneys who had really made Judge Numbers angry. He said he was putting in more quality control measures and he was going to reduce caseloads and do some stuff like that. But again, he goes back to, throughout his response to this order, that there are still some outstanding resource issues that they can't get around.
Terry: So what happens next? Waiting until the resources are there?
Billman: I don't know that the resources are going to be there. This wasn't in either the House or Senate's proposed budget, the $3 million that the Department of Justice asked for. It's really not something I don't think the legislature thinks is necessary in the way that the Department of Justice thinks is necessary. So I'm not sure this is something that's going to happen anytime soon.
