Mecklenburg sheriff, clerk sued for ‘recklessness,’ negligence with new NC court records

Three former inmates at the Mecklenburg County jail are suing Sheriff Garry McFadden and Clerk of Superior Court Elisa Chinn-Gary over allegations about undue, extra time behind bars.

It’s the latest development in a federal suit — first filed in May — claiming “hundreds” of people across North Carolina were unlawfully detained because of a new records and case management system that brought controversy to a number of courthouses. By using the system, eCourts, and not checking behind themselves, McFadden and Chinn-Gary were “negligent” and acted with “recklessness,” the suit says.

Before eCourts came to Charlotte, McFadden met with others in the criminal justice system and shared concerns about his staff using the system, the complaint says. Still, he didn’t put in a fail-safe, it says, and more than 60 people were unconstitutionally held at the jail in just four days.

After first agreeing to an interview, McFadden declined on Wednesday, and said that his legal staff advised against speaking. In November, his office told The Observer that it was taking longer to release detainees after eCourts’ launch.

Chinn-Gary failed to step in despite knowing about eCourts’ issues, the amended complaint says. She did not respond to requests for comment.

The office that has overseen eCourts’ rollout, the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts, and the vendor it hired to create the software, Tyler Technologies, are also defendants. So are other North Carolina sheriffs and clerks.

ECourts expanded to 12 new counties this month.

The Charlotte Ledger first reported that McFadden and Chinn-Gary were added as defendants in a brief.

WHAT INMATES SAY HAPPENED

Sarah Fields, Sayeline Nunez and Thomas Hayward joined the federal suit as plaintiffs Wednesday.

All three were held at the Mecklenburg County Detention Center last year, cleared to be let out and waited because of an “integration defect” between two pieces of eCourts software, according to the complaint.

For Fields and Nunez, that meant more than an extra day behind bars, they said. Hayward spent more than an extra 14 hours, he said. Fields got booked for charges of communicating threats and simple assault, Nunez for financial card fraud and Hayward with assault on a female, according to jail records.

The waits are unusual. When a person is arrested, courts set conditions for release. Once those conditions are met, an inmate is supposed to be let out quickly. Before eCourts, it took about two to four hours in Charlotte, the lawsuit says.

Mecklenburg County resident Allen Sifford joined the suit last year. Sifford said he was arrested over a 14-year-old, dismissed warrant and spent two days in Gaston County’s jail.

He said that eWarrants — a piece of eCourts software that launched statewide in 2022 — was to blame.

INTEGRATION FAILURES

The three new plaintiffs may not be outliers. Reports obtained by the Observer appear to show integration defects were frequent in eCourts’ earliest days in Charlotte.

Those reports say there were more than 540 “integration failures” here in just 12 days in October.

Integration failures happen when information in one piece of eCourts software doesn’t match another. One of the inmates’ attorneys says the failures in reports mirror issues that led to his clients being detained longer than they should’ve been.

“Generally speaking, when an eWarrants user (court user or law enforcement user) enters certain information into eWarrants, select data fields are transmitted to Odyssey via an integration,” NCAOC spokesperson Graham Wilson said in an email last month. “The reports you have referenced identify a few instances where all the data did not transmit automatically.”

An integration failure report doesn’t mean the record is still wrong, Wilson said. It just means that some manual changes had to be made to court records.

WHAT’S NEXT

United States District Court Judge William Osteen hasn’t ruled whether the lawsuit can move forward as a class action, said Zack Ezor, an attorney representing the former inmates.

If approved, that could open the door to others across North Carolina suing.

But a class action would “devolve into a series of mini-trials to determine, among other things, whether a hypothetical class member’s arrest or detention was justified under the circumstances, or whether the arrest or detention was in any way related to the eCourts system,” Tyler Technologies said in its own filing last year, arguing against it.

Osteen will rule whether any claims should be dismissed, too, Ezor said.