NC judicial branch at odds over what to ask from lawmakers. How jobs, eCourts are factors

Concerned about the troubled rollout of digital court software, a group representing district attorneys suggested several solutions to lawmakers last week, including more help.

But a N.C. Conference of District Attorneys’ 2024 list of budget requests, made to the state court system, did not include a big expansion with more positions. Rather, it made just a few requests, and one of them was to move the group’s top administrator into the lucrative pension plan reserved for judges, district attorneys, clerks of superior court and public defenders.

Lawmakers removed a similar pension benefit from their proposed budget last year after The News & Observer reported based on public records that it would affect a single position and cost taxpayers $642,000.

“They tried it once before and it was rejected and should be rejected again,” state Rep. Marcia Morey, a former judge, told The N&O on Friday.

“This is an attempt to give one person a disproportionate benefit over other state employees,” said Morey, a Durham Democrat. “Judicial retirement benefits were supposed to be for judicial employees, not a lawyer who lobbies for the DA’s conference.”

In an email obtained by The N&O, the Conference of District Attorneys’ counsel and legislative liaison, Chuck Spahos, asked the state Administrative Office of the Courts in January for the pension change, along with a change in funding for a separate position. The pension is for Spahos’ wife, Kimberly Spahos, who is the executive director of the Conference of DAs.

The Administrative Office of the Courts, which does the internal work for the state’s Judicial Branch, did not include the pension change in budget recommendations sent to the legislature. AOC did include the conference’s requests for permanent funding for two positions. According to the agency, AOC decided not to include the pension request in favor of focusing on eCourts.

The president of the Conference of District Attorneys told The N&O that while the conference did not include the pension request “in the formal AOC budget request this year,” it still wants the change.

“Our conference continues to believe that the position of executive director of our organization is analogous to the position of executive director of the Office of Indigent (Defense) Services,” District Attorney Ernest Lee said in an email. “Because the director of IDS was incorporated into the Judicial Retirement Plan several years ago by act of the legislature, it continues to be our position that the executive director of the Conference should be given the same benefit that has been accorded a similar position at IDS.”

Opposition to the pension by AOC “would be news to us,” Lee said. “To the contrary, in the immediate past the leadership of the Administrative Office of the Courts has been supportive of our position,” Lee said, but did not offer documentation showing that.

The reason for leaving out the pension in AOC’s final budget request, according to the agency, is that “AOC’s budget recommendations focus on supporting local court operations across North Carolina, including the success of eCourts.”

IDS job not ‘apples to apples’

The DAs’ group cited the Office of Indigent Defense Services’ director’s inclusion in the judicial pension system as a reason that the DAs’ leader should be included as well.

The executive director of the Office of Indigent Defense Services for the past four years has been Mary Pollard, but the role has been in the judicial retirement system since at least 2008, when chief public defenders were added to the plan, Pollard said.

IDS was created by the General Assembly in 2000 to “make real the Constitution’s right to counsel for those charged with crimes or who face significant deprivations to their liberty.” The office oversees defense provided to indigent defendants, which means those who cannot pay for their own defense.

The N&O asked Pollard about Lee’s position that the director jobs are “similar.”

“I do not disagree with Mr. Lee that the position of executive director of the Conference of District Attorneys is tremendously important, and that the duties of that position have expanded greatly in recent years,” Pollard told The N&O in a phone interview Monday.

Pollard said in her job as executive director, she oversees a budget of more than $160 million.

“We’re not comparing apples to apples here. The IDS job is quite a bit different,” she said.

Conference of DAs does want more jobs, they say

Chuck Spahos told state lawmakers during a recent meeting that the Conference of DAs wants a pause on eCourts to solve multiple issues.

Spahos said “we need more help, and we need more time.”

However, the Administrative Office of the Courts told The N&O that despite the Conference of District Attorneys “citing a need for additional resources as a condition to continue the successful implementation of eCourts, the Conference of DAs did not request that additional staff be funded in local prosecutors’ offices through the Judicial Branch’s 2024 budget presented to the General Assembly.”

Lee, the district attorney, said a workload study shows an increase of hundreds of staff is needed, but said it wasn’t included in this year’s formal budget request because of the timing of this year’s legislative session and because that study came before the eCourts software rollout.

Lee said that state lawmakers already know about the need. Large staffing requests are traditionally reserved for the two-year budget passed in odd-numbered years, he said, so the conference decided to wait until next year.

A budget bill in an even-numbered year like this one is just an adjustment. The off-year budgets usually include additional raises for teachers and state employees, additional spending needed for various programs and sometimes policy as well.

Lee said the other reason for not asking for the positions this year is because of the eCourts rollout, and because their workload study was done before the rollout.

The study, he said, shows that 138 more prosecutors and 167 legal assistants are needed statewide.

Lee told The N&O that the conference wants to pause the eCourts rollout to give AOC and Tyler Technologies time to address the system’s issues, which have caused “multiple disruptions to the judicial process.”

As it stands, he said, district attorneys already using the software agree they’ll need more resources to move as quickly as they did before eCourts. They’re waiting on AOC to share more data from pilot counties to know exactly what those needs will be, he said.

But while they wait, Lee said the DAs’ group is evaluating what to request from lawmakers “to mitigate the negative effects of an automation system that, up until this point and by all honest accounts, seems replete with inefficiencies.”

eCourts rollout problems

The court system’s new case management software — called Odyssey or Enterprise Justice — is part of a larger $100 million suite of eCourts tools intended to provide essential operations for the entire judicial system. That means everything from issuing arrest warrants to filing and accessing court documents.

The digital transformation was supposed to create a “virtual courthouse,” upgrading North Carolina’s antiquated paper- and mainframe-based system.

But since it launched in four pilot counties in February 2023, the rollout of the new case management software has been beset with problems that have drawn complaints from all corners of the criminal justice system.

Democratic and Republican prosecutors alike say dealing with the system’s instability and sluggishness requires more attorneys to work cases in the calendar — they’ve even called for an independent review of the launch. The company behind the software, Tyler Technologies, is facing a federal civil rights lawsuit over North Carolina residents who say they were wrongfully detained and spent extra time behind bars because of problems with the system. And Guilford County’s elected clerk has urged delays to the continued rollout over concerns about increased workloads.

Comments to state lawmakers from the DAs’ conference in early April marked the most prominent call yet for the pause.

Now active in 17 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, the software’s next expansion is scheduled for April 29 in Guilford, Durham and eight other counties.

There is precedent for slowing the eCourts rollout. In March 2023, AOC announced a delay to the system’s launch in Mecklenburg County that ended up lasting five months.

AOC director Ryan Boyce told lawmakers two weeks ago that his agency — and Chief Justice Paul Newby — oppose a similar delay for the next step in the eCourts launch.

“Slowing down that increase of public access to justice, I think, is harmful,” he said.

Pension pushed, and removed, in 2023

In a January 2024 email to Administrative Office of the Courts and Conference of DAs leaders, Chuck Spahos wrote that the conference’s request would be limited to two items, a change in funding of one position to a full-time state job, and the pension.

“Also, I have included the Leadership of our Executive Committee related to their initiative to continue to pursue the addition of the Conference’s Executive Director in the Consolidated Judicial Retirement. For obvious reasons, I will ask that all communications related to that matter be directed to these members of the Executive Committee leadership,” Spahos wrote.

The Conference of District Attorneys submitted its budget requests to the Administrative Office of the Courts in January, which considered the recommendations before making its own budget requests to lawmakers on Feb. 29.

According to the AOC, the only change the conference made later to the January request was to ask for a second Conference of DAs position be converted from grant-funded to permanent funding, which the AOC included in its requests, while leaving out the pension.

The same request for the judicial pension change was put in the House budget proposal in 2023.

Kimberly Spahos and future conference directors would have been moved into the Consolidated Judicial Retirement System from the Teachers’ and State Employees’ Retirement System, according to an actuarial note from the Retirement Systems Division under the State Treasurer’s Office, The N&O reported at the time.

Morey, the former judge and current House member, asked Republican budget chairs to remove that provision in the middle of a committee meeting after reading The N&O’s story. She said the $642,000 cost of the additional benefits was “shocking.”

Morey called it an “outrageous provision targeted to one person to get a substantial change in retirement benefits from the state to judicial. And retroactive — back-dating it — which I think is unprecedented.”

Republican budget chairs Rep. Dean Arp and Rep. Donny Lambeth told The N&O they removed it based on feedback during the meeting.

The General Assembly starts its short session next week.

Top Republicans remove special retirement benefit from NC budget after N&O story

Reporter Kyle Ingram contributed to this story.