Prosecutors Plea For Pause on eCourts Rollout

Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather gave lawmakers an earful when they asked for his thoughts on how the rollout of the $100 million eCourts system has been going.

Mecklenburg is among the 17 counties that currently use the new system as part of a phased rollout expected to be completed by the end of 2025. Ten more counties are scheduled to go fully online on April 29, and another 11 counties on July 22.

“In my district, grave challenges remain,” Merriweather told the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety last Thursday, noting that it had been almost seven months since it launched in the state’s largest county. “It now takes more people, more time to accomplish less than it did before.”

Clerks, prosecutors, magistrates and law enforcement officers have complained that Tyler Technologies, the Texas-based company selected to move the state into a more modern era of judicial record-keeping, started with a model that did not mesh well with some intricacies specific to North Carolina.

One of those glitches that few had planned for, Merriweather told lawmakers, revolves around domestic and sexual violence cases. 

Officers and clerks redact contact information in some criminal cases in which a victim or witness might be intimidated or at risk. But if the case is not filed by law enforcement, and the victim goes to a magistrate or a clerk for a protective order or to initiate a criminal complaint on their own, “the clerks still must enter their information and contact information into the system for all of the world to see, including information accessible to the very assailant from whom that victim may be trying to protect herself,” Merriweather added.

As the system is currently set up, law enforcement officers can attach a detailed sworn statement in a criminal case. If that “sensitive identifying information” isn’t redacted, not only could victims and witnesses be exposed to potential harm, “it could chill their continued participation in criminal prosecution,” Merriweather said.

Those were just some of the reasons that the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, a lobbying organization for the state’s prosecutors, told lawmakers they want the state Administrative Office of the Courts to delay adding more counties until eCourt’s problems are fixed.

“It does not make good sense to continue to go into counties when there’s this kind of a problem,” said Chuck Spahos, the conference’s general counsel and legislative liaison.

The state Division of Motor Vehicles also asked for a pause in October, after system hiccups created problems for routine traffic cases. Guilford County made a similar request in late January.

After the Mecklenburg rollout, a federal lawsuit alleged that 66 people had been jailed longer than they should have been because of problems between the online warrant depository eWarrents and Odyssey, the cloud-based integrated case management system. [Note: This paragraph has been corrected to reflect the number of people involved in the lawsuit.]

Ryan Boyce, director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, told lawmakers that he and Chief Justice Paul Newby were against a delay, and provided several reasons. 

“One is, just slowing down that increase of public access to justice I think is harmful,” Boyce said. “The second issue is, right now, we’re in a period of transition. We’re living in two worlds: Some in paper, some in the system. …Clerks and attorneys are living in two worlds. The longer we live in this purgatory is going to be hard for them.”

As leverage to get a better product, Boyce told lawmakers that his office has sometimes delayed paying Tyler Technologies until fixes are made. In March, Carolina Journal reported that such negotiations had resulted in a $6.1 million decrease in the overall bill, but also extended the contract through 2034–though that agreement can be terminated any time for cause or convenience.

Sen. Warren Daniel, a Burke County Republican and lawyer, told Boyce and lawmakers it might be beneficial to think about what’s down the road.

“They built us this car,” Daniel said. “So could we keep the car and if we wanted a different mechanic to keep it running, could we do that, or is it proprietary to Tyler?”

“We’re essentially leasing a car, but paying for customizations,” Boyce countered. “So if we were going to move on, I don’t think we could keep their software because we would lose that licensing access.”

–Anne Blythe

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On Our Radar

>>Tourist Tax Fight: Currituck County wants another shot to appeal last month’s unanimous decision from the Court of Appeals that it misspent proceeds from the room occupancy tax on general public services.

Assembly reporter Johanna Still reported on the case last week. The Corolla Civic Association had accused the county of not using the revenue for its intended purpose, and a trial court sided with the county. 

But the Court of Appeals ruled on March 19 that the county’s use of funds was inappropriate. Currituck wasn’t following its specifically tailored law passed in 2004, the court said, that removed police, garbage, and other general government services from the list of allowable uses for occupancy tax dollars.

The Outer Banks Voice reports that Board of Commissioners Chair Bob White said that the county “is left with little choice but to” ask the state Supreme Court to take up the case. 

>>Freed Speech: CityView reports that commissioners in Hope Mills are talking about the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Lindke v. Freed. 

The case deals with a Michigan resident who argued that a city manager violated the First Amendment by deleting and blocking critical comments on his Facebook page. Hope Mills was cited as an example in an amicus brief that referenced the town’s former mayor reaching a settlement with a commissioner over allegations that the former had violated public records law by blocking and deleting critical comments on her personal Facebook page. 

The court ruled unanimously that there’s a distinction between posting in an official capacity and as a private citizen, and proposed a test for how that should be determined. “Private parties can act with the authority of the State, and state officials have private lives and their own constitutional rights—including the First Amendment right to speak about their jobs and exercise editorial control over speech and speakers on their personal platforms,” the court wrote.

>>Shots Fired: A Guilford County mother wants the state Supreme Court to take up her case alleging that her then-14-year-old son received a COVID vaccination against his will in 2021. They had sued the county school board and the Old North State Medical Society, and a state Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously against them last month.

As the Carolina Journal writes, the mother says her son went to a site the society ran to get a COVID test, but instead was given a vaccine against his and his parents’ wishes. The appellate judges ruled last month that the defendants are protected under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, a federal law that allows for declarations of immunity from liability in certain public health emergencies. 

Have any suggestions for improving this newsletter or stories we should look into? Email us at courts@theassemblync.com.

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Around the State

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