Today's Fresno Bee reports that Judge O'Neill spoke to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee yesterday in support of a bill that would provide four more permanent EDCA district judge slots and one more temporary position to the overburdened EDCA court.
A U.S. District Court judge from Fresno told a Senate panel Wednesday that federal judges in the Central Valley are shouldering some of the highest caseloads in the nation and need reinforcements -- now.
The federal judges serving in the Fresno and Sacramento courthouses are, by some measures, the busiest in the nation, and waiting times to complete cases are among the longest.
Judge Lawrence J. O'Neill advised Senate Judiciary Committee members that the solution is a bill increasing the number of judges in California and 11 other states.
"There are other judicial districts that are in trouble," said O'Neill, who works in the Fresno federal courthouse. "We happen to be in crisis."
The weighted caseload average, for instance, is higher for federal judges in Fresno and Sacramento than anywhere else in the country.
The weighted caseload average measures the judicial burden by assigning different weights to different types of cases, depending on how much time they typically take.
For federal judges nationwide, the average weighted caseload is 471. For judges in Fresno and Sacramento, together known as the Eastern District of California, the weighted caseload average is 1,095.
