A piece in yesterday's Daily Law Journal (subscription only at dailyjournal.com) indicates that EDCA Judicial nominee Troy Nunley may get a voice vote in the Senate before year's end. The article highlights the shortage of EDCA district judges and the problems caused by overloaded caseloads. Here's an excerpt:
In a sprawling district that stretches from the Oregon border through the Central Valley to the edge of Los Angeles County, judges must cope with the burdens of additional work due to the area's growing population. But judgeships haven't kept pace; the district hasn't added an Article III judge since 1978.
The problem is compounded, judges and lawyers say, by a disproportionate burden of habeas petitions and prison condition complaints from inmates in state and federal prisons within the district.
Nearly 2,400 prisoner petitions were filed in the Eastern District in 2011. Nearly 2,500 more were filed in the Central District of California, based in Los Angeles, together totalling about 12 percent of prisoner petitions nationwide. But it stings more in the Eastern District, where there are just six district judges to the Central District's 27.
"They're deluged with habeus cases," said Donald R. Fischbach, Fresno-based chair of business litigation for Dowling Aaron Inc. "There's all kinds of prisoner cases that just take a huge amount of time."
Judges in the Eastern District, which includes courts in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, Yosemite and Redding, must handle a caseload more than double the national average.
"To say we are the stepchild doesn't begin to even approach our situation." Karlton said. "We are desperate and nobody seems to care."
If the senior judges weren't helping out, attorneys who practice in the district said they fear the time to trial would be even slower.
"In the last 15 years, 10 years, the length of time to get a case to trial realistically has doubled or tripled. Now I'm filing things, and things are looking like 2015," said Stewart Katz, a civil rights sole practitioner.