Fulton County Daily Report
By Steven H. Pollak,
Assistant Editor-Digital Content
Thursday, April 22, 2004

Jail’s delays in inmate releases, strip-searches of prisoners prompt suit

Delays in releasing inmates from the Fulton County Jail and the practice of strip-searching arrestees and prisoners w ho are about to be released have prompted a class action suit that could leave taxpayers footing the bill for millions of dollars in settlements and legal fees.

A group of attorneys led by William C. Claiborne III, a Washington lawyer w ho is licensed in Georgia, filed a federal class action suit Wednesday morning in U.S. District Court in Atlanta. Powell v. Barrett, No. 1:04CV1100 (N.D. filed April 21, 2004).

Atlanta attorneys Charles B. “Chuck” Pekor Jr. and Daniel E. DeWoskin of Pekor & DeWoskin will serve as local counsel for the suit. Claiborne said his brother, Augusta sole practitioner James Patrick Claiborne, also w ill work on the case, as w ill George Washington University Law School professor Lynn E. Cunningham. William Claiborne also has asked Los Angeles attorney Barrett S. Litt to help.
Litt was the lead counsel for a similar group of class actions brought against Los Angeles County. Those suits resulted in a $27 million settlement for the inmates in 2001. Two suits brought by William Claiborne against the Washington jail, the city of Washington and the U.S. Marshal’s Service,  which exercises joint custody of arrestees at the courthouse, are pending before a federal judge.

Pekor said he expects the Fulton County class to include almost every inmate to pass through the jail in the last two years.

Anecdotes of late releases prompted the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights to begin studying the problem in Fulton. Mary Sidney Kelly, an investigator and paralegal at the Southern Center, said she attended two  weeks of first appearance hearings and state court preliminary hearings. She tracked 215 cases where the defendant w as sentenced to time served, the charges were dismissed or the judge granted a signature bond.
None of the cases tracked by the Southern Center resulted in the defendant’s release from custody the same day the judge signed an order.  Of the 215 cases, Kelly found only 24 defendants were released within one day after their court dates. Some of the others took much longer to be freed: four remained in jail six days after their release dates, three were held seven days, one was held 11 days and one w as held 12 days.
Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center, said the problem lies in the jail’s inability to process inmates in a reasonable amount of time. “The perception of it is that there are not enough personnel to process people out,” he said. “People don’t get out until a computer check is done. … The jailers, after people are supposed to be let go, are then checking for warrants. … It’s a total bureaucratic mess that keeps people in.”
A spokeswoman for Fulton Sheriff Jacquelyn H. Barrett said there would be “no statement at this time” about the late releases. She referred questions to Fulton Superior Court Chief Judge Doris L. “Dee” Dow ns. Barrett, w ho has been dogged by questions surrounding her decision to invest $7 million in county funds collected from property tax sales, announced Monday that she will not run for re-election this fall.
A federal grand jury on Tuesday began hearing testimony related to Barrett’s handling of the investments. According to reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Barrett took the advice of a Florida MetLife broker, Byron Rainner, and invested $2 million of county money in Provident Capital Investments Inc. on March 26, 2003, and $5.2 million in MetLife on April 28 of the same year.
The money for the Provident investment w as proceeds from property sales conducted by the sheriff’s department to settle county tax claims. The $5.2 million given to MetLife came from another fund controlled by the sheriff.

Both investments have come under scrutiny by federal prosecutors. The MetLife money has been returned, but the $2 million given to Provident has not been given back to the county.

Jail’s ‘State of Emergency’ Barrett declared a “state of emergency” at the jail in early March following the accidental releases of three inmates. Citing jail overcrowding, increased deputy workloads and staffing cuts, Barrett said the jail had reached a “breaking point” and emergency measures were needed.
Soon after that announcement, several attorneys and judges noticed the increase in the time it took to get a defendant out of jail following a judge’s order.
Miranda L. Gatlin, a staff attorney with the state court division of the Fulton County Conflict Defender Office, said the delayed release problem became “widespread” in the last month or two.
She filed five habeas suits at the end of March when she learned that five of her clients w ere in jail even though a judge had sentenced them to time served or the charges had been dropped. Four of those defendants remained in jail for two days after the judge’s order and one stayed locked up for five extra days. Gatlin said she’s had fewer problems since filing the habeas suits.
Attorneys also are protesting the practice of “blanket” strip-searches for arrestees at the jail. Claiborne said case law suggests the policy of strip-searching every arrestee is illegal.
In addition, defendants w ere strip-searched upon returning to the jail from court appearances where they were sentenced to time served, released on signature bonds or had their charges dismissed. Presumably, the deputies strip-searched the returning inmates to prevent the introduction of contraband into the jail. But attorneys say searches of people w ho have been given their freedom by a judge are unconstitutional.
Why the Delay in Inmate Releases?

As for the delayed releases, Dow ns cited several reasons. The number of people coming through the jail has increased. In 2002, releases averaged about 80 per day, while in 2004 the average is 112 people per day. In addition, the procedure for checking out inmates has been “tightened” because of the accidental releases.
Dow ns also observed that the flow of information between the jail and the courts needs to be improved. Currently, information is sent back and forth from the jail and the courts via e-mail before being manually entered into each agency’s respective computer systems.
County officials have implemented several measures to alleviate the problem in the short term. According to Dow ns, several representatives from the county’s criminal justice system have been meeting on a weekly basis for the last month or so in a bid to improve the situation at the jail. “The main thing is that we’re all working together, and it seems to be effective,” she said.
Deputies have been working overtime to speed up the booking process and that has helped reduce the number of people waiting to be released, Dow ns said.
Another county official looking to improve the jail, Fulton County Commission Chairwoman Karen C. Handel, said 17 new employees at the jail soon w ill complete training in the booking process.
Also, Handel said, the Georgia Department of Corrections has agreed to move 85 of the 200 state prisoners being housed at the Fulton County Jail. “These are all things w e can do in the immediate short term,” Handel said.
To resolve the long-term issues, the county will convene an “independent panel of criminal justice experts” to search for solutions to the jail’s problems. Handel said she is helping gather names for the panel and will discuss the issue at this week’s commission meeting.
The chairwoman, w ho has publicly called for Barrett’s resignation, noted that the commission does not have any authority over the sheriff’s department but nonetheless may be held liable in legal action against the jail.
“That’s w hat’s so incredibly frustrating,” she said.
The short-term relief w as apparently too late to avoid a class action. Claiborne already had begun investigating Fulton County and
interviewing released inmates and their lawyers by the time the changes at the jail were beginning to be implemented.
Same Problems, Different Cities

Similar circumstances led to the litigation in Los Angeles and Washington.
In 2001, Los Angeles County agreed to pay $27 million to settle five class action suits brought on behalf of inmates held beyond their release dates. The settlement covered some 400,000 people detained in Los Angeles County jails over a five-year period, about half of whom were strip-searched after their release order.
A 1998 case from the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California described the process for releases from Los Angeles County jails and cited two reasons for the delays. Fowler v. Block, 2 F. Supp. 2d 1268 (1998).
In California, releases were delayed because deputies had to make sure an inmate w as not released if there w ere outstanding warrants or the inmate w as supposed to appear in another criminal proceeding. “Thus, because there w ere several information sources to investigate and the Sheriff’s Department w as not endowed with an efficient and very effective computer system, the plaintiff’s criminal check w as both time consuming and laborious,” Judge William J. Rea  wrote in his 1998 decision.
The w arrant checking process w as further exacerbated by the need to enter manually each w arrant received by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
According to another case related to the five class actions, the sheriff’s department received a large number of warrants each day and “due to the high volume of w ants and holds received each day, the inputting process can, and often does, take between one to two days to complete. It is only after the inputting process is complete and the computer check run, that the LASD begins the administrative steps toward a prisoner’s release. Although no longer required to serve time, these prisoners must remain in jail during the inputting period.” Streit v. County of Los Angeles, 236 F.3d 552.
“In other words, the Sheriff and County needed to modify the appropriate records and files to reflect the plaintiff’s status as a ‘former’ inmate,” Rea wrote.
In cases pending before the U.S. District Court in Washington, two classes of inmates have been approved. One class includes inmates w ho were kept in custody beyond their release dates. The other includes those w ho w ere strip-searched after their release orders. Claiborne, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Fulton and Washington suits, said the Washington cases stemmed from a series of administrative glitches and bad practices. Bynum v. Government of the District of Columbia, No. 02-0956 (D.D.C. filed May 16, 2002). Similar to the situation in Fulton, the courts in Washington used separate computer systems so that w hen inmates were sentenced, paperwork had to be entered manually into the jail’s computer. Making matters worse, Claiborne said, the paperwork in Washington did not always come back from the courthouse with the inmate. Detentions w ere prolonged further because Washington corrections officials were checking for warrants and holds after a judge ordered an inmate’s release.
In the suit against the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the city of Washington, Claiborne contends that the law enforcement authorities were conducting illegal strip-searches of female arrestees. Johnson v. District of Columbia, No. 02-2364 (D.D.C. filed Dec. 2, 2002).
Magistrates Frustrated

The lengthy booking process at the Fulton County Jail has caused problems not only for releases but also for intakes. For a time, the system was so backed up that inmates were being brought before magistrates for first appearance hearings w ithout being booked into the jail.
“It w as so bad that they w ere bringing people over before they’d been booked in,” said Fulton Magistrate Stephanie C. Davis.
Davis said the jail’s system appeared to improve in the last w eek, but, for the last month or two, inmates were coming to court without the proper paperwork. Attorneys scrambled to find the documents needed to hear the cases.
As previously reported in Creative Loafing, the practice frustrated one magistrate so badly that late last month he dismissed misdemeanor charges against approximately 20 defendants.

Magistrate Roy C. Roberts said the mass dismissal of charges turned out to be wrong legally (he should have given the defendants bonds and ordered them released from custody), but the move caught the attention of jail officials.

Last week, Roberts w as at the jail conducting first appearance hearings for felony offenders. Attorney Richard C. Wayne came to the
makeshift courtroom  with a signature bond signed by Magistrate Michael B. Wallace at 9:30 the previous night. Through a paperwork error, the signature bond never made it to the proper authorities and Wayne’s client was placed on Thursday’s first appearance calendar by mistake. Wayne showed Roberts the signature bond and asked the magistrate to order the deputies to release his client immediately. Roberts told the Daily Report that he could order such a thing, but the deputies “can tell me to take a hike.”

Two hours later—and more than 15 hours after Wallace’s order—Wayne’s client w as released. “The jail does whatever the hell they want to do,” Wayne said afterward. Wayne’s experience notwithstanding, Roberts said the jail’s system for processing inmates and paperwork appeared to have been working better last w eek. “We are seeing vast improvements on the felony side,” he said.

Indeed, Gatlin at the Conflict Defender’s Office said last w eek that since she filed the habeas briefs, the majority of her clients have been able to get out of jail  within 24 hours of a judge’s order.

“It’s been an improvement,” she said. “It’s not 100 percent better but an improvement.”