Area courts move to next phase of pandemic precautions

A new administrative order will ease some of the COVID-19 precautions at the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse as court officials prepare to resume jury trials later this spring.

The order, issued Monday by 32nd Circuit Court Presiding Judge Scott Lipke, follows a new operational directive issued Friday by the Missouri Supreme Court outlining conditions under which certain court proceedings may resume.

"I think everybody's ready to get back to normal, whatever that means," Lipke told the Southeast Missourian on Monday, shortly before issuing his order moving the judicial circuit from Phase 2 to Phase 3. The new order goes into effect Thursday.

Although a slight less restrictive phase, Lipke said Phase 3 will still require social distancing, face masks and other precautions inside the courthouse. Under Phase 2, there was a limit of no more than 25 people in a courtroom, all of whom had to be socially distanced.

"When we go to Phase 3, there's no limit, but the reality is, you're not going to be able to get many more people in a courtroom than that," the presiding judge said.

Jury trials, both criminal and civil, remain suspended through May 31. Afterward, Lipke said, the court's intention is to resume trials with a backlog of criminal cases having priority.

"We'll have a higher priority on criminal cases in which the defendant is in custody and waiting for trial," he said. "There may also be a few civil cases that take place because of scheduling. If I have two criminal cases ahead of a civil case and both (criminal) defendants plead guilty by a pre-trial conference date, I wouldn't have time to put another criminal case on, so we would probably go ahead with a civil case as long as it's ready to go."

The county's new courthouse, Lipke said, is better suited to accommodate socially-distanced courtroom activities than many other courthouses in Missouri.

"Some courts across the state are actually putting their jurors where the general public would sit and kind of turning everything around," he said. "But I think what we can do in our courtrooms, in at least the ones we've looked at inBollinger and Cape County, is normally a jury would be in two rows of six. We'll probably stagger those every other seat and probably put a third row in front of the jury box so we could get four (jurors) in each row and be socially distanced."

As for when trial activities and other courtroom procedures are running at full speed in the 32nd Judicial Circuit, Lipke said it's difficult to say, but he hopes it can be by the end of the year.

"It's a pretty fluid situation," he said. "You have different variants of COVID-19 and we don't know how much it might impact us locally, but that's our hope."