Computer glitch creates 'big headache' for courts

A computer glitch brought the judicial process to a screeching halt Monday morning as the software system that serves courts across Missouri went down.

In Judge William Syler's courtroom in Jackson, defendants and their families fidgeted and whispered as attorneys tried to explain the problem.

Cape Girardeau County Circuit Court is paperless, assistant prosecuting attorney Jack Koester said, so without access to the electronic system, Syler couldn't start hearing the cases on his docket.

While defendants and bailiffs waited in the courtroom, Syler was in the circuit clerk's office, monitoring his email -- the only part of the system that seemed to be working -- and taking requests from attorneys for new court dates on cases that weren't yet ready for trial.

By late morning, 31 circuits, including the 33rd Judicial Circuit -- which includes Scott County -- had access to the system, but 14 still were offline. The 32nd Judicial Circuit, which comprises Cape Girardeau, Perry and Bollinger counties, was among those that still couldn't connect.

"It's been a big headache. ... It's almost 11 o'clock, and we haven't done a damn thing," said Syler, who serves on the Missouri Court Automation committee.

He said the Judicial Information System, which includes multiple components used statewide by attorneys, judges, clerks and the general public, was down.

"Theoretically, you have redundancies in systems, so if it crashes one place, it picks up in another," Syler said. "...They tell us this isn't supposed to happen, but obviously it did."

The outage basically left the whole circuit in a holding pattern, he said.

"We've just been kind of dead in the water, the question being, 'Is this going to be a real long day or a real short day?'" he said.

Wherever possible, Syler accepted defense attorneys' requests for continuances, provided prosecutors agreed. He marked the new dates on a printout of the docket.

More complicated matters, such as pleas, motions or sentencing hearings, had to wait.

"The actual meat and potatoes haven't been addressed yet," Syler said.

He said about a third of the state's circuit courts -- including Cape Girardeau County -- use e-filing for legal documents, but every court relies on JIS.

"If you had a file that's old enough, you might be able to do things with it," Syler said, but any case filed after the circuit switched to e-filing in May would be more or less at the mercy of the computer system, because "we don't have the hard files that are being developed."

Syler said Casenet -- the part of the system that provides public access to basic information about specific cases -- gets 5 million hits per day.

In Syler's courtroom alone, 54 cases were on the docket for Monday.

Some were minor matters that could be passed to another date without any real problem, but some were more serious, Syler said.

"There's people sitting there in orange suits, expecting to be in court today and have something to show for it. ... I can't really pass everything," he said.

Simply rescheduling everything for today wasn't an option, even if Syler could clear his schedule to hear all the cases, because most attorneys have cases in multiple counties and would end up double-booked if their clients' cases were moved back a day, he said.

One of those attorneys, Scott Reynolds, has clients in eight different counties -- Cape Girardeau, Perry, Ste. Genevieve, Bollinger, Scott, Mississippi, Stoddard and New Madrid -- and asked Syler to continue one of his Cape Girardeau cases Monday so he could get back to his office to prepare for a trial he had scheduled for today.

"Makes it bad when you've got cases all over the place. ... You have so much planned in a day that it's hard to sit here and wait a couple of hours," Reynolds said.

Syler said in an email message Monday afternoon that the system came back up about 3:30 p.m.

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