Courts taking heat over handling of DUIs

Justice courts have come under fire the past few years for doing a poor job of ferreting out repeat DUI offenders.

Conceivably, a drunken driver could rack up a number of drunken-driving convictions in different justice courts. Because there was no single, readily accessible clearinghouse of their past records, some repeat offenders' claims that they have no history of drunken driving went unchecked. Absent a complete record, someone with previous DUI convictions may be treated as a first-time offender.

The Utah Legislature last year passed a bill that requires all justice courts to report the same DUI data currently collected by state courts. The Department of Public Safety houses the information in a single database. But some rural justice courts don't have computer systems.

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study targeting how justice courts handle impaired-driving cases recommended Utah get rid of justice courts.

Karl B. Grube, a St. Petersburg, Fla., trial judge who was on the five-member study team, says a couple of judges told him after the report was released in 2001, "Please don't come back and visit Utah anymore."

Grube, though, still doesn't pull any punches, continuing to suggest as he did two years ago that city and county courts are throwbacks to the Old West.

"There's just no excuse for having that system now in the 21st century," he said.

According to the report, "In order to ensure a higher quality of justice in the disposition of criminal cases, a number of states have undertaken court reform by abolishing city, county and municipal courts and opting for a unified court system operated under the auspices of the state's supreme judicial court instead."

Clearfield Justice Court Judge Sandberg says the "generalizations" Grube makes about justice courts don't apply to Utah.

"It's not a question of abolishing," he said. "It's a question, I'm comfortable with saying, of fine tuning."

A portion of a justice court judge training conference in April will be spent dissecting how to handle a DUI case from start to finish, Sandberg said.

Grube's biggest problem with justice court is that the judges don't have to be law-trained and that they work for municipalities rather than the state. Part-time judges, especially in rural areas, find themselves in the difficult position of living and working among the same people they are called on to administer justice, he said.

Grube suggests a two-tier state-run trial-court system in which misdemeanors would be handled in the lower court. All judges would be full time and law-trained, a change requiring an amendment to the Utah Constitution.

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