Jury trials take longer because they don't call in enough jurors, therefore voir dire carries over to additional days because under the new "budget edict" only a certain number of jurors are called in daily.
It is now far more difficult to obtain foreign language interpreters, particularly Spanish interpreters, expeditiously.
The Landlord/Tenant parts in Manhattan Civil are a nightmare. We've been waiting 6 months to get a judge to hear our eviction trial. It was just kicked to January 2012.
I practice in Bronx Family Court, Child Support Litigation. Cases take longer because there is less time to hear them so they are adjourned more often. Litigants are forced to take more time from work. This causes stress for both the court and the litigants.
An emergency hearing on continued remand of a child was halted because the case was called at 4:24 p.m., after all three attorneys had waited all day. The judge allowed no applications, although the attorney for the child wanted the child to go home.
As a prosecutor, my experience has been that there are simply not enough judges, courtrooms and court personnel to hold the number of trials we should be having. Misdemeanors should not take more than a year to go to trial, yet virtually all of them do.
I made a motion in April of this year. Oral argument was not heard until September. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I needed an adjournment in September. The oral argument was then rescheduled for late January. That means one simple motion has taken almost a year.
I work with consumer debt defendants in Civil Court. The closure of child care centers has made it much more difficult and burdensome for many defendants to appear and assert their rights, and the cutback in hours has been downright devastating, particularly in Staten Island.
In what would otherwise be a relatively brief (i.e., 2 hours) commercial landlord-tenant trial in Civil Court, Kings County, we were forced to spend a full day because a single Russian interpreter was staffing the courthouse. The trial could not commence because the interpreter was unavailable, and, mid-trial, the interpreter was directed away to another courtroom. The delay was so great that the trial judge felt compelled to leave the bench to personally search the courthouse for the interpreter.
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