Washington
CNN
—
Without long-awaited Congressional action to add more judges to the bench to match the massive increase in caseloads over the past few decades, federal courts across the nation are straining to support the growing caseload.
It has been 34 years since the last comprehensive bill to increase the number of lower court judges was passed. During that time, the U.S. population has grown by 80 million people. The U.S. district court caseload has increased by more than 30 percent. Last year, the federal courts, which consist of 677 judges (including about 40-50 vacancies), handled more than 724,000 backlogged cases. This represents a 72 percent increase in backlogs over the past decade, when no new district court seats were created.
“We’re really under pressure to do all the work that litigants are asking us to do, and that’s affecting the quality of justice they receive,” federal Judge Mary Scriven in Tampa, Florida, told CNN.
She and other judges told CNN that staffing shortages cost litigants time and money and undermine public confidence in the judiciary. Whether the problem is resolved soon depends on the House passing a bill in the coming weeks to create 66 new judge positions, 63 of them full-time, in the nation’s most overburdened court jurisdictions. The bill, known as the JUDGES Act, or the “Delayed Resolution of Judicial Staffing Shortage Emergency” Act, was quietly approved without opposition by the Senate just before its August recess.
The bill, which has bipartisan support and a similar version introduced in the House, could face an uphill battle in the House, with limited legislative time in September, a vote on politically charged messaging bills taking priority in the weeks before the election, and a looming government shutdown that must be averted. The bill is not considered a top priority by many, and with Speaker Mike Johnson holding an unwieldy slim majority, leadership would need to step in.
Supporters of the judges’ bill argue that the bill’s chances of passing will be significantly reduced once it becomes clear which political party will appoint the first new judges allocated under the bill after the election.
“The uncertainty of no one knowing what’s going to happen in this election or any other election should motivate people to get this bill through the House and into law this month,” said Jonathan Hafen, national president of the Federal Lawyers Association, which has supported the bill.
If this bill doesn’t pass, the situation will only get worse for the most overburdened federal courts. The semi-retired judges who have been shouldering the extra burden are now too old to contribute. And the burnout factor is impacting the amount of work recently retired judges are willing to take on, leaving active judges scrambling to fill the gap.
“The workload just keeps growing relentlessly,” said Timothy Corrigan, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Central Florida, which covers Tampa and the rest of Central Florida and where five new judges would be appointed under the bill. “You’re issuing opinions, you’re holding cases, you’re doing what you need to do, but as soon as one thing gets done, you’ve got five other things to attend to. It’s never done.”
Litigants will have to wait longer for their cases to be resolved. For defendants held in pretrial detention, this could mean additional months of detention before a jury considers the charges against them. And in civil cases, parties may feel pressured to settle cases that would otherwise have gone to trial in order to pay seemingly endless legal fees.
“Without capacity, courts cannot hear plaintiffs’ claims in a timely manner,” said Kimberly Mueller, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
Mueller’s 34-county district in California’s Central Valley has just six sitting district judges, covering a region that has grown to about 8.5 million people from about 2.5 million in 1990, when Congress last passed a comprehensive judicial expansion bill.
Courts prioritize the resolution of criminal cases in accordance with the Speedy Trial Act, but in the Eastern District of California, the average time between the filing and resolution of a criminal felony case is 33 months.
“If they are detained, they could spend months, or even years, in pretrial detention in a local jail, waiting for the outcome of their case,” Mueller said. For prosecutors, delays risk losing witnesses and their memories.
Under the JUDGES Act, her district would receive four more judges, one each in 2025, 2027, 2029 and 2031. The bill was crafted based on recommendations from the Judicial Conference, the federal judiciary’s policy-making body, and took into account both caseload statistics and other circumstances such as the geography of a court district, the availability of magistrate judges who could help with the work and factors that complicate litigation, such as the frequent need for interpreters.
“We take great care to ensure that all judicial personnel recommendations are reasonable, justified and based on actual workload needs,” said U.S. Circuit Judge Nancy Moritz, chair of the Judicial Statistics Subcommittee of the Judicial Conference’s Judicial Resources Committee.
Some court districts don’t have judges dedicated to filling increasingly busy divisions and are scrambling to assign cases to other judges in their districts. For example, there are no sitting judges in the Ocala district of the Middle District of Florida, home to a retirement community called The Villages that has grown rapidly in recent years.
“This community has a right to have a full-time district judge sitting in the courthouse in Ocala to handle these cases and to allow the community to come in and observe,” Corrigan said. “The fact that we can’t do that right now means we can’t provide the quality of federal justice that you have come to expect.”
The bill’s lead Senate sponsors, Sen. Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who first introduced it in 2020, and its original Democratic co-sponsor, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, are urging the House to quickly pass it in September, fearing that the party that lost in November’s elections would be discouraged from supporting the bill.
But even Rep. Hank Johnson, a co-sponsor of the House bill, expressed skepticism about that timeline. “I think it’s most likely going to happen during the lame-duck session,” the Georgia Democrat told CNN, pointing to a government spending bill the House will tackle next month.
Supporters of the bill are lobbying both House leadership and House members whose districts would see additional judge positions added to the court, a Senate aide involved in the effort told CNN.
To garner broad support for the bill to pass unopposed in both the Senate Judiciary Committee (where partisan battles are fierce in the Senate) and on the full Senate floor, bill authors needed to extend the time frame for adding judges to each district court. The bill would assign new judges over 12 years.
“It’s likely that both parties will control the White House at some point during that period, and all judicial nominations await Senate confirmation,” another Senate aide working on the legislation told CNN.
CNN’s Lauren Fox contributed to this report.