Editorial: Courthouse error will demand answers

We tend to think of accidents as a car crash or a fallen electrical pole — something with physical presence and possibly injury.

But accidents happen everywhere, including government and bureaucracy. They might happen more there just because of the volume of people involved. Those can be the ones that slip under the collective radar when they impact only one person.

Except sometimes they hit a lot of people at once. Like all of the people who were supposed to show up for court this week in Allegheny County.

Ten trials were set to play out in court over the week but didn’t because of an administrative error. None of them had potential jurors called and those people whittled down to make up the juries needed to hear the cases. It was a problem that wasn’t discovered until Friday as the county headed into the holiday weekend followed by a four-day work week.

“We all feel terrible for the people whose lives were affected by the mistake,” Administrative Judge Jill E. Rangos said.

That is undoubtedly true. The courts like to run with clockwork precision, but, with human beings doing the work, that won’t always happen.

The lawyers aren’t happy. By the time a case gets to trial, it can have hundreds of hours of work behind it on prosecution and defense in a criminal matter or with plaintiff and defendant in a civil trial. Rescheduling a trial isn’t like moving a dental appointment. It is a complex issue with lots of moving parts and a lot of busy people who can’t just make themselves available at 9 a.m. next Monday.

Even worse, each trial represents lives that have been up in the air for months, if not years. Tomichael Sherrell’s trial for the shooting death of Bradley Lucier during a Stowe robbery has been dragging on since April 2019 and finally was looking at resolution before being thrown off track.

A criminal case can be compromised if a defendant can make a claim that a right to speedy trial was affected. An accused’s defense can collapse because a witness who was available on the day scheduled won’t be available later.

Perhaps the human error is seen most poignantly in the toll taken on the families who have been dragged along in the red tape for years.

No one in the courthouse meant for this to happen. As with any accident, it was without malice. Rangos says steps have been taken to make sure this mistake — the first, she said, she has seen in 20 years — won’t happen again.

Good. It shouldn’t. Too much is on the line.

But courts deal with inadvertent screw-ups that land people in a courtroom every day to have their issues sorted out. Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas should be prepared to do more than say the issue was handled and spell out exactly how it was addressed and what the human and financial toll might be.