Can cutting down the time to fulfill court requirements result in more of the valley’s young defendants getting them done? The Issaquah Municipal Court is making a bet that it can.
The court, which additionally serves North Bend and Snoqualmie, is using a new calendar to improve drug and alcohol evaluation compliance rates among defendants younger than 25.
Citing an increase in criminal cases involving young adults and heroin seen in recent years, Judge N. Scott Stewart said the new system holds the younger defendants accountable for immediately scheduling a substance abuse evaluation. Otherwise, they might put off their court requirements until it’s too late and have a harder time moving on from an alleged crime.
“We want people to become happy, law-abiding citizens at 22,” Stewart told the Reporter. “Not to find themselves a permanent part of the system at 44.”
Why put the cutoff at 25, seven years after a person is a legal adult? The reason comes from recent literature and training in judicial policy, Stewart said. Those policies are themselves are informed by neuroscientific research from the past 16 years suggesting the human brain doesn’t complete its late adolescent development until the age of 25.
That research has been particularly championed by Dr. Jay Giedd, formerly an intramural scientist with the National Institute of Mental Health and currently a professor at the University of California San Diego. Giedd was lead author on several research papers published in 1999, 2004 and beyond showing continued post-teen brain development in MRI scans.
“(A person’s early 20s) isn’t a great time emotionally and psychologically,” Giedd was quoted as saying in a speech at the 2005 National Institute of Health Parenting Festival. “This is the great paradox of adolescence: right at the time you should be on the top of your game, you’re not.”
The Young Adult Drug Calendar recently instituted by the court is scheduled for two consecutive Tuesdays per month. A new defendant will come before Stewart the first Tuesday, be ordered to obtain a drug and alcohol evaluation if suggested by the prosecutor based on the circumstances of the alleged crime, and be told to come back the next week.
That differs from most adult cases, in which defendants traditionally have 30 days to obtain an evaluation, Stewart said.
“Too much of the time, the mindset will be, ‘I have a few weeks, I don’t have to do it right away,’” he said. “That’s when you get people who won’t call to schedule the appointment until the 29th day. If they can’t get an appointment, they’re coming back to me without their evaluation. If that continues, it could be 60 to 90 days until I have hard and fast results I can act on.”
If the same thing happens with defendants on the young adult drug calendar, the court is at least dealing with shorter amounts of time overall, Stewart said.
The calendar is only one of several recent inroads the court has made with drug and alcohol related cases. At a recent State of the Courts address, Stewart told the city council that, since hiring a probation officer in the middle of 2012, the number of random urine tests that turn up positive for drugs has gone down from 42 percent that year to 24 percent in 2014.
Because the probation officer is female and can only watch female probationers as they provide a sample, the recent hiring of a retired male Issaquah police officer to court security will allow all probationers to be monitored during urinalysis to avoid tampering or fraud.
In 2014, the Issaquah court saw a 767 non-traffic cases, versus 540 the prior year, with vast increases in the number of theft and criminal trespass cases — both crimes, along with domestic violence, comprising the “big three” for including a drug or alcohol component, Stewart told the council.
Meanwhile, traffic cases saw a decrease from 581 to 523. Alcohol related traffic crimes, such as driving under the influence, decreased from 109 to 68.
