SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The steel-bar cells inside the courtrooms of Sacramento County Main Jail’s Patino Justice Center and Gordon Schaber Courthouse are some of the busiest spaces in a bustling Sacramento Superior Court. The cells are as much a part of the courtrooms as the judge’s bench or jurors’ box.
Eight courtrooms in all have cells within their courtrooms: Departments 4, 5, 8 and 9 on the second floor of the Schaber Courthouse at 720 9th St., and Departments 60 through 63 in the main jail’s Patino courts on I Street.
But as the framework of a towering new 17-story, 53-courtroom courthouse rises behind the jail courts near the city’s Railyard district, lingering questions of the cells’ utility, and resultant issues of equity, fairness and attorney access have re-emerged.
The lock-and-key bays will soon give way to plexiglass docks at the new Sacramento County Courthouse, scheduled to be completed in November 2023, but concerns remain. Schematics of the new Sacramento courthouse provided to The Sacramento Bee by court officials give a preview of courtrooms and in-court confinement.
Six courtrooms will have arraignment docks within the courtroom. Each will be approximately 20 feet wide by 6 feet deep, the schematics show; Schaber’s and Patino’s bars replaced with the new facility’s plexiglass.
“It’s incredibly prejudicial for people viewing it — family, neighbors, victims,” said Sacramento attorney and former federal public defender Mark Reichel. “He’s in orange. He’s in a cage. He’s like some kind of monster.”
Criminal defendants are granted the right under the Constitution to confront accusers and witnesses against them in criminal proceedings. The Judicial Council of California’s standards for the state’s trial court facilities lay out clear objectives for transporting and accommodating defendants held in custody while in the courthouse.
— Provide a safe and secure environment for transporting and accommodating jail inmates while in the courthouse.
— Maintain the safety and welfare of the judiciary, court staff and public in the courthouse.
— Prevent contraband from coming into the building.
The Sheriff’s Office manages all in-custody holding and sets protocols for how inmates are held.
“Courthouses must be a safe harbor to which members of the public come to resolve disputes that often are volatile. Once courthouses themselves are perceived as dangerous, the integrity and efficacy of the entire judicial process are in jeopardy,” Ronald M. George, former chief justice of California, once said.
But the arraignment cells, whether steel bars or a plexiglass box, also expose troubling equity concerns, striking an unfair balance between safety and defendants’ rights, defense attorneys and criminal justice advocates say.
Each day, a steady stream of orange-clad county inmates held on suspicion of minor offenses to more serious crimes stand, for lack of bail, inside the 7-by-3-foot cages of the existing Sacramento courts. They consult briefly through the bars with their attorneys, await a judge’s reading of the charges they face, the date of their next court appearance or, if they have entered a plea, the sentence they will receive.
A printed sign taped to the bars warns spectators: “No communication of any kind with inmates. It’s against the law.”
In Sacramento Superior Court, poor or indigent in-custody defendants who cannot post bail make their initial court appearances behind the bars of an arraignment courtroom’s cell. The equity issue that poses is one reason why advocates California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a statewide association of criminal defense attorneys, has opposed cash bail.
“There is an adverse effect because of the appearance” of the defendant behind bars, said attorney Stephen Munkelt, executive director of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice. Munkelt said the cells also point to more systemic issues in criminal justice.
“CACJ believes the right to liberty has been severely undervalued by the court in the last 40 years (beginning) with the War on Drugs,” the decadeslong campaign to stem the illegal drug trade in the U.S., to deleterious effect on Black and brown communities from long prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders to mass incarceration.
“Before that, judges understood the right to liberty. People were released pretrial,” Munkelt said. Over time, he said, public and political attitudes and media coverage of crime and criminal justice have worked to influence the bench.
“It is an ongoing and systemic issue,” he said.
Sacramento courts leaders had long argued for a new, modern courthouse to replace the Schaber courthouse, a building for years seen as cramped, obsolete and unsafe. The downtown arraignment cells on Ninth Street and on I Street are among the relics that have long been part of the judicial routine in Sacramento Superior Court.
With new courthouses in Yolo, Placer, Sutter and San Joaquin counties opening in recent years, the arraignment cells inside Sacramento’s courtrooms are among the last holdovers from an earlier era. But other local courts, for years, have had their own troubled history.
Yolo County jail inmates as late as 2015 were shepherded in chain gangs from a sheriff’s holding facility and through the crowded corridors of the county’s century-old courthouse on Court Street. The procession was both a security risk to the court-attending public and an injustice to the inmates facing criminal charges.
“It’s prejudicial to be chained up in those striped uniforms and led across the street. It’s a perp walk,” Woodland attorney Steven Sabbadini said in a 2014 interview, as construction was beginning on the new Yolo courthouse. “When they’re walking through the halls, it’s not a good thing for them, for jurors, for witnesses and alleged victims or for family members.”
But the cells are also likely a reflection of attitudes on courtroom security and in-courtroom confinement at the time construction of the Patino courtrooms was completed in 1989; and the influence more broadly of county sheriff’s officials in the design of court facilities, Munkelt said.
“It’s a sign of political power and delegation of responsibilities to the sheriff and security staff,” Munkelt said. “When designers go to construction, the sheriff has basically designed them. The state of the art at the time (that Schaber was built) was to put (inmates) in a box. I’m sure that’s how it came about.”
Sheriff’s offices today continue to exert great influence on courthouse security.
Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies, as well sheriff’s offices as in nearly all of California’s 58 counties — marshals in the case of two counties — supply courthouses’ bailiffs and courtroom security, according to the Judicial Council of California, which oversees the state’s superior courts.
That is as far as the Sheriff’s Office’s responsibility goes, said Lt. Rodney Grassmann, a Sacramento County sheriff’s spokesman. Legislation enacted 20 years ago, the Superior Court Law Enforcement Act of 2002, calls for the presiding judge of each court to contract with the county’s sheriff or marshal for “the necessary level of law enforcement services” subject to the court’s available funding.
The courthouse buildings, including the arraignment cells, are the responsibility of the Superior Court, Grassmann said.
But officials at the Judicial Council of California say sheriff’s offices play a much greater role, working closely with the court, courthouse designers and the design team’s security consultants, to define security operations, procedures, and staffing levels proposed for the new courthouse.
“The superior court relies on the sheriff to provide bailiffs and courtroom security, so they have a large amount of influence on how the courts are run and that leads to ongoing problems that concern myself and other criminal defense lawyers,” Munkelt said. He says the defense bar should also have some input into how courthouses are designed but says “the ability to influence those construction details is extremely limited.”
Today at Yolo Superior Court’s new Main Street courthouse in Woodland, a basement holding facility holds as many as 140 inmates, with secure elevators to transport those in custody to hearings and trial.
The chain gang’s parades through crowded hallways are over. New inmate docks enclosed in plexiglass are now standard equipment in the Woodland courthouse’s arraignment courts.
The old Yolo courthouse “was just not big enough to accommodate a growing county,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, said in 2015 upon the opening of the new five-story facility. “It’s not safe — we had chain gangs going up and down the hallways,” Reisig said. The new downtown courthouse, he said, was “modern, consolidated, high-tech.”
At Placer Superior Court’s Santucci Justice Center in Roseville, its Department 20 inside the South Placer Adult Correctional Facility opened in 2018. It replaced the tiny, cramped and now-closed Department 13 shoehorned inside Placer County Jail in Auburn. Department 20 features the plexiglass-enclosed arraignment dock standard now in newly built courthouses.
“Serious matters are heard in courtrooms. Whether you are here as someone who has been charged with a crime or as a victim or victim’s relative, legal proceedings need to be done in a dignified, safe and efficient manner,” then-Placer Superior Court Presiding Judge Alan V. Pineschi said upon Department 20’s debut. “Our new Department 20 will provide for that.”
Munkelt recalls the construction and opening of Department 20.
“Department 20 was built with a large plexiglass box” to seat inmates,” Munkelt said. “When they finished the courtroom and started using it, they said, ‘It’s all ready to go.’”
Only, Munkelt said, attorneys could not communicate through the glass with their clients.
“We said, ‘That’s illegal. If the attorney and defendant can’t speak to each other....” he said. “The defendant had to be out of the box, so we set up a method” to speak to them.
Munkelt successfully argued the right of defendants to have face-to-face jail visits with their attorneys before the state’s Third District Court of Appeal, a decision that has since been used to argue to provide similar access in new California courtrooms.
The appeals court in its 2015 decision, County of Nevada v. Superior Court, ruled that Nevada County Sheriff’s Department unconstitutionally barred attorneys and their clients from meeting in jail visiting rooms without glass partitions under the guise of safety and security concerns.
Several inmates wanted to restore the face-to-face “contact visits” in non-partitioned rooms as had been the practice for years at Nevada County’s Wayne Brown Correctional Facility.
The Nevada Sheriff’s Office and other law enforcement organizations across California opposed it on various grounds but appeals judges ruled in favor of defense attorneys and their clients.
“Any kind of barrier is a barrier to communication,” Munkelt told The Bee. “That decision was used in a number of new (courthouse) construction cases. That doesn’t mean the problem is solved.”
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