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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Contact:
Marti
Maxwell, Superior Court Administrator, 360-786-5560
Video
Arraignment Begins For
Thurston
County
Superior Court
OLYMPIA
– Arraignments for certain cases in Thurston County Superior Court will now
be done via a video system between the county jail and the court.
The new system went into effect after successful trials last week.
Two courtrooms in Building Two of the main county
courthouse campus are now equipped to handle the video appearance cases and
one inmate/attorney booth has been set up in the jail.
Total cost for the project was less than $130,000.
Superior Court Administrator Marti Maxwell says
all Superior Court Judges will be able to use the system, but it is primarily
designed for the Criminal Presiding Judge.
She says demand for the video arraignment is quite high.
“For January through June of this year, we had 1,000 cases which
could have utilized video arraignment. That
averages out to about 166 cases a month and we expect that level of service to
continue through the rest of this year.”
Preliminary court appearances, the kind of cases
that would utilitize the video system, start at 3 o’clock each Monday and
3:30 the other four workdays of most weeks.
Maxwell says the video arraignment system is one
more step in increasing security at the courthouse.
“By using video, inmates are not transported from the jail to a
courtroom. They remain in the jail
and are able to confer with their attorneys and appear before a judge, all on
closed circuit television. That
means more than 150 times a month that inmates will remain in lock-up instead
of moving through the courthouse complex.”
Video arraignment is one of many steps toward
increased security in the wake of an inmate attack on a corrections officer
that happened in a courthouse elevator last March.
The suspect in that attack has since been convicted and sentenced to
life in prison.
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