Schuylkill County district judges are urging County officials to find a solution to a grueling on-call arraignment system, which they say is exacerbating workloads as the roster of active magistrates shrinks.
Judge Edward Tarantelli, who serves at the District Court in Frackville, brought the judges’ concerns to the county Prison Board on Wednesday.
He tells The Canary that of eight similarly sized Pennsylvania counties, Schuylkill is the only one that still processes off-hours arraignments on an on-demand basis.
Tarantelli says the preferred solution is the use of holding orders, which would allow police to hold suspects and process all off-hours arraignments during a single, consolidated block of time. However, Schuylkill County currently lacks a secure facility to hold suspects awaiting those hearings.
Without a holding facility, the on-call judge is summoned immediately when police require an off-hours arraignment. A busy night can result in multiple trips to the court – early in the evening, late at night, and overnight – for hearings that can take upwards of an hour or longer. The next morning, the on-call judge is still expected to report to their office to manage a regular daytime docket.
That dynamic “dramatically changes the workload,” Tarantelli tells The Canary.
The frequency of those on-call shifts has increased significantly over the past year. Historically, a rotation of seven magisterial district judges covered the off-hours shifts, requiring each to be on call about once every two months.
Following the retirement of David Plachko in Port Carbon and the resignation of Andrew Serina, who was elected to the Court of Common Pleas, the active roster has dropped to five. With Judge James Reiley occasionally out of the office this year, the rotation has sometimes fallen to four, forcing the remaining judges to cover on-call shifts approximately once a month.
Prison Board Chairman Boots Hetherington acknowledged the judges’ concerns Wednesday, noting the county is exploring both short- and long-term options for a holding facility.
A short-term fix to hold suspects at the Schuylkill County Prison was recently ruled out. Hetherington said county officials toured the prison with an engineer and determined using it as an arraignment holding site was not feasible.
“We get it. We’re trying to come up with some kind of solution,” Hetherington said.
A long-term solution favored by county officials involves establishing a central booking location. Hetherington pointed to Pottsville’s potential acquisition of the Krasno, Krasno & Onwudinjo law office behind City Hall, which the city hopes to partially convert into a new police headquarters. If the city leases space in that building, there were hints that it could serve as a central booking site, though Hetherington cautioned, “That’s not a short-term solution.”
Following his public comments to the Prison Board, Tarantelli requested a private meeting with the County Commissioners to discuss the matter further. He later told The Canary that the commissioners were “very attentive to our concerns” during the closed-door session.
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