AS LONG AS New Hampshire legislators are going to devote a fair amount of energy this session to judicial reform, they might also devote a little time to seeing what they can do to improve court operations. We mean that little time literally, because it shouldn’t be hard to figure out: The court system is in desperate need of some cash to make technological improvements.

According to a Concord Monitor story, the New Hampshire court system isn’t merely having a hard time keeping technological pace. In some regards, courts are moving backwards. Inadequate funding is forcing them to implement systems that are inferior to the ones they replace. This isn’t just making life difficult for those who work in the courts, it is potentially undermining the courts’ ability to deliver justice. That’s intolerable.

The advantages of computerization may often be overblown, but it’s hard to exaggerate the improvements offered by the digital age to a system that must keep track of huge amounts of information.

An up-to-date system not only makes it easier for all parties and the public to get access to active documents and old files, it can also change the way trials are conducted. Evidence and exhibits can be electronically stored, retrieved and displayed during trial, speeding up proceedings by eliminating hand-to-hand passing of documents. Videoconferencing can pull in testimony from out-of-state witnesses, video machines allow for the quick recall and review of testimony, and computerized reporting enables the immediate transcription of trial proceedings.

Updating the court system will make it more efficient, which can only save the state money over the long run. That heightened efficiency would also allow the court system to handle more cases in a timely fashion, a crucial consideration for a system with a growing backlog.

So how close is the New Hampshire court system to taking advantage of this useful new technology? For the most, part, computers in New Hampshire courts are still DOS-based. On an electronic timeline, that would place the courts’ technology somewhere between the disappearance of Pong and the advent of the Internet.

More troubling, inadequate funds have forced courts to turn to clunky technology when they can’t afford human beings who can do the work better. Because of an ongoing budget squeeze, the number of court stenographers available to New Hampshire courts has dropped from 27 to 19 over the last decade. Courts that don’t have stenographers rely on audio and video machines to record proceedings.

Those machines occasionally malfunction. Even when they work properly, they cannot pick up mumbled testimony or they inadvertently capture conversations that are supposed to be off the record. …Something that isn’t put in the record is forever lost, potentially influencing the fate of an appeal.

In some ways, this is a quintessential New Hampshire story. The consequences of the nickel-and-diming that passes for a budget process in the state are rarely immediately apparent. When they do surface, it’s clear that the little money that the state saved in the short run cost it more over the long haul. But even after it becomes indisputable that spending a little more money would make a lot of sense—the New Hampshire Bar Association says the court system’s computer system can be updated for $3.4 million over several years [quoting a Feb. 9 Bar News article]—that particular demand must compete with other pressing needs that also have been shortchanged. Lawmakers are forced to choose between, say, the requests of an agency that doesn’t want to cut back on health insurance for children and a court system that doesn’t wish to have its creaky infrastructure affect the outcome of cases. It’s an ugly choice.

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