As the District faces a continuing surge in homicides, Mayor Muriel Bowser and other D.C. officials have placed some blame for the increase at the feet of the D.C. Superior Court.

"There is a lag in [criminal] case processing that is creating its own public safety crisis in Washington, DC," Bowser wrote in a letter to the public last week. "In practical terms, what does this lag ... mean for our community? It means more people are arrested and then immediately released."

She reiterated those criticisms in a public safety press conference on Wednesday, citing the 10,199 criminal cases pending in D.C. Superior Court in June 2021, compared to 5,707 pending criminal cases in January 2020. (The federal government is largely in control of D.C.'s justice system and manages the courts, meaning that Bowser has no say in how they're run.)

"Cases are up. Pretrial release date times are also up. The average length of stay at D.C. jail is up and the number of indictments are down," Bowser said. "No matter how you look at it, it reflects that the system isn't working full capacity and the administration of justice is delayed for victims, defendants, and the whole city."

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The mayor's statements prompted a rare response from D.C. Superior Court Chief Justice Anita Josey-Herring, who defended the court's operations and provided her own set of data.

In an interview with DCist/WAMU, Josey-Herring emphasized that D.C. Superior Court never shut down during the pandemic, even though they've had to do their work differently.

"Most of our court proceedings occur virtually," she says. "Judges are hearing cases and have disposed of a number of cases the whole time that the pandemic has existed. We do have in-court operations, or in-person operations, in some critical matters in the criminal division and have started jury trials in the spring of this year."

D.C. Superior Court Associate Judge Juliet McKenna, who presides over the criminal division, says that the criminal division has dealt with more than 7,000 cases over the past 15 months through diversion agreements, trials, and more, and that the numbers continue to ramp up.

She tells DCist/WAMU that the long pause on jury trials didn't impact most cases because "the overwhelming majority of cases in the criminal division are not on a trial track, will never proceed forward to trial. That's always been the case both in Superior Court and in courthouses all across the country."

Josey-Herring says she took the unusual step of responding to Bowser's claims because "it would be unfortunate for the public to think that, in fact, we have closed the doors in our operations because that is not the case. People have been really inventive, working hard and very creatively to make sure that our cases proceed." She says that by September, the court expects that all criminal division judges will be fully present in the courthouse "to make sure that we can tackle our pending caseload."

Still, it's true that local courts are facing a backlog due to pandemic-related restrictions, much like courts across the country. That has a wide variety of effects, including an increase in the number of people being held pretrial or on supervised release.

But Misty Thomas, the executive director of the Council for Court Excellence, says the data presented by the mayor doesn't show whether there's a direct link between the backlog and violent crime.

The data doesn't "actually tell us anything particularly specific about whether the courts have altered their procedures or judges have altered their decision-making during the pandemic in a way that can show us a connection to the incidence of serious or violent crime in our community," says Thomas. For example, she asks, how many of the upwards of 10,000 pending cases represent violent crimes?

Asked that question on Wednesday, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee said that approximately 500 of the 10,000 cases are "felony onecases that run the gamut of all things that are not good for people and community." (Felony one cases refer to the most serious crimes.)

There's also the matter of D.C.'s homicide rate before the pandemic-related backlog in cases. While homicides reached a 15-year high in 2020, gun violence and killings in the city have been ticking upward since 2018. With 113 homicides so far in 2021, D.C. is on track to see even more murders than in 2020. That increase in homicides tracks with nationwide trends, including in suburban and rural areas.

"These tragedies have been warranting our community concern, grieving, study, and some really good, coordinated strategic action for several years," says Thomas. "It's clearly far too simplistic to blame courts with the information we have now for rises in tragic gun crimes, just as it would be too simplistic to blame the police or any other particular element of our criminal legal system. To me, the takeaway is they all need to work together."

Many advocates in D.C., meanwhile, have argued that the key to reducing gun violence lies outside the criminal justice system altogether. Some of those solutions, like funding for families in crisis and intervention workers, are in next year's proposed budget.

The Bowser administration's critique of the courts system wasn't limited to the courts themselves. Bowser and Contee said that more than 2,000 cases are waiting for the U.S. Attorney's Office of D.C. to bring charges.

In a statement, USAO of D.C. spokesperson Bill Miller said that the office has continued to charge cases during the pandemic, and that grand juries are now meeting five days each week.

"We began presenting cases before grand juries in October 2020, months before vaccines were widely available. From the outset of the pandemic, we have done everything we can, consistent with both CDC and District public health guidance, to ensure serious felony cases remain prioritized in the criminal justice system," Miller said. "The U.S. Attorney's Office is committed to transitioning back to a full court schedule as soon as possible."

Bowser also assigned some blame to the D.C. Council on Wednesday, for declining to fund the police budget at the levels she requested in 2020. The department only hired 42 officers this year, a drastic reduction from its usual 250, Bowser said.

She announced Wednesday that she would request $11 million in funding to hire an additional 20 police officers in 2021 and 150 more in 2022. Her initial budget proposal to the D.C. Council actually called for less funding for the police department in the next fiscal year, compared to last year. The new request will come before the D.C. Council on Tuesday.

There's at least one thing that the Bowser administration and chief judge agree on: they want Congress to act quickly to fill the 12 judicial seats that are currently vacant, and have been empty since before the pandemic.

"It's a really hard time for us, and it was even before COVID hit," says Josey-Herring. "It is fair to say we are in pretty desperate need of having the additional judges, particularly to help us as we work to handle the pending cases that we have in our court system."

This story is from DCist.com, the local news website of WAMU.