John "Dan" Kemp, Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court stopped by the large courtroom at the Hempstead County Courthouse late this morning as part of a tour of circuits throughout Arkansas. He and Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) Director Marty Sullivan provided an update on infrastructure and other improvements to the Arkansas judiciary, including conversion to an electronic filing system, renovating and expanding the Justice Building in Little Rock.
An assemblage of formally dressed local officials, including County Judge Jerry Crane, Hope City Manager J.R. Wilson, Judge Joe Short of Division One of the Eighth Judicial Circuit North and retired Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Gunter sat in the courtroom’s benches when Judge Duncan Culpepper of Division 2 of the Eighth Judicial Circuit approached a podium set next to the counselors’ tables to introduce Chief Justice Kemp.
“He's known as Dan to most folks, but he has been the Chief Justice for eight years,” Culpepper said. “He will continue to serve. He was, I believe, for 30 years, a circuit judge, and he was a municipal or district judge for a number of years. And we're pleased to have him. He has been here once before, and we're glad that he's here today. “
“I appreciate the invitation to come down and visit with you,” Kemp said. “I've got two main reasons for making this tour of the districts, and this is the 22nd of the districts out of 28 that I have made in this tour. I’ll finish up seeing the rest of the districts between now and the end of the year, when I finish my term. But first and foremost, I'm going around for the purpose of thanking the judges and their staffs and the clerks and their staffs for the good work that y'all do.”
Kemp then spoke of how his experience as a judge in several courts has made clear that few people who have to go to court want to be there. “You're dealing with people that are probably dealing with one of the most stressful times of their lives whenever they're coming to court. It may be a divorce case, it may be a criminal charge, civil case, traffic ticket, but it's a difficult time, and the way you treat them is the way they feel about the court system,” he said.
He said the fact that 70 percent of respondents to a survey by the National Center for State Courts said they had been treated fairly in their state courts.
Kemp then told of seeing on his bookshelves on his first weeks at his Arkansas Supreme Court office a book that contained plans for how to respond to emergencies that could affect the court system, like tornados, fires, train wrecks and other incidents. “One of the things it mentioned also was a pandemic. When I saw that, I remembered reading about a pandemic of the Spanish Flu back in 1918 and I was thinking, ‘It's probably going to be pretty unlikely that we'd be facing a pandemic in 2020,” he said.
“Then when it hit, I had to issue some orders so we could continue the operation. And not only for the Supreme Court, but also the circuit courts and the district courts. [I thought] this is just going to last maybe three or four weeks, and we're talking about a year and a half before we kind of started getting back to normal.”
He said the pandemic revealed the need for changes to keep the court system going. In 2017, at his first State of the Judiciary Address, Kemp announced an effort to have all the state’s 75 counties using an electronic filing system by the end of his term in office, which will be the end of this year. He said the pandemic caused an acceleration of the process such that as of March 2023, the state’s courts are using an efiling system. “I think that's a very big benefit for the court system, for the judges, for the attorneys, the parties, the clerk's offices, and then just the general public itself, to have the ability to have that electronic filing process,” Kemp said.
Now the Administrative Office of the Courts is working to bring about a new case filing system. The AOC is building this system itself, Kemp continued. The first stage of this build, completed as of the beginning of 2024, was Court Connect, which Kemp said allows the searching of court records statewide.
Kemp then turned to the subject of specialty courts that include drug courts, juvenile drug courts, mental health courts and veterans’ treatment courts. After 17 years as a circuit court judge, Kemp said he was feeling like retiring from the bench. “I was getting a little burned out, and I was probably going to be retiring after 20 years if I kept just doing the same thing that I was doing because, as one of my deputy court clerks said to me, ‘We see a lot of people in court who repeat and repeat,’ and that's discouraging.”
But when he saw the success of a drug court he established in Independence County, Kemp said, “it kind of reinvigorated me, and I was able to establish another drug court in Cleveland County. I had five counties in my district at that time, Cleveland County in 2005 Stone County, 2007 and in 2009 we got a drug court for Izard and Fulton County, a combined drug court. So that covered all five of our counties in the Ninth Circuit.”
A million-dollar grant this year from funds the state received from a settlement with drug companies that manufactured opioids has been sent to state drug courts “for use to help people in rehabilitation and to get reestablished, which is a big benefit,” Kemp said. “We also provided opioid emergency kits for each courtroom in the state. So hopefully that's been delivered here. It's available here for this courtroom because unfortunately, some people come to court and before they get sentenced, they may have one last episode of drug use.”
Kemp also said grants would be made available soon for court security. The Security and Emergency Preparedness Committees over the past 12 years has dispensed $250,000 each year for grants courts have applied for to address these issues. County level communities of this sort have also been established. These have made requests of the state committee for metal detectors and detecting wands.
Two wings have been added to the Justice Building in Little Rock, Kemp said, allowing for more space for the Information Technology Department, whose personnel had previously been in locations all over the city. A visitor’s center with exhibits on Arkansas judiciary history and on the necessity of civility is also available for viewing. The center boasts a mock courtroom, Kemp said, so that children can get their pictures taken as young judges sitting at the bench. “Hopefully that would inspire them someday to become part of the illegal system or part of the judiciary system,” he said.
Here Kemp brought AOC Director Marty Sullivan to the podium. Sullivan said “I came to the justice building almost 23 years ago as an intern, and then never left, and it was a privilege and an honor to work my way up through that organization, which I think is the greatest public service organization in the state. We really do phenomenal work.”
Sullivan said when the pandemic struck, and he was named interim director of the AOC at the age of 40, he felt overwhelmed, but now believes eight years later he has been “the right person for the job.”
Sullivan recounted the much-increased use of the Zoom software for interactive video communications for court proceedings during the pandemic. “They actually gave us 250 Zoom licenses for no cost for the first year,” he said. He said that in trying to corral masks, thermal imaging thermometers, hand sanitizer and shields for the Arkansas courts, he reached out to a friend working with the administrative office of the courts in Arizona and got the name of the supplier the state ended up using.
Concerning the effort to convert the courts to an electronic filing system, Sullivan said he invited a vendor known for doing a good job on such things to demonstrate the product in Little Rock. “This vendor came in and did a great job in the Justice building in room 101, and it was amazing. We were closing down the meeting, and I said, ‘What's the ballpark price?’ And they literally gave me the price of a ballpark. They said ‘70 million and we'll take care of you.’” Sullivan said he then imagined what the legislature would say to such a request.
“I literally go back to my office and felt so overwhelmed,” Sullivan said. “And I remembered two books that I had read as an undergrad. One was called Reinventing Government, and the other one was Reframing Organizations. So I called our IT team together, and I said, ‘We're going to build our own system. No one knows the court system better than us. We're the subject matter experts. Let's build it.’”
This was the start of a four-year process, Sullivan said, that is continuing still. Despite initial hiccups and complaints, now “everybody seems to love the new system, and it's certainly a lot faster. It's definitely a lot more secure.” The next phase will be to extend the system to the district courts.
“We're simultaneously building the criminal and juvenile case management system for the circuit judges as well. So I see probably a three-year process of rollout, and then every record will be on search our court right now, if you go up to the Buffalo or some of your kids or grandkids go up to the Buffalo River and float, and they get a speeding ticket or something worse, you're not going to be able to see that because they're not on Court Connect. The idea here is having a truly unified case management system, so you can see all of that.” He said this would be especially helpful for attorneys in that they could do so much on one website.
Other states have taken notice of what Arkansas is doing, Sullivan said. About 22 states were represented at a recent conference called Coding For Justice that was hosted in the Justice Building in Little Rock.
Regarding the state’s specialty courts, Sullivan said he had travelled around to see graduation ceremonies for those affected by drug addiction. “It's really inspired me to see courts being used as a vehicle to help people instead of punish people,” he said.
Mentioning that he had been pleased to present Judge Culpepper with a check for use in the county’s drug court system, Sullivan said more funds may be forthcoming for security upgrades to local courts since the legislature has increased the amount of funds available to half a million dollars a year. The local courts have received $100,000 since the program began in 2010, Sullivan said.
Sullivan explained that while there had been 140 district judges in the state when his tenure as AOC director began, now there are 70. “So we're closing down a lot of the part time positions,” he said. “There was a lot of potential for conflict of interest. Essentially, we had a lawyer who was a prosecutor, or maybe had a law practice, who was having a district judgeship where he held court once a quarter, maybe once a month in some parts of the state. So having a true professional district judge system, I think, is really phenomenal. It took a lot of years to get here, but as of January 1st, we're finished.”
About the new wings of the Justice Building, Sullivan said the building of these did not take any new taxpayer funding and were made possible by the refinancing of a bond issue. The exhibits at the visitor’s center were inspired by Sullivan seeing what other state courts had in their buildings. He urged people to come tour the 1958 building, which has also been improved by a new roof.
“There are over 1,300,000 cases in Arkansas courts each year. That's by far more than all the federal court system combined. So you do a fantastic job, and we're here to support you,” Sullivan said in closing.
Justice Kemp took the podium briefly to thank all attendees and all court staff. Judge Culpepper, taking the podium, then recognized the presence of Judge Short, current Hope police chief Kim Tomlin and former police chief and now city manager J.R. Wilson at the event.
