Cobb County Superior Court Chief Judge C. LaTain Kell is in the unusual position of having to walk back plans to expand his bench. It turns out that the judges in Marietta are not quite as busy as he thought.

With legislation funding a new judicial position for his court halfway through the Georgia General Assembly, Kell learned that the supporting evidence for the need was based on faulty math.

“We're shocked to say the least,” Kell said in an email Wednesday evening. “I was dumbfounded.”

Kell said Wednesday night and again in a phone interview Thursday that he has withdrawn his request to the Georgia Legislature for an additional judge because of the inaccuracy. The clerk's office had miscounted, leading to a faulty workload analysis by the statewide entity that oversees the business of the courts, Kell said.

The business of adding new superior court judges in Georgia requires levels of approval and that a workload analysis be done by the Georgia Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC). The numbers used in the analysis are supplied each year, around this time, by the clerks of court, who have separate departments from the judges and who are constitutional officers elected by the voters.

“This is what happened,” Cobb County Clerk of Superior Court Rebecca Keaton said Thursday. “By a fluke, we discovered that the numbers are off by maybe a third—inflated by 30 percent.”

Keaton said a longtime employee in her office had been generating the report for many years. That person left last year. This year, others had to gather the numbers. They found a discrepancy. It seemed the old reports had been based on the number of criminal charges rather than the number of individual defendants. So the case counts were higher than they should have been, Keaton said.

Keaton said she contacted the AOC and was directed to review past years' reports. Those were even more inflated, she said.

“The judges didn't do anything wrong,” Keaton said. “It's my office that made a mistake.”
But, Keaton added, “When you make a mistake, you correct it.”

Based on that flawed workload report, the Judicial Council of Georgia unanimously approved a request for an additional judge for the Cobb County Superior Court last August. The council is made up of 27 members who are judges of appellate and trial courts at all levels, plus a representative of the State Bar of Georgia. Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Harris Hines—a former Cobb County judge himself—chairs the council as part of his leadership responsibilities for the high court.

State Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta, and others sponsored a bill funding the new Cobb County judge. The Senate approved the bill last week and sent it on to the House of Representatives.

“We had been assured it was going to pass,” Kell said.

AOC Director Cynthia Clanton sent a notice Wednesday to the members of the Judicial Council of Georgia saying that, based on new numbers provided by Keaton, “it appears that the Cobb Judicial Circuit would no longer qualify for an additional judge, contrary to the recommendations of the Judicial Workload Assessment Committee.”

Clanton confirmed the decision to withdraw the request pending in the Legislature.

Clanton said her staff is working with Kell and Keaton “to ensure future caseload data is accurate prior to its submission for analysis.”

Both Kell and Keaton agreed the episode underscores the need for a case management system that different departments and courts statewide can use to access documents and data. Hines mentioned that plan in his State of the Judiciary address last month, telling the General Assembly that such a system is under development.