The public defender and civil rights activists are in an uproar over the revival of the seldom-used filings; the district attorney’s office says non-appearances for serious crimes triggered t…
SAN JOSE — Earlier this year, line-level public defenders in Santa Clara County started noticing an unexpected trend: Criminal defendants were suddenly getting new charges added to their existing charges — specifically for not showing up to court.
But the District Attorney’s Office says the new charges have become necessary to uphold accountability for people charged with serious crimes who willfully defy the court system. The issue caught the attention of public defenders and court observers, when starting in August they saw a charge they rarely encountered instead show up multiple times a week, peaking to about a dozen in a week that month. Then after a few weeks, the charges subsided again, with no clear inflection point other than prosecutors’ empirical observation of court scofflaws trending upward.
After O’Neal and a coalition of community and civil-rights groups — along with this news organization — asked prosecutors to explain the uptick in charges citing Penal Code 1320 — willful failure to appear — District Attorney Jeff Rosen wrote them a letter in October describing “a startling backlog of cases which is exacerbated by some criminal defendants who willfully and repeatedly refuse to come to court.
“Failures to appear in court constitute a drain of precious resources and exacerbate the already substantial delays and backlogs caused by Covid as our court system and community recover,” Rosen wrote. “It is corrupting when some people set themselves above the law and simply decide they won’t comply with a judge’s order to appear in court.”
Yuen said one common issue is that when it comes to unhoused defendants, there’s often no proof that they ever got written notice of their court appearances, given their inability to reliably receive mail. That challenge is often worsened by the presence of mental illness and substance abuse that contribute to their instability.O’Neal also questioned the viability of PC 1320 charges once they face legal scrutiny: “It’s very hard to prove someone intentionally didn’t come to court.
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