Council 6-23-2026 [67:13-72:13]

It's an open plea that's equivalent to going to a jury trial. And then a year from now, they can come in and request a modification. And then the judge can be like, okay, nobody's mad anymore. We'll go out and get them out of prison 10 years earlier. I'm a little bit of a control freak when it comes to that. Does that answer the questioner? Okay, try not to be a remnant politician up here on this. Specific formula recipe you're using somehow. So we would like to do more trials. The problem with trials is that they really bogged the system down. I think it would probably be a fair assertion in my mind, whether it's true or not, that 98 to 99% of the cases nationwide are going to be flooded out. And if you think about it here, for example, we've got two criminal judges, and we've got the circuit. They're judges. They don't traditionally handle criminal cases. So your average trial is going to be at the minimum three days realistically. An average trial is probably five days. You can get into a complex trial through three weeks. And that whole court shuts down for that. My workload still complies with why I'm doing a trial. And then come back and play catch up with that. And then the same way with the judge on that as well. So our system's not really set up to come in and do all these elaborate trials. I find ourselves playing out in our really good cases. And then we usually go to trial in the cases that are really at the end. We kind of, for the lack of a better expression down the cross for the cases that probably, you know, don't have a great shot of winning. And when you get into your victim cases, it's not about winning or losing. It's about whether or not the victim gets hurt. And a lot of the child in the last case is, for example, when they get a little bit older and there's a delayed recording on it, it's important for us that sometimes you just have a trial just so they can tell their side of the story and go on and get that healing. Or as if we just don't do anything. I often tell people, if you look for a prosecutor, it's got a 100% win trial rate, you've got the worst prosecutor I've ever met because they're only trying cases that they decide that they're going to try. And Tim Sled often says that the prosecutor can decide whether to try. So it's not he's right. You know, if I don't want to try a case, I can make it go away. We definitely try the cases that we have to, but not always on the ones that are easy and that we should. We give them plenty of easy ones up. But, you know, I think things are going well. Our primary is down. And I think the way that we're going about things is this working people are working more in the community. Two years ago, I got up here and I said I don't know how to quantify this, but our income tax rate ought to be going up through the roof because of the amount of people that I'm putting back to work with the programs I've gotten in place. And the next month, we were in a meeting in the State Board of the Counsel, he was up here and said, hey, for some reason, you guys have played the 400,000 more income tax that you ever had before. So, I can't tell you that I did that, but I kind of like to take credit for it after I said that. So, you know, there's different ways to go about new things, but I definitely don't think we're the most tryingest people. And it would be hard, too, because myself and my chief deputy are probably the most experienced in that area, and we are the most experienced in that area. I don't feel like I'm a hotshot trial attorney by any means, but when you have deputy prosecutors that as soon as we get them trained, they go in and go someplace else and make more money. We never have anybody that we can trust to take trials on. And once again, if I'm following all the charges, reviewing all the cases, and doing all this other stuff, and then I'm also having a lot of trust, and the office is going to shut down and it's not going to run itself. So, until we get in a situation where we can afford to have senior trial deputy that we can hire on a pay a little bit more money, and have that person say, hey, you're our guy to go to a trials, you know, then we can maybe start seeing a little bit more trials. But we're in a little bit of a survival mode when it comes to that. We'll definitely go to trial, but we also try to be reasonable and avoid a trial if it'll possible. I was talking to Judge Klein before the meeting started. What about the DLC hold? I mean, it's a shared question on that. Is there no way to speed them? I know Greg can't, but... No, there was a statute, and I'm pretty sure it got changed because of Bob Klein, but there used to be a statute where you can do an order, and I think within five days we're supposed to pick it up. It's just not the way it works. You've got the law, you've got practicality, and I mean, I think the good thing is, is that once we get that certification, it's been $37.50 ever since I was a rookie police officer, 26 years ago, I don't know that it's changed, hasn't it, Sheriff? Is it like $40 or something? All right, so, you know, the strategic plan is a prosecutor. Not so much now, but the last several years,