TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – The Chairman of the Leon County Commission called an emergency meeting for Monday, after a switch to a new database went haywire.
The database includes records for criminal and civil court cases and is used by the Clerk, State Attorney, Public Defender and the Leon County Sheriff’s office.
Leon County Administrator Vincent Long said the county was upgrading components of its 30-year-old jail management system, when it experienced “substantial operational disruption during the migration to its new system.”
The botched transition has forced jail and court personnel to resort to paper copies and there are reports of improper documents, duplicate charges and even “ghost cases” in the system.
State Attorney Jack Campbell said the system swap has resulted in more than a thousand errors.
“It re-opened cases. It closed cases. It filed new cases,” Campbell said. “Some people didn’t know that they were even impacted, but others spent more days in jail than they should have. That’s a big deal.”
Campbell said in one case, the defendant stayed in jail six days longer than they should have.
“We’ve got to put the fire out,” Campbell said. “It’s taking a lot of effort to go in and decide what is an error and what is real.”
A Leon County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said they are not aware of anyone who has been improperly released from jail because of the problem, but they also could not specify how many cases or people have been impacted by it.
“We are literally printing out documents to distribute to the judge, to the attorneys and everyone involved to ensure that due process happens as efficiently as we can considering the circumstances,” LCSO’s Shonda Knight said.
An emergency meeting of the Leon County Commission is now scheduled for Monday at 6 p.m. Commission Chair Christian Caban says he’ll propose bringing in a new vendor to handle integration of the new system.
“We’re going to inform the public what’s happened, what’s occurred, what we’re doing to fix it,” Commissioner Caban said. “I’ve completely lost trust in our existing vendor. This is their job. We hired them on behalf of our taxpayers to make sure these issues don’t happen. And it’s completely failing.”
“We will continue taking the necessary actions until we restore the full operability of the system and make sure that all of our judicial partners are confident in its reliability,” Leon County Administrator Vince Long said in a statement released Friday.
State Attorney Jack Campbell says changes could come as soon as this weekend, but they will likely have to continue fixing mistakes caused by the new system.
“We’re turning the old system back on and turning off the new one. I have every expectation that we’ll be back to reliable on Monday,” Campbell said.
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