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Mecklenburg County District Attorney Peter Gilchrist got a letter, an angry one, from a bicyclist who was hospitalized with broken ribs and a collapsed lung after being hit by an 82-year-old driver who didn't stop.
Police caught up with the driver on that August day but didn't give him a ticket because he said he didn't realize he had hit anyone.
What police apparently didn't know is that the crash was the driver's sixth within less than eight years, including two others that caused injuries and occurred two days apart.
Even if the driver had been ticketed and appeared in district court, prosecutors likely wouldn't have known about the five previous accidents, Gilchrist said. They are handicapped by a computer system that makes it extraordinarily difficult, and often impossible, to find out about a defendant's arrests and convictions, or even if the defendant is on probation.
A new system to help is getting a test run in Wake County, and Gilchrist is eager for a rollout in Mecklenburg.
The new database gives prosecutors quick access to criminal records across the state, probation information, state prison files and soon will include county jails. It even sends an e-mail alert to prosecutors if a defendant in an upcoming case is arrested again.
The system, called the Criminal Justice Law Enforcement Automated Data Services, is a direct response to the 2008 murder of UNC Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson, a case involving two men on probation. Their offenses while on probation went unaddressed by probation officials partly because of a 1980s technology computer system that didn't alert them.
What remains unsettling with the new system is that, while it will bring prosecutors light years forward in technology, it offers the sort of computer capability that online retailers like Amazon.com deployed a decade ago. It's also uncertain whether Mecklenburg, the state's largest metropolitan area, is next in line to get the program.
"We need a better grasp of who we have standing before us," Gilchrist said. "We may be dealing with somebody in district court and have no idea what their criminal history looks like because ... (the computer system) made it extremely cumbersome to get a driving history or a criminal history on this individual."
A visit to the office of Patrick Latour, a drug prosecutor in the Wake County district attorney's office in Raleigh, provides a disturbing glimpse of the antiquated cyberworld labyrinth through which prosecutors must navigate each day.
To enter the current database, Latour flips through six computer screens of the old DOS-style white letters on a black background. He enters login information twice, and then he can get detailed information - but only about Wake County. For other counties, he has to log in to a different area.
"All I can get is what they're convicted of," Latour said. "I don't know if they're on probation, if they're in jail."
For jail information, he has to log into a database that includes only information from the Wake County jail. He types the defendant's last name, a comma, first name and no spaces. If he accidentally puts in a space, he gets nothing. He uses a series of commands that sound like a computer programming class circa 1982: F2, put a slash next to the listing he wants, then F11 for the next listing. The computer freezes. He typed something wrong. Log out. Start over.
Prosecutors handling major felonies such as homicide and rape must take the time to retrieve background information from the cumbersome system. They know the defendant's full rap sheet when they go into superior court.
But district court prosecutors, with 150 or more cases in a single morning, are retrieving as much data as possible on a laptop in the courtroom as they go. These are the cases that will most benefit from the new system.
In the aftermath of Carson's murder, the legislature approved the new data-sharing software ultimately to make available to law enforcement statewide information on warrants, arrests, prison conduct and other important details. A handful of Wake County officials are testing the program, built by Cary-based software giant SAS, and a countywide pilot program is expected to start by the end of June.
The estimated cost over three years is $27million, but the program only has funding for the $9.1million that will carry it through the end of this fiscal year, June30.
The prosecutor and, ultimately, a cop on the street can pop up a color-coded timeline of the defendant's entanglements with the courts - orange and yellow bars mark months in prison, for example.
"It's more intuitive and a quicker way to work," Latour said.
The struggles now lie in compiling the data. Records are being drawn from different counties and different levels of government that use inconsistent pieces of identifying information. Older records lack data that is now routine. The system's next step is to add all county jail information and, by June, driver's license records, juvenile court files and the state sex offender registry. A later phase will include sources such as concealed handgun permits. Officials must carefully navigate restrictions, such as confidentiality of juvenile records, along the way.
The accuracy and details are important because a mistake can put the wrong person in lockup or, conversely, set the wrong person free.
