in summer 2021 was scuttled by the Delta variant. Trials resumed in January and remain underway.
The court system’s request for additional funding would allow it to rent additional temporary courtroom space and buy equipment that could be used to set up socially-distanced courtroom spaces. The state’s existing courtrooms are too small to allow for proper social distancing, he said. “Think of it like a football player. You put them out on the field, and you can scrimmage them as much as you want. But it’s different when you actually do a real game on Sundays. And the more experience they have in those games, you hope, the more they develop, and the better they get. It’s no different in this circumstance,” he said.
“It’s painful in that conversation to say, right now with these numbers, we have to protect people coming into our courthouses, and so let’s limit what we have,” he said.kept by the Alaska Justice Information Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage. That dropped to about 4,000 by May 2020, but by the end of November 2021 — the most recent data — the figure had climbed back to about 4,500.
Skidmore said the Department of Law changed its strategy to address the backlog. It declined to prosecute some less-serious offenses in favor of serious ones.