Criminal defense attorney Joshua Schiffer is 'frightened' about the future of his Fulton County cases because a cybersecurity incident is making it difficult things done in a court that's already the busiest in the state.
"Holding back on disposition of a few cases now and a few cases tomorrow, that creates bigger calendars in the future, calendars in the future that were already big," he said. "We can't do our jobs. Neither can the courts... when we slow down a system as large as ours, the effects just reverberate through the rest of the system."
He said he is concerned there weren't more redundancies in place to begin with.
"We are stuck in quicksand because of our immense reliance on the automated paperless system that's been developed, ostensibly to increase systemwide efficiencies," he said. "When we can't represent our clients by making requests, the state can't respond to them. That grinds our entire system to a halt."
He said his clients are worried, too. They're struggling to look up cases and information online.
"Clients are terrified and scared. The criminal justice system is already deeply intimidating, and now they're being told by everyone [that] it's a little bit more broken and slower than normal," Schiffer said. "That's a really frightening thing when you're talking about someone locked up in Fulton County Jail — a jail that has a troubled history of working in the best of times."
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