Case Explained: Issue Spotlight: How Arkansas Supreme Court candidates want to improve state courts – Legal Perspective

More than 180,000 cases were filed in Arkansas circuit and appeals courts last year — from civil actions to divorces to criminal charges. This sprawling legal system is overseen by the Arkansas Supreme Court, which oversees the administration of the lower courts.

The two candidates for the only contested Supreme Court seat on the March 3 ballot, Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Bronni and private attorney John Adams, both have areas of the state’s legal system they would like to see improved.

Here’s what the two say about how they’d like to improve the state’s court system:

Bronni: Improve access to legal system

Bronni said one of his priorities would be improving access to the justice system by continuing to roll out digital court records systems and addressing Arkansas’ legal deserts.

“We need to do a better job of providing legal services in rural and small town parts of our state. In many counties, there are no lawyers,” Bronni said.

Arkansas has one of the worst attorney-to-population ratios in the country, according to a 2020 report from the American Bar Association, with only 2.1 licensed attorneys per 1,000 residents. The report said eight counties had less than five attorneys, and another 13 counties had between six and ten.

Nationally, wages for attorneys haven’t kept pace with inflation since 2010, according to the association, and lawyers are also providing fewer free legal services — called pro bono work — than they used to. Several metro areas in Arkansas ranked near the bottom for average attorney wages.

“The (Arkansas Supreme) Court really needs to do a better job of encouraging people to serve those communities,” Bronni said. “And some of that is encouraging people to do pro bono work in rural areas, providing free legal clinics for folks who need help writing a will, settling a property dispute, doing domestic stuff, you know, solving practical problems for people on the ground.”

Adams: Court fees and funding

Adams said one of his priorities is how courts are funded. He wants to draw more attention to the fees courts in Arkansas impose on those he said were already struggling to get by.

Court fees, especially on those convicted of a crime, is not a new issue in Arkansas. A 2021 state law created a task force to examine court-imposed fees and fines, and a subcommittee of the task force found the payments “frequently overwhelms defendants and their financial ability to pay,” making it harder to reintegrate into society after release.

The subcommittee findings, included in the task force’s final report in 2022, said these fees fund large parts of the state’s justice system. The subcommittee’s members recommended the Legislature find new sources of court funding to reduce the burden on those struggling to pay.

Adams said his experience representing people with large fines pro bono would help bring a new perspective to the court on court funding matters.

He said the state constitution and laws require state courts to take into account the ability of someone to pay the fines and fees that are set — but in practice, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes its an issue of record-keeping, he said, especially in district courts.

“The court really needs to, through its rule making and leadership, ensure that there are no debtors prisons in Arkansas,” he said. “This wouldn’t be an unusual thing for the court to provide process and structure for.”