Copyright postandcourier
The need for a lawyer-only court seems self-evident: Magistrates can put you in jail for 30 days or make you pay a $7,500 civil judgment. They decide whether most suspects can pay bail or must wait in jail for trial. They preside over traffic cases and decide whether police can search your home. Some people still cling to Justice Toal’s idea of magistrates presiding over a commonsense, every-man’s court, where nobody needs to hire a lawyer; those holding this view include magistrates who insist they need to know the people who appear before them, which is a perfect recipe for home cooking, or worse. But our laws for years have been getting more complicated, and with that the need to have those laws interpreted and applied by people who are trained in the law; that's why about a quarter of S.C. magistrates already are lawyers. Most people recognize the need, even if they aren’t ready to say it out loud. Indeed, Justice Kittredge isn’t talking a lot about why we need to move gradually toward an all-lawyer magistrate court. Instead, he focuses on the problems that have to be overcome to get there, which sounds like a strange way to advocate for reform — if you’re not familiar with our Legislature, and with the practical obstacles to a quick transition. Aside from any philosophical or less-honorable concerns, the problems come down to money and workforce. South Carolina's constitution requires a unified judicial system, which means among other things that judges’ pay is supposed to be standardized across the state. We have that in the Family and Circuit courts, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, where there are fewer judges and the Legislature pays them. But magistrates are still paid by the counties, because that’s how we’ve always done it and because 300 more judges on the state payroll would not be an unnoticed expense.
