AGO sides with DPS in new policy on court summons

The Attorney General’s Office justified the Department of Public Safety’s decision to stop serving court processes except for criminal summons and arrest warrants, saying that it is consistent with the department’s statutory duties not only to assist the courts but also to save taxpayers’ money.

But Attorney General Pamela Brown came up with a proposal on how the CNMI courts could facilitate the service of processes despite limited DPS assistance brought on by the police department’s manpower shortage and funding woes.

Superior Court presiding judge Robert Naraja earlier said that the law mandates the DPS to assist the courts in serving its processes, regardless of their nature. Court processes are documents that are served to parties in court cases to notify them of the proceedings.

Naraja made the statement in an interview after the police department told the judge that it would only accept and process penal summons, arrest warrants, and bench warrants in criminal cases effective May 8.

The department said it could no longer keep up with the high number of court processes due to manpower shortage. Over a month ago, the DPS disclosed that court processes that remain unserved had already reached more than 5,000, with only two policemen tasked to do the work. About 3,000 processes pertain to traffic cases, most of them bench warrants.

“Currently, DPS spends $90,654 per year for overtime, personnel, equipment, and even gas for automobiles to serve the various summons and warrants for the court. While we appreciate the court’s assistance to help DPS offset some costs, we believe that we need to make some basic changes to the approach taken for summons and warrants,” Brown and DPS commissioner Santiago Tudela said in a June 3 letter to Naraja.

While Brown and Tudela said that the DPS would continue to serve criminal bench warrants, they proposed that traffic bench warrants should be an exception. Traffic bench warrants comprise the bulk of criminal warrants, with those pending reaching some 245 from the current year alone.

“We would like to follow the practice of other jurisdictions and serve the warrants only if an officer stops an individual who has one outstanding,” Brown and Tudela said.

They said, though, that the DPS would get the court’s assistance by providing a copy of its database to the police department and allowing the latter to update the database weekly.

Like most jurisdictions in the United States, the CNMI courts should also serve jury summons to prospective jurors by mail, they added.

“We do not believe that the court needs DPS’ assistance with respect to civil matters. Individuals may hire process servers to serve civil documents and, if the court wishes to assist parties, it can use its marshals to do so,” they said.

The DPS’ summons and warrant office only has a staff of three, including officer-in-charge Ronald Dela Cruz, but one of them has been on-leave for some time due to medical reasons. Dela Cruz said he needs about three more additional staff to carry out the job effectively.

Recently, Dela Cruz said more than 6,000 court processes had reached his office since 2004, but only about a thousand of them had successfully been served. He had said that about 2,000 unserved processes pertain to civil and small claims cases.