District court judge details case trends, probation monitoring and new systems

Chief Judge Craig Bunce presented the 2024 annual report for the district courts that serve Ottawa County, telling commissioners the courts moved off an aging AS/400 system to a modern case-management platform while continuing to manage rising workload. "We said goodbye to our beloved AS 400," Bunce said, and added the new system provides statewide reporting benefits though it has required rebuilding local integrations.

Bunce summarized caseload and probation work: he said one general caseload measure rose about 23% over a five-year window, probation officers began supervising about 980 additional individuals during 2024, and staff completed 1,335 pre-sentence investigations. He also listed monitoring activity: probation collected and analyzed 54,691 urine samples, continuous-alcohol-monitor (CAM) units produced 906,104 separate readings, and breath-alcohol tests totaled about 47,050 in the year. Bunce described GPS monitoring as another large data source and cautioned that closer monitoring can create additional docket work for bond violations. "While this closer monitoring can promote compliance and lead to safer communities, it also can result in higher reporting of bond violations," he said.

Bunce said the court continues to run multiple treatment courts and that outcomes for those programs exceed statewide averages. Commissioners asked about the role of artificial intelligence in filings; Bunce said he has seen AI-generated pleadings arrive in court and that judges must check citations and accuracy rather than assume a filing is correct. "AI is a great tool, but AI also tries to just put in what it thinks it needs to put in based on this large database, and sometimes it's not accurate," he said. The judge closed by asking commissioners to keep the human impact of court decisions in mind as they review numbers and budgets.