Chief justice hails state’s backload of cases returning to pre-pandemic levels

The leader of the state’s court system said Monday that the pending caseload is back to where it was before the pandemic broke out in 2020 and slowed judicial proceedings to a trickle.

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, whose duties include running the state’s highest court and the judicial branch across 87 counties and the appellate courts, announced the achievement and called it “an incredible accomplishment” in erasing the backlog of nearly 14,000 cases tied to COVID-19.

As COVID-19 surged in Minnesota in early 2020, both state and federal courts were forced to slow down, with many trials and other court proceedings delayed indefinitely or rescheduled. Some cases moved ahead through video conferencing in an effort to keep people apart and less vulnerable to infection.

By early 2021, the judicial branch estimated that more than 190,000 state court cases had been influenced by the pandemic.

Hudson’s announcement noted that “eliminating the pandemic backlog of felony and gross misdemeanor cases has been the Judicial Branch’s highest priority since the Judicial Council adopted the backlog reduction goal in June 2021.”

The state court system used federal and pandemic relief funding to pay for various backlog-reduction tactics, among them increasing use of senior judges to take on cases and expanding criminal court calendars.

“The result of all of those efforts has been a steady reduction in the pandemic backlog over the past three years,” Hudson’s announcement continued, “culminating in the exciting news that we have finally achieved this important and historic milestone.”

Hudson pointed to elsewhere in the country, where “there are still many state and local court systems mired in case backlogs and delays stemming from the pandemic.”

According to the Minnesota Judicial Branch: Just as the pandemic was taking off in earnest, the pending caseload statewide was 35,682. When the backlog-reduction goal took effect in November 2021, the pending caseload was 49,313. As of Monday, the state caseload stood at 35,636.

At Hennepin County District Court, where more cases are handled than anywhere else in the state, the backlog has fallen by 87% in the same time period from 2,688 to 339, a District Court official said.