60 Time March 15/March 22, 2021
On march 28, 2020, Janie marshall lOsT her
footing and stumbled near another woman while
both were being treated for non-COVID-19 ailments
at a Brooklyn hospital. With the pandemic raging,
an encounter that days earlier might have ended in
a friendly apology or a cluck of sympathy quickly
turned ugly. Authorities say the other woman, Cas-
sandra Lundy, shoved Marshall, 86, for having “got
into [Lundy’s] space” and violating new social-
distancing orders aimed at containing the virus.
Marshall—who had dementia and was in the hos-
pital for stomach issues—fell to the ground, hit her
head and later died.
The city’s medical examiner ruled the death a ho-
micide, and Lundy, now 33, was charged with man-
slaughter and assault. It was the city’s first homicide
associated with COVID-19, and, nearly a year later,
one more piece of evidence that the U.S. system of
justice can be counted a casualty of the virus. Among
its many impacts—none of them good—closed court-
houses and canceled jury trials mean that neither
victims nor defendants can be assured of attending
their trials in person, much less the anxious fami-
lies of those involved. And there’s no telling when
that will change.
“Every time I think about my aunt, I well up in
tears,” says Marshall’s niece, Eleanor Leonard, 74. “I
want this over. And I won’t have peace, and I don’t
think my aunt has peace in her grave, until this
woman is convicted.”NationS L O W
MOTIONS
Criminal court cases are backloggednationwide because of COVID-19, leavingvictims and defendants adriftBY MELISSA CHAN
Since cOViD-19 waS DeclareD a national emer-
gency in March 2020, every state and Washing-
ton, D.C., have canceled or scaled back in-person
criminal court proceedings. The snarled justice sys-
tem has left hundreds of thousands of families wait-
ing for trials and other resolutions while creating a
cascade of civil rights issues for the accused. More de-
fendants, especially those with health problems, are
striking plea deals to avoid sitting in virus- infested
jails while awaiting their day in court, defense attor-
neys say. And virtual courts are exposing the disad-
vantages of the poor, who are less likely to have Inter-
net service, as a staggering number of new criminal
cases stack up. New York City alone is bogged down
with about 49,000 pending criminal court cases, and
Maine has 22,000, officials say. Florida’s court system
says it needs $12.5 million to crawl out from beneath
a mountain of more than 1.1 million stalled cases.
California’s courts were recently given $25 million
by the state’s judicial council to do the same.
In San Antonio, a moratorium on in-person crim-
inal jury trials has extended the pileup of indicted
pending felony cases to roughly 9,500—a nearly 67%
increase since March 2020, according to Ron Rangel,
a criminal district court judge in Bexar County, Texas.
There, the family of slain firefighter Scott Deem is
growing weary in anticipation of a court date that
never seems to come. Deem, 31, died battling an
arson fire in a gym on May 18, 2017, authorities say.
While a grand jury indicted the gym’s owner, EmondPHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK CLENNON FOR TIME