| Toward swifter justice Like most states, South Carolina is spending a good part of its Big Tobacco settlement on programs that are neither anti-smoking nor medical in nature. Even so, it's hard to fault how Aiken County is spending its share of the loot - to upgrade and hasten communications in the county's judicial system. Aiken County is taking its share of the settlement - $1.4 million distributed by the state Department of Commerce - to buy a high-speed fiber-optic connection to link the county jail, courthouse, sheriff's office and county agencies. The new pipeline boosts speed from 1.5 megabits per second up to 1,000 megabits per second at each of the four locations, says Johnny Walton, Aiken County's director of information technology. That kind of bandwidth upgrade, says Walton, provides a huge increase in the computer system's capabilities - about tenfold. This wiring of judges, prosecutors and law-enforcement officials, slated to be completed next month, will enable bond hearings to be held via teleconferencing - a common practice now in most municipal courts. It will also allow judges and other authorized personnel to pull up on their computer monitors original incident reports and related documents from the sheriff's office Although the county's 10 magistrates can now communicate via computer, they have no reliable means of checking for outstanding warrants or criminal convictions of defendants who appear before them. The fiber-optic upgrade is apparently the first step toward a statewide hookup of all the judicial system's computers, which state Supreme Court Justice Jean Toal has made a top priority. Two pilot programs in Greenville and Anderson are already linked into a statewide system, and are doing well. When the statewide hookup is fully operational, South Carolina judges won't have to ask defendants what their criminal justice status is. They'll be able to find out for themselves - making justice not only swifter but surer.
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