Does York County Show the Way to Solving Maine’s Stubborn Criminal Case Backlog?
Posted by Ed Folsom, April 16, 2025.
While Maine’s Unified Criminal Docket (UCD) remains backlogged by some 5,700 pending cases compared to the number of pending UCD cases in April of 2019, York County has caught up and eliminated its backlog. How has the county with Maine’s second busiest UCD managed to do what no other Maine county has managed to do? It’s a good question, isn’t it? Why not figure out the answer and use what has happened in York County as a template for eliminating the backlog in the rest of Maine?
Before I dive into what’s in the numbers for York and the other four busiest Maine counties, a little background is in order. The Maine Judicial branch’s MEJIS Data Warehouse, tracks changes in the number of pending UCD cases between the current month and the corresponding month in pre-pandemic year 2019. These are the numbers that show a statewide increase in the UCD backlog of roughly 5,700 cases from April 10, 2019, to April 10, 2025. That’s about a 34% increase in the statewide UCD case backlog in that time frame.
But again, York County has 3,205 UCD cases pending now versus 3,309 in April of 2019. That’s a 3% decrease in its backlog in that time frame – in the county with the State’s second busiest UCD.
Cumberland County has the busiest UCD. It now has 37% more pending UCD cases than it did in April of 2019, increasing from 3,480 to 4,768 pending cases in that time frame.
Third-busiest Penobscot County has a 56% larger backlog now than in April of 2019, rising from 1,595 cases to 2,494.
Fourth-busiest Kennebec’s UCD backlog has increased 53%, rising from 1,378 to 2,113 pending cases.
And fifth-busiest Androscoggin’s UCD backlog is 38.5% larger now than in April of 2019, rising from 1,630 pending cases to 2,258.
As previously discussed (here) these backlogs exacerbate Maine’s current indigent defense crisis, in which the State is unable to find attorneys to appoint to people charged with crimes who are entitled to court appointed counsel under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Also, as previously discussed, some people have insisted that the existing backlog is caused by prosecutors jamming up the system with an outrageous number of new criminal charges. Do the numbers bear that out?
The Maine Judicial Branch publishes statistics on the number of cases handled in each of eight regions in the state (here). Those numbers are currently available for fiscal years 2020 through 2024. It’s these numbers that show us that Cumberland has the most UCD case filings, York second, Penobscot third, Kennebec fourth, and Androscoggin fifth. But we want to go back one year before that, to 2019, for our starting point – the year that the MEJIS numbers use to begin tracking the change in criminal case backlogs from pre-pandemic times to now. For 2019, we can draw the numbers of new UCD cases filed in each of these five counties from the Maine Judicial Branch’s 2019 Annual Report (see here).
The numbers show that new UCD cases filed fell from fiscal year 2019 through fiscal year 2024 in all five counties. In all five counties, prosecutors are filing fewer criminal charges now than then.
Cumberland County had 9,807 new UCD cases filed in 2019, declining to 7,389 in 2024. That’s a decline of 2,418 new UCD case filings — a 24.6% decline. And yet, Cumberland County’s backlog increased 37%. What are they doing wrong?
York County’s UCD filings dropped from 8,994 in 2019 to 6,374 in 2024. That’s a drop of 2,647 new cases filed, or a 29.4% decline. They also wiped out their post-2019 backlog increase in York County. What are they doing right?
Penobscot County’s new UCD filings declined from 7,240 in 2019 to 5,932 in 2024. That’s a decline of 1,308 new cases filed, or an 18% decline. Yet their backlog of pending cases increased 56.4%.
Kennebec County’s new UCD filings declined from 4,846 in 2019 to 3,698 in 2024. That’s a decline of 1,148 new cases filed, which represents a 23.6% drop. Yet their UCD case backlog increased 53.3%.
And, finally, Androscoggin County’s new UCD case filings declined from 4,588 in 2019 to 4,017 in 2024, for a decline of 571 new UCD cases filed, or a 12.4% decline. Here, they experienced a 38.5% increase in their pending-case backlog from 2019 through 2024.
In every one of these five counties, the D.A.’s filed a significantly decreasing number of cases in the UCD in 2024 versus 2019, yet in all but one –York County—the UCD case backlog grew by a percentage significantly larger than the percentage decline in the number of new cases filed. In every county other than York County, the cases are simply not moving. In York County, the cases are moving.
Isn’t it time to figure out what York County has done right and use it as a model to dig the rest of the State out of its current crisis?
We should also consider that if York County still has a Sixth Amendment crisis in its inability to find lawyers to assign to people entitled to court appointed counsel, the problem simply cannot be laid at the feet of York County prosecutors at this point for flooding the system with new cases. In fact, the percentage decline in the number of new UCD cases filed by prosecutors in Kennebec, Cumberland, and York counties (23.6%, 24.6%, 29.4%, respectively) is probably much larger than the decline in the number of reported criminal cases in the 2019-2024 time frame, although, as discussed here, Maine’s change in the method of tracking reported crimes within this time frame makes it difficult to pin that down.
Tribalism and partisanship aside, what really is the answer to the problem? Does York County’s experience hold the key?
