Lowndes and Oktibbeha counties have taken action to conserve one of the area’s most endangered species: the court reporter.
Last week, Circuit Judge Jim Kitchens appealed to the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors to give the final in a series of step raises designed to get court reporter annual salaries up to the $64,000 allowed by statute.
“Court reporters are retiring, and other districts are starting to poach each other’s court reporters,” Kitchens said. “That didn’t used to happen. We are getting to the point where it’s hard to replace them.”
Both Lowndes and Oktibbeha counties approved the raise unanimously. Court reporters previously made $58,730 per year, Kitchens said.
The raise goes into effect Oct. 1.
Kitchens said the law was changed in 2015, and in 2017 area counties agreed to bring court reporters up to $64,000 a year via a three-step process. However, Lowndes and Oktibbeha did not follow through with the third step until last week.
Under the funding formula, each county in the circuit and chancery court district pays a portion of the salary — Lowndes pays about 37 percent of the reporters’ salary, Clay and Oktibbeha pay 24 percent and Noxubee pays 15 percent.
The area’s three circuit and three chancery judges have six court reporters between them, Kitchens said. Four of them drive in from other counties to work here.
“Mine has been with me almost 18 years, and she lives up in Monroe County,” Kitchens said. “We have one that comes in from Calhoun County, one from Chickasaw County and one from Lafayette County.”
Kitchens said he was afraid local courts would lose court reporters to places that were more convenient.
“What concerns me is if a judge in Monroe County wants to hire my court reporter away, she loves me and I love her, but I don’t know that the money difference would not be a problem,” he said. “On top of that, she has to drive here and she is paying to drive here.”
Oktibbeha County board attorney Rob Roberson agreed the raise is vital.
“We were about to start losing our (court) reporters to other districts,” he said. “The raise was a very smart move.”
A vital function
Court reporters are vital to the functioning of the court because they are the ones who produce the record of the proceeding, whether it is civil or criminal.
“It is their job to take down everything that is said in that courtroom, either by shorthand or by using a steno machine,” Kitchens said. “Then they go back and look at the tapes and interpret it and type everything out in a transcript format so that a reviewing court can look to see whether we tried the thing correctly. Without court reporters there would be no real appellate review.”
Local colleges don’t offer the coursework to train court reporters anymore, Roberson said. Ole Miss discontinued their program, and efforts to start programs at community colleges have not worked out.
“You can’t just have someone come in off the street and have the expertise to do it,” he said. “I doubt most people could understand the language used. You hear words that are out of most people’s vocabularies, and you have to know what they mean.”
Kitchens said he intends to try to get Mississippi University for Women to begin offering a court reporter program.
“They already have most of the classes,” he said. “They teach paralegal, they have business courses and anatomy and physiology classes and all that. We just need somebody to teach the (steno) machine. We’ve got court reporters locally who maybe wouldn’t mind helping teach that part-time.”
Without court reporters, said Kitchens, he is “a guy in a high chair wearing a black dress twiddling my thumbs.”
Getting everything down
Veteran court reporter Nikki Clark works for Kitchens, and has been his court reporter for nearly 18 of her 22 years in the field.
“To be a court reporter you’ve got to be able to type 225 words per minute, with only five drops,” she said. “You have to be able to get everything down, even noting pauses and things like a cell phone ringing in the courtroom.”
The equipment she uses both saves the shorthand she types and also produces an audio recording. After a trial finishes, she uses both to write her transcript, a process she likens to writing a book.
“If a trial lasts a week, it can easily result in a thousand-page transcript,” she said. “I can typically produce somewhere between 10 and 25 pages an hour. It means a lot of long nights.”
Judges already struggle to keep things moving when one of the reporters is out sick or on vacation, Kitchens said.
“If one of them is out sick or something like that, we’re kind of sunk,” he said. “When my reporter was out having her baby, I had reporters coming from Booneville, from Oxford, from all the way from the Delta to patchwork quilt fill in. I appreciate them doing it, but I was lucky to get that.”
Roberson said some have suggested replacing court reporters with machines, but he said he didn’t think that would work.
“I don’t think the technology is at a point we can depend on,” he said. “I can’t think of a better dynamic than having a person sitting there in that chair.”
Last week’s decision puts local court reporters on an even footing with the majority of the state, Smith said.
“About 85 percent of court reporters statewide had already gotten the full raise,” she said. “It means a lot as the cost of gas, and just the cost of living, is going up.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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