After a man was convicted of vehicular homicide and driving under the influence in Chattooga County for an incident eight years ago, the Lookout Mountain district attorney said one of his priorities is to move old cases to trial.
There are some organizational reasons that are preventing the judicial district from being as efficient as possible, said Clayton Fuller, who became district attorney in March 2023.
Georgia code sets trial terms for the courts in each district. The Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit includes Catoosa, Chattooga, Dade and Walker counties, and each county gets two weeks of criminal jury trial time twice a year. The District Attorney’s Office has to attempt to fit all the cases that need to go to trial in each county into that time frame.
“It’s kind of based off of the circuit being a rural circuit hundreds of years ago, and there wasn’t much crime and the judges could just kind of travel the circuit and make sure that all the cases were getting resolved,” Fuller said by phone. “Now, two of my counties in particular have become bedroom communities for Chattanooga, and then Chattooga is kind of a bedroom community for Rome.”