New Justice Center Emphasizes Security

This article first appeared on Monday, Nov. 26, 2007.

WEST CHESTER – Chester County’s new Justice Center on West Market Street has one district court, seven floors, more than a dozen cells – group and individual size -- for prisoners, enough space for 18 courtrooms, and a stairwell with 152 steps.

But most tellingly, it also has 172 individual panic buttons to bring courthouse security personnel on the run.

That final figure is the result of changes in design for the 422,000 square foot, $100 million building brought about by a bloody attack in the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta two years ago.

In March 2005, a man on trial for rape overpowered a court deputy, took her gun and killed three people – the judge overseeing his case, a court reporter and another deputy who confronted him as he fled the courthouse. He later pistol-whipped another man whose car he stole and shot and killed a federal marshal unconnected to his trial.

The courthouse killings in Atlanta came just two weeks after a federal judge’s mother and husband were found murdered in their home, and set off a flurry of concerns about the safety of judges, prosecutors and others who work in courthouses across the country.

What had thus been planned as a somewhat standard-issue building housing the county’s Common Pleas courts and court-related offices underwent a metamorphosis into a high-tech structure whose complexity rivals hat of a hospital and whose security suggests something close to a modern maximum security prison.

“This is in no way a run-of-the-mill building,” explained Don Thompson, the county “owner’s representative” who is overseeing the work on the Justice Center, as he did for the Chester County Prison expansion in Pocopson and the county’s Juvenile Detention Center in West Bradford.

“This is a big building. A really, really big building. It is a special place that requires service you can’t ever imagine would be done at another facility,” Thompson said during a recent tour of the building. “The normal frame of reference of an office building that you and I would work in just doesn’t apply.”

Among the security measures that are incorporated in the Justice Center include a basement sheriff’s lock-up that is state of the art in its safety measures to keep prisoners from escaping; judges chambers that are accessible only by security card or electronic entrance; separate elevators for the public, judges and prisoners; and courtroom corridors that are inaccessible to the public and are used only by sheriff deputies and their charges.

It is a far cry from the current courthouse facility, where shackled prisoners walk down hallways in plain view of the public, and can be brought into the courtroom only one at a time. No longer will someone riding one of the courthouse’s four elevators be ordered off so that the deputies can transport a defendant to the courtroom of his or her destination.

“I think the county is going to get a good building,” said Thompson. “Perfect, no. What they paid for? Yes.”

The decision to build a new court facility was years in he making. As long as a decade ago the county’s judges began urging the commissioners to expand the court facility to make room for the new judges the county gained because of its striking increase in population, and all the component personnel – extra prosecutors and public defenders and courts clerks, for example.

The decision was first made to expand on the footprint of the current courthouse, located in the center of West Chester bordered by High, Church, Gay and Market streets. But a dispute between the county and the borough over the density of the planned construction and the proposed demolition of historic properties led to the ultimate decision to relocate the court facilities to the 200 block of West Market Street, across from the site of the county’s new parking garage.

In some ways, the delay itself became a favorable circumstance; because construction did not begin until after 2004, the county was able to incorporate the security changes brought about by the Atlanta courthouse shooting into its design while the building was still being built, instead of after it was completed.

Thompson said that when he came aboard the project, the design by architects Bernardon Haber Halloway of Kennett Square were already on the books. It became his task, he said, to go to all of the county’s court-related department heads, show them the design and ask them what changes they needed.

Which leads Thompson, a friendly man who needs only a small invitation to talk about the project in his hands, to tell the story of the district attorney’s restroom.

In the original design, the DAs office had no interior restroom facilities. In his conversations with District Attorney Joseph Carroll, however, Thompson discovered what a mistake that had been; if left unchanged, it would have put criminal witnesses and victims in the uncomfortable, if not unsafe, position of having to share the facilities with someone connected with their case – perhaps even the defendant.

The DAs office now has its own washroom, Thompson said.

The original design also showed judges having to share courtrooms; now, each judge on the bench currently will have their own courtroom – although they may have to trade off during criminal sessions. Not all courtrooms have been given the necessary individual prisoner lockups, so a judge who hears mostly civil cases would have to move to another courtroom temporarily if he or she is hearing a criminal matter.

When the Justice center opens in late spring or early summer, it will have 15 completed courtrooms, one for each of the county’s judges. There are three additional courtrooms that will remain unfinished until more jurists are added.

Thompson says that special touches in the building – terrazzo floors and milled cherry wood paneling, for example – make it somewhat elegant. Those touches also prove less costly to maintain, however, so that the county will end up spending less money in the long run. He refers to the center as a “50-year building,” ready to stand up for the long haul.

The commissioners, who every month or so are faced with the decision to approve construction change orders that add to the cost of the building, have expressed faith in Thompson’s proposed changes.

“I’ve got lots of confidence in Don,” said Commissioner Patrick O’Donnell, who owes that nevertheless he has ridden Thompson hard on some of his requests.

“I think there were design flaws in (the center) that hadn’t been thought out clearly,” he said. “But Don does not come in with changes lightly.”

Thompson predicted that the final cost of the building will be within three percent of the original budget.

“I’m very proud of that,” he said.