In open meetings case, Sowinski missed deadline on rendering decision

Oneida County might be the place where nature lingers longer, but apparently so do court cases, as Oneida County circuit judge Mary Sowinski blew past a decision time limit set by Supreme Court rule in a recent open meetings case.

Sowinski’s decision in the case was more than a month after the Supreme Court rule’s final time limit — including an extension — for rendering opinions.

On June 6, Sowinski issued a written decision after an October 16, 2024, court trial. Following the trial, the judge gave parties two weeks to submit briefs, and, on October 30, Oneida County district attorney Jillian Pfeifer submitted a brief, the last submission before the decision 219 days later.

Pfeifer’s submission triggered a clock established by Supreme Court rule for issuing decisions. Per the rule, judges have 90 days to render an opinion after the matter has been submitted to the judge in final form, which for Sowinski would have started the clock ticking on October 30. 

The 90-day period excludes any time the judge is out due to illness. If the original 90-day deadline can’t be met, the judge is required to certify the delay to the parties and to the chief judge of the judicial district, and receives another 90 days to decide the case.

“If a decision can not be made within 90 days, the judge shall certify this in the record of the matter and notify the chief judge of the judicial administrative district,” the rule states. “The period is then extended for one additional period of 90 days.”

In sum, that 180-day calendar stretched to the limit meant Sowinski should have issued her opinion no later than the end of April. Her June 6 decision missed by more than a month. It is not known whether the judge actually certified the delay but in any event missed even the extension deadline.

The court record for the case on the state circuit court online website does not indicate any certification in the record of the need for an additional period.

In the case at hand, at the October 16 court trial, Sowinski found a meeting held in 2023 on wake boats and attended by a quorum of the Lake Tomahawk town board to be illegal, but she decided to issue a written decision to determine individual culpability, if any.

“It is undisputed that Ms. Lopez and Mr. DeMet attended an illegal meeting, the issue turns to whether Ms. Lopez and Mr. DeMet ‘knowingly’ attended the ‘informative talk’ in

violation of Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law,” Sowinski wrote in her decision. 

In October, DeMet said at the court trial that he wanted the trial and the case settled that day. He ended up waiting eight months. That timeline was greater than the average resolution of an entire misdemeanor case in 2023, according to a survey by Wisconsin Public Radio in 2024.

According to WPR, prior to the pandemic, in 2019, a Wisconsin felony case was resolved on average in about six months. The average ballooned to 208 days in 2020, and rose even more to 241 days, or about eights months, in 2021.

The average was 259 days in 2023.

For misdemeanor cases, WPR reported, the pattern was similar, with the average misdemeanor case in 2023 closed after 166 days, 10 days faster than the average for 2022 but still higher than the 118-day average in 2019.

Those numbers reflect the length of time it takes to resolve an entire case after filing a charge. Sowinski’s time of 219 days between the final submission to her court by the parties and the actual decision was longer by approximately 53 days than the entire average time it took to resolve misdemeanor cases from filing to resolution in 2023.

The total time it took the DeMet/Lopez case — which was a state case prosecuted by the district attorney based on a verified and notarized complaint — was well more than a year, from May 8, 2024, when the complaint was filed, to June 6, 2025, or 394 days.

To be fair, Sowinski didn’t enter the case until August 1, 2024, meaning the total time on the case from judicial transfer to resolution was 310 days, still almost double the amount of time it took to resolve a misdemeanor case in 2023.

Not an isolated problem

Lagging decisions and case backlogs are not confined to Oneida County.

There are some signs court backlogs in the state are starting to recede, but they still are higher than pre-pandemic levels. Pandemic restrictions, including the suspension of in-person trials, helped create initial backlogs, though a shortage of public defenders and district attorney staff has helped choke the system.

Experts often cite rising caseloads and more complex cases, too, but that would not have been a factor on a straightforward open meetings case. Now a new focus is not so much the time it takes to resolve a case but to issue an opinion once the judge has the case in hand, as well as enforcement of Supreme Court rules.

Finally, the court at the top of the heap — the Wisconsin Supreme Court — is having its own productivity problems, issuing only 14 decisions during the 2023-24 term, according to a Badger Institute analysis conducted by Marquette University professor Alan Ball.

Ball found that that during the 2023-24 term the high court produced the fewest decisions since 1927, when record-keeping began.

“The most decisions issued in a single term were the 386 decisions handed down in 1932-33,” Ball wrote. “The number of decisions was often over 200 until the late 1970s when the state’s Court of Appeals was created through a constitutional amendment. The number slowly declined after that but has been between 40 and 60 until the most recent term.”

To come up with his calculation, the Badger Institute says Ball used court records and legal databases, counting the number of decisions issued within a court term. 

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court issued fewer decisions than any of its neighbors, the professor found. At the same time, it had the most pages per decision as well as the highest average number of separate opinions per decision, Ball stated.

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com