With state lawmakers looking to fill a $2 billion plus deficit as the legislative session begins, Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren is hoping that one place that they don’t cut from is the criminal justice system.

“This year the state withheld $1.4 million,” Warren told Spectrum Bay News 9 last week. “They’re telling us that they could potentially cut another $2.5 million. We’ve trimmed all the fat we can from our budget.”

Warren is referring to the 6% cut that all state agencies were required to undergo last summer by Gov. Ron DeSantis as the state attempted to grasp the serious economic fallout from COVID-19.

But with approximately 2,000 court trials now backlogged in Hillsborough County due to the court system being shut down last year for several months, Warren says every trial that can’t happen means a victim “whose justice is delayed.”

One of those victims who can’t bear any further delays is Sybille Naude, whose brother Mike was killed in April 2017.

After several delays, his killer was tried and convicted last November. He has yet to be sentenced, however, due to COVID delays.

“It definitely halts the healing process,” Naude told reporters on a Zoom call last week. “You can’t close the chapter and heal until you can metaphorically put the weight down, and it stops that with every time that you guys deal the process or cut funding or the district attorney can’t do what he needs to do because the funding isn’t there.”

Senate Appropriations Chair Kelli Stargel (R-Lakeland) says that the 2021 budget will be a “conservative budget.” And she says she’s heard from state attorneys and public defenders about their concerns about seeing their budgets cut.

“We’ve heard from the public defenders — the state attorneys, the court system as a whole — we’ve talked to the Chief Justice," she said. "There’s a lot of concern in making sure that we make sure that all of that is able to run as smoothly as possible, when our state opens back up. When our courts do open back up.”

Public defenders are also extremely concerned about seeing their budgets reduced.

Stacy Scott is the public defender in Florida’s 8^th Judicial Circuit (Gainesville) and is with the Florida Public Defenders Association. She says some circuits (like Miami-Dade County) have experienced a 50% increase in open and pending cases since COVID-19 hit.

“We need to staff the courtrooms and be able to represent our clients, and we just cannot sustain any cuts for this upcoming fiscal year,” she said, adding that public defenders and state attorneys are essential workers of sorts.

“We have an ethical duty to provide competent and zealous representation to our clients, and our caseloads were already high before COVID, and they’re even higher, and if I have to cut more people the caseloads increase even further, and it really implicates our ethical obligation whether we can sustain competent representation if we keep getting higher caseloads and lower staff,” she said.