Greg Pachmayr, Clerk
Indiana Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, and Tax Court
Subjects of involuntary temporary mental health commitments in Indiana can be left without meaningful appellate relief. Indiana Code 12-26-6 states that an individual alleged to be mentally ill and either dangerous or gravely disabled may be committed for not more than 90 days. Contrast this with the appellate timeline which aggregates to 150 days (excluding extensions of time) before the Court of Appeals starts drafting an opinion, and you can see why some such appeals can be treated as moot.
After receiving a formal rule change proposal, the Indiana Supreme Court instructed the Office of Judicial Administration to conduct a pilot in Marion County – home to the state capitol, Indianapolis – to address the issue. We convened a group of stakeholders, including representatives from: counsel for mental health care providers, the Court of Appeals of Indiana, the Marion County Judiciary, the Marion County Public Defender Agency, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General, and the Office of Judicial Administration.
After coming to an agreement on the parameters of the program, including shortened briefs (4,200 words instead of 14,000 words) and briefing periods (25 days instead of 150 days), the group acknowledged that the major obstacle to resolving these types of appeals on the merits are the transcripts. While counsel and the courts could accommodate a condensed timeline, court reporters across the state indicate that their standard forty-five-day timeline is already difficult to meet.
Fortunately, Marion County has a robust IT staff and infrastructure. Working closely with the Marion County Superior Court Chief Technology Officer, we determined that one of Marion County’s vendors, The Record Exchange (TRX), has voice to text capabilities that interface with a system that is already in use. Using this system as a starting point, with some additional resources, an Artificial Intelligence natural language generation program was added to clean up the initial text produced by their system.
This new AI enhancement is powered by Anthropic. It is set up as a closed system, meaning that all the data put into the system, including the hearings, are kept confidential and are not fed into the larger library that feeds Anthropic’s public AI model. Our pilot-specific library was augmented with medical and legal dictionaries and other resources pertinent to these mental health case types. The system generates the initial voice to text, which is then run through the Anthropic AI system, and within minutes generates a transcript that can be used on appeal.
The Indiana Supreme Court issued an order authorizing a two-year pilot project to test out the new system that went live September 1, 2024. In the first month of the pilot, three Notices of Expedited Appeal were filed. As of October 3, 2024, none of the cases have made it through the entire briefing schedule. However, the average time for the transcripts to be filed with the Appellate Clerk’s Office is five days and the average time for appellant’s briefs to be filed is six days.
Six judges from the Court of Appeals of Indiana volunteered to be on panels hearing these expedited cases. They are dedicated to thoroughly weighing counsel’s arguments and issuing opinions as efficiently as possible. Likewise, the Indiana Supreme Court is prepared to rule on expedited petitions to transfer should the need arise.