photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The home of the City of Lawrence's Planning & Development Services department and Municipal Court at City Hall Riverfront, 1 Riverfront Plaza, is pictured on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024.

After about six months, a pilot night-court program in the Lawrence Municipal Court is being discontinued after failing to draw enough participants outside of the court’s regular hours.

City Manager Craig Owens announced the move during the Lawrence City Commission meeting earlier this week. Since last summer, the court has remained open on the third Wednesday of each month for an additional hour and a half for a night court session, which was intended to reduce the number of instances in which defendants failed to appear for a scheduled court date.

But participation was slim, Owens told the City Commission earlier this week. A report included with the meeting’s agenda materials notes that despite various efforts to advertise the program, only two defendants appeared in the first pilot night court session in July 2023, and only six appeared the following month. Results were stagnant through the remainder of 2023, with four defendants appearing in the months of September through November and two appearing in December.

“Sometimes, you try something with good intent — it just didn’t work out, and I think it’s OK,” Owens said at Tuesday’s City Commission meeting. “… And maybe there will be another time for it where we can try it again. I think our team did a good job of figuring out how to do it and make it available; it just didn’t work out.”

The idea of a pilot night-court session originated in Douglas County’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council earlier in 2023, which city and county leaders thought might be a viable strategy to decrease the number of people spending time in the Douglas County Jail for minor, nonviolent offenses like failure to appear.

According to the report with Tuesday’s agenda, the program did not make any difference in those numbers, though, because all of the defendants who appeared for the evening docket had already failed to appear for their regularly scheduled court times. The report notes that the Municipal Court continues to seek ways to reach defendants and reduce the number of defendants who fail to appear at their original court date.