Civil rights advocates told the Third Circuit that Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is jailing defendants for probation violations too hastily, and the panel appeared open Wednesday to reviving a lawsuit against several county judges for more developments.

Alec G. Karakatsanis of Civil Right Corps, representing the proposed class of probationers, argued that defendants were being held for months or even years after only a "cursory" hearing on whether there was probable cause to say there had been a probation violation, with the actual determination of a violation not happening until a second hearing at some vague point in the future.

The defendants at those probable cause hearings were often denied a chance to truly argue their case, with some judges or crimes triggering automatic detention, or defendants claiming they were denied access to lawyers, evidence or witnesses before being locked back up, Karakatsanis told the court.

Given the dispute with Allegheny County over whether those deprivations were an issue, it was inappropriate for a district court to have turned a ruling denying a preliminary injunction ruling into a ruling for summary judgment in the county's favor, he said.

"The trial court dismissed our case despite absolutely flagrant disputes of material fact," Karakatsanis said.

Judge Marjorie O. Rendell seemed to agree that the case may need to be revived for further development, and Chief Judge Michael A. Chagares also joined in questioning whether defendants had adequate notice of why they were being held for a probation violation.

"There's evidence all over the place that needs to be sorted out," Judge Rendell said.

The Allegheny County judges contend that the current process adequately protected defendants' rights, according to Nicole Feigenbaum of the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, representing the jurists. While the initial hearing only determined if there was probable cause, a "more fulsome hearing" came "down the line" to more definitively say if there had been a probation violation, she said.

Feigenbaum said that most people jailed for probation violations were being held over additional criminal charges, rather than technical violations. The county had a written probation detainer policy that set out only certain crimes that would automatically trigger detention, and she said that the judges with so-called "zero tolerance" policies where any probation violation accusation triggered detention had explicitly added those into their probation conditions.

Karakatsanis said defendants had a right to confront witnesses and examine evidence prior to hearings over whether they'd go back to jail, but the initial probable cause hearings often saw them denied a chance to speak, to consult with their attorneys or to fully know what they were being accused of.

Judge Stephanos Bibas said there was a difference between someone who was presumed innocent of a crime and someone on probation who had already been convicted, but Karakatsanis said such a conviction does not erase the defendants' rights and the government still had to prove it had some interest in detaining them, such as rehabilitation, punishment or preventing them from absconding.

"Just because of a criminal conviction, clients haven't fully surrendered their liberty," he said.

Feigenbaum disagreed that defendants were frequently denied a chance to speak at their probable cause hearings. She said that the "court observers" whose testimony supported the complaint had observed more than 1,500 hearings, but if defendants don't speak in 25 percent of them it wasn't proof that they weren't allowed to speak up.

She said that pointing out a lack of evidence was not the same as identifying a factual dispute, and that the facts the probationers had disputed were not "material facts" that were necessary for the court's decision.

Led by Dion Horton, the plaintiffs had filed a suit in 2022 against Administrative Judge Jill Rangos, Judges Kelly Bigley and Anthony Mariani, the director of probation and parole, and several probation hearing officers, alleging that the county's system for probation detainers resulted in defendants being unjustly detained, often for excessive lengths of time.

After U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan denied the preliminary injunction in December 2023, the court asked why that order should not be converted to a summary judgment in the county's favor, which it ended up doing in February 2024. The appeal followed.

Chief Judge Michael A. Chagares and Judges Stephanos Bibas and Marjorie O. Rendell sat on the panel for the Third Circuit.

The probationers are represented by Alec G. Karakatsanis, Katherine Hubbard, Leonard J. Laurenceau and Sumayya Saleh of Civil Right Corps and Bret Grote, Jaclyn Kurin and Dolly Prabhu of the Abolitionist Law Center.

The judges are represented by Nicole A. Feigenbaum and Michael Daley of the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

The case is Horton et al. v. Rangos et al., case number 24-1325, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

--Editing by Patrick Reagan.