The Utah judiciary held its third-ever Court Connect town hall on Thursday at the Wasatch County Justice Court. Court Connect is an initiative that began in Tooele County in November, allowing residents to connect with their court judges and personnel to ask questions and access resources, with the hope of building public trust.

“Right now is a time where most folks don’t trust institutions,” explained Jonathan Puente, director of the Office of Fairness, Equity and Accountability for Utah State Courts. “If you want to build trust, it’s relationships. And in order to have relationships, it’s (about) communicating. So, we’re going out to the communities and having these dialogues.”

Most of the event took the form of a Q and A with a panel of local judges: Fourth District Court Judge Jennifer Mabey, Fourth District Juvenile Court Judge Brent Bartholomew, Heber City Justice Court Judge Randy Birch and Wasatch County Justice Court Judge Brook Sessions.

The judges answered burning questions — like why one attendee had been called to jury duty several times, while their spouse had always gotten off the hook.

“You hear stories of someone winning the lottery twice. Like, how does that happen?” Mabey said. “But our system is designed to be random because that ensures that jurors are not picked based upon any particular attribute.”

Mabey recalled she’d once gotten a jury qualification questionnaire for her own court.

“I excused myself,” she explained as the audience laughed.

Another audience member asked whether crime was increasing or decreasing in Wasatch County.

Birch said his court had about 3,600 cases in 2012 and 2,327 in 2025. He’s been tracking the number of cases since he became a judge and hasn’t been able to find any correlation between crime and population growth. 

“The other weird thing? Heber is sort of like this ‘Crossy Road’ mecca in the summer, right? You’d think we’d have more cases in the summer,” he said. “Our slowest months for tickets (are) June, July and August.”

Mabey said felonies filed in the Fourth District Court declined from 196 in 2024 to 147 in 2025. Meanwhile, misdemeanor DUIs have stayed “pretty steady,” she said, with “way too many of them in our community.”

The judges also explained how state courts are adapting to the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence. 

Mabey said she’s seen AI-generated pleadings come from pro se litigants and attorneys.

“One of the things that we see is that there are hallucinations in those pleadings, and hallucinations refer to cases that don’t actually exist,” she said. “You have to have case law to support what you’re asking for, but sometimes the case law that’s being cited is not an actual case.”

But what scares her most about AI is the potential for deepfakes. She said that in many cases, particularly domestic and protective order cases, she is given incriminating audio recordings by defendants and plaintiffs.

“They want me to take their phone and listen to the audio and try to figure out if that’s a legitimate piece of evidence,” she said.

She said AI could muddy the waters of determining legitimate evidence even further.

“We have these rules of evidence that have been around for hundreds of years,” Sessions chimed in. “We’re trying to run our courts with the old rules of evidence with the new world of AI. And it’s a challenge every day that I expect is going to get harder.”

When asked how state courts interact with federal courts, the judges brought up immigration. 

Mabey said the biggest thing she’s dealing with right now is immigration holds. 

“The difficulty with that is that if they do go into ICE custody, I’m probably not going to see them again. So, I will have cases that don’t get resolved because they are gone from the jurisdiction,” she said. 

Birch provided an example. 

“I would never obstruct immigration from coming into my courtroom, but I really don’t like it when they do. I remember a few years ago, I had a gentleman who had a ticket of some sort, relatively insignificant. His wife was there. His two kids were there. They looked like they were going to church, and immigration came,” Birch said. “I was pissed. There’s not a dang thing I can do about it. Makes it a little hard to get people to come deal with their tickets when that happens.”

The Court Connect ended with Mabey asking attendees to complete a survey about what topics they would like to see covered at future events. Answers came flooding in, including domestic violence, how to prevent the most common offenses and community resources for legal help.

It was Mabey who facilitated the Wasatch County Court Connect. She wants to continue the dialogue at quarterly events. 

“We’re all trying to figure out how to do what we do better, to serve our communities better, to uphold the oaths that we’ve taken as judges,” she said. “I just appreciate that you’re willing to come and have a conversation.”

The next Court Connect will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City.

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The Summit County Library in Kimball Junction hosted a YouthSpeak event for teens, creating a safe environment for them to express their feelings through poetry, spoken word or song and to receive feedback Wednesday evening, March 29, 2017. The event, which was free and open to the public, awarded first, second, third place and honorable mention prizes to participants. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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