As the state's economy slows down, the number of traffic-related bench warrants that get entered into state computers has also dropped off.

The result is police may not know that a person they have stopped has a warrant out for his or her arrest.

Three thousand bench warrants ordered by state judges since September have not been entered into state computers and can't be served by sheriffs or police.

Judiciary spokeswoman Marsha Kitagawa said the latest arrest warrant backlog began building after the courts ran out of overtime money in August to pay clerks who entered warrant data into state computers.

"Unfortunately, the adverse impact of the economic downturn and escalating utility costs on the Judiciary's budget means that funding for overtime and other expenditures are no longer possible," she said.

In June, court officials found overtime funds to clear another 3,000-warrant backlog that had built up since February.

"Court staff worked overtime to catch up on the prior backlog of approximately 3,000 Honolulu District Court traffic warrants that had accumulated since mid-February and were successful in eliminating the backlog by August," Kitagawa said.

Then the money ran out, she said.

The new batch of unprocessed warrants are only a small portion of a much larger backlog of arrest warrants that are in the system but haven't been served because of law enforcement manpower shortages.

The total number of unserved traffic warrants sitting in law enforcement files as of mid-December was 52,941 — one fewer than in May of this year, according to data supplied by Kitagawa.

Arrest warrants for probation violations declined to 2,450 from a May total of 2,506, Kitagawa said.

City Prosecuting Attorney Peter Carlisle, who has deplored the arrest warrants backlog in the past, did so again this week.

"It's just an ongoing problem that doesn't seem to get better," Carlisle said.

"With the economic downturn, it's likely to get worse," said Carlisle, who called the backlogged warrants problem "unacceptable" when it was first disclosed in a series of news reports in The Advertiser in 2006.

A government task force created to address the problem after those stories were published emphasized the importance of the Judiciary's plans to develop an electronic "paperless" warrants system that speeds entry of warrants in law enforcement computers and allows a hard copy to be created only at the time of arrest.

Kitagawa said a pilot paperless warrant program, called eBenchWarrant, is now scheduled to be tested "by the end of the first quarter of 2009."

The paperless warrants program was supposed to be a part of a new computer system serving traffic courts around the state that went online in November 2005.

The task force found that the new Judiciary Information Management System, commonly called JIMS, was actually aggravating the warrants backlog problem.

"One of the problems in the timely creation of warrants is caused by the new JIMS system," the task force reported.

"Although the JIMS system was created to bring the court's technology up to current standards, it actually requires more manual data entry and does not allow for 'batching,' (creation of multiple warrants at one time)," the report continued.

"This creates a strain on court staff, causes a delay in the physical creation of warrants and delays the time the warrants are available for service."