SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The steel-bar cells inside the courtrooms of Sacramento County Main Jail’s Patino Justice Center and Gordon Schaber Courthouse are some of the busiest spaces in a bustling Sacramento Superior Court. The cells are as much a part of the courtrooms as the judge’s bench or jurors’ box.
Eight courtrooms in all have cells within their courtrooms: Departments 4, 5, 8 and 9 on the second floor of the Schaber Courthouse at 720 9th St., and Departments 60 through 63 in the main jail’s Patino courts on I Street.
But as the framework of a towering new 17-story, 53-courtroom courthouse rises behind the jail courts near the city’s Railyard district, lingering questions of the cells’ utility, and resultant issues of equity, fairness and attorney access have re-emerged.
