When police arrested Wayne Terlep on March 29, 2005, for hitting his neighbor on the head with a cordless screw gun, officers had no way of knowing that Terlep was wanted on five Traffic Court arrest warrants.

The five warrants for Terlep's arrest on 23 outstanding traffic charges were signed by judges in February and mid-March but weren't entered into law enforcement computers by state sheriff's personnel until August, according to court and sheriff records.

Even when a Circuit Court jury convicted Terlep on June 29 of felony second-degree assault, the warrants still weren't served because they hadn't made it into the computer system. A sixth warrant for Terlep's arrest on a contempt-of-court charge, signed by a Traffic Court judge in April, also didn't show up when Terlep stood trial.

Between Terlep's guilty verdict and his Sept. 13 sentencing date, three more warrants were issued for his arrest on new traffic charges. That brought the total number of unserved Terlep warrants to nine. When Terlep didn't appear in court for sentencing on the assault conviction, warrant No. 10 was issued for his arrest.

Terlep's story is not unique.

Thousands of defendants avoid arrest warrants in a game of catch-me-if-you-can, passively aided by a system that fails to promptly report when warrants are issued. The delays allow the subjects of warrants to escape quick arrest, possibly committing other crimes and traffic violations.

The state Sheriff Division and the judiciary blamed the six-month delay in entering thousands of warrants — including Terlep's first five warrants — on manpower shortages and an overhaul of the state Traffic Court computer system.

The lag time was pared down to about three weeks but will swell again in coming weeks when thousands more warrants in the courts are processed and sent to sheriffs, according to officials.

City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle said the backlog problems in the courts and the Sheriff Division were already "unacceptable" before being aggravated by a new judiciary computer system known as JIMS.

Having the warrants entered swiftly into the system is just part of the problem.

Even after the warrants are delivered to the Sheriff Division and keyed into the computer system, chances are the warrants won't be served. The sheriff's office doesn't employ enough deputies to track down the tens of thousands of defendants wanted for various offenses, particularly misdemeanor traffic violations.

Some defendants are only caught if the police, who aren't responsible for serving O'ahu traffic warrants, detain them for another reason and discover through a computer check that they have outstanding orders for their arrest.

Terlep was nabbed not by police or sheriffs but by bounty hunter Duane "Dog" Chapman's company.

He remained at large until mid-December, when he was picked up by Da Kine Bail Bonds for failing to appear in court after posting $15,000 bail following his arrest on the March assault charge.

Last month, Terlep was sentenced to five years in prison, in part because he failed to appear at his August sentencing hearing, said state Circuit Judge Steven Alm.

Terlep's attorney, Alan Komagome, said his client was sorry for assaulting neighbor Douglas Souza and didn't appear in court for sentencing because he "was scared he was going to jail."

At the sentencing hearing, there was no mention made of Terlep's failure to appear earlier in the year to answer numerous Traffic Court charges, among them speeding, driving without a license, driving without no-fault insurance and driving with a suspended license. The suspension was the result of a drunken-driving conviction.

To underscore how widespread and intractable the backlogged warrants problem is, consider Souza, the victim of Terlep's March assault.

Court files show Souza, who declined comment for this story, had multiple outstanding warrants for his arrest when he complained to police about the Terlep assault in March.

The warrants were still not served when Terlep went to trial in Circuit Court in June. It was only after Souza was stopped by police in August and cited for driving without a license that the computer system flagged the outstanding warrants and he was arrested by Honolulu police on the pending charges, according to court records.

Souza, 41, requested and received a brief jail sentence in August for driving without a license and for failure to pay fines and fees imposed after an earlier conviction for the same offense. In the meantime, however, four more warrants had been ordered for Souza's arrest on new charges, including driving without a license and driving without insurance.

On Feb. 1, Souza was arrested on several outstanding warrants, reached a plea agreement and received a jail sentence and suspended driver's license, according to court records. He was released from O'ahu Community Correctional Center on Feb. 10. Records show another arrest warrant, ordered on Jan. 3, was unserved as of Friday.

Reach Jim Dooley at jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com and Ken Kobayashi at kkobayashi@honoluluadvertiser.com.