From the beginning, when vague details about the courts' handling of suspects in the Eve Carson murder case began surfacing, the worry was about how broken the system really was. Articles last week in The News & Observer, about the findings of an investigation by the Division of Community Corrections and about how the courts had dealt with one of the suspects, show that matters are worse than could have been imagined.

The implications for the public -- that dangerous criminals walk the streets due to outmoded, careless court and corrections systems which often seem oblivious to each other -- are chilling. Governor Easley or perhaps state Chief Justice Sarah Parker should order a wide-ranging investigation to gauge the extent of problems, assess responsibility and recommend solutions. The tragedy is that it took two murders to bring those problems to light.

Two suspects were arrested last month for the killing of Carson, the UNC-Chapel Hill student body president -- Demario Atwater, 21, and Laurence Alvin Lovette, 17. Police quickly charged Lovette with a second killing, that of Abhijit Mahato of Duke University in January. Thanks to a promptly convened investigation ordered by the head of the Division of Community Corrections, Robert Guy, we now can begin to grasp the extent of the dysfunction in the Wake and Durham County probation and parole offices.

Failure to communicate

In a total of three years under court supervision, the report says, Atwater had 10 different probation officers. None was aware that he should have been on a curfew, should have met with his probation officer weekly and should have been subject to nighttime checks.

He had been put on probation for crimes committed in Wake County in 2005. At one point, according to the report, he went for more than a year without receiving a single phone call from a probation officer. In effect, Atwater -- who racked up new charges in Granville and Durham counties during the period -- was neither supervised in a manner that protected the public nor guided toward a better path.

Guy has reassigned the three top managers in the Wake office and made other staff changes, partly in response to the findings. The reflexive response might have been to hunker down in the face of failures, but Guy has done the opposite. He may be the right person to follow through with remedial steps. But an independent investigation could put this entire set of overlapping problems in the justice system in perspective. Certainly it's reasonable to think that those problems go far beyond the Wake and Durham offices.

The state's handling of Lovette was even more troubling. According to an article by The N&O's Joseph Neff, the teenager was sent to juvenile prison in 2006 for burglary and other felonies. He could have been held until 2009, due to the serious nature of the offenses. The juvenile justice department released him on parole in September, 2007.

Staying out

Two months later, he was charged in adult court for a crime similar to the ones that landed him in training school. But the charge was downgraded to a less serious felony, and Durham magistrates set his bail at just $20,000.

In January, after another downgrade, he was allowed to plead guilty to three misdemeanor counts. He walked out of court, on probation, even though a note on his paperwork clearly indicated he was supposed to be on juvenile parole. District Court Judge Ann McKown says she didn't know about Lovette's long record or his juvenile parole. Two days later, Mahato was killed.

Less than a week after that, Lovette was in juvenile court for violating his initial parole. District Judge William Marsh III could have returned him to training school until he turned 19. But he was released from juvenile supervision. Lovette subsequently was arrested twice on other charges, and each time was released on stunningly low bonds. It's impossible to tell whether Durham officials knew or cared about his increasingly serious encounters with police.

Things are this bad in probation offices at least in part because the General Assembly has failed in its oversight role. In 2004 it ordered a study of problems in the Division of Community Corrections. Yet turnover among officers is still sky high and no wonder.

Just over 2,000 certified officers supervise 128,000 offenders. For officers and the courts, technology remains incapable of the kind of prompt, thorough communication necessary to keep proper tabs on offenders on whom the justice system is taking a calculated risk. In other words, tragic failure was in the cards.

The mistakes that these cases illustrate present a template for what needs to be fixed. A highly qualified investigative panel needs to interview judges, prosecutors, magistrates, probation officers and others involved in the decisions to understand why the mistakes occurred and then offer guidance on how to ensure they don't occur again.