YAKIMA -- Pam Perez still wakes up every morning in pain, nearly eight years after a car accident totaled her car just blocks from her house. Things got even more painful when her subsequent lawsuit got pushed back over and over.

"We spent six of those years getting bumped as they say, schedule a court day and they don't have room for you and it takes whole other year to get rescheduled," Perez recalls.

The court says there's just nothing it can do.

I asked Perez what she was told when she was bumped. "Sorry," she replies,"Too many criminal cases."

So many cases in fact, the county courts are backed up by hundreds of cases. And with things like speedy trial laws not effecting civil cases, the DA's office has focused on cutting into their criminal backlog.

"We are everyday addressing it. We are doing everything we possibly can to get rid of the backlog, to move the cases and to get current on it so that a citizen can take advantage of their right to a trial in a divorce or a civil matter," says District Attorney Jim Hagarty, who has even taken on a caseload of his own.

Cutting into the backlog will take some time. So that means asking people already waiting to have their cases heard, to wait even longer for the problem to get fixed. Perez settled out of court when she heard her case would get bumped a sixth time.

That means Perez waited six years to go to court and never even got to go. "No, never got to go, never got to speak my peace or state my story to my peers and the jury."

But getting your case heard in front of a judge or a jury is more than just scheduling.

"The difficulty is, you only have limited amount of resources. You only have a limited number of bodies in the office as prosecutors that can handle these cases," Hagarty explains.

Court Administrator Harold Delia says the court is aware of the problem. "There is a concern among the judiciary that we don't have enough officers to hear all the cases."

When cases can't be heard, people simply have to wait, or look for alternatives.

And Perez didn't know what else she could do. When I asked her if she'd explored other options she replied,"Like what? I don't know what the other option was. I wouldn't do it again."

"We just have so little capacity for them, it's hard to meet everybody's needs. So there are people who walk away from our system saying 'I've been bumped 3 times this isn't fair.' And I agree with them," says Delia.

There are laws to make things fair for criminals, but nothing for someone like Pam.

"I feel like there should have been something to protect me."

Pam Perez's wait is over, but there are dozens more like her getting bumped repeatedly so the court can deal drug dealers and gangbangers. Speedy justice for some, and a long painful wait for others.