If things were not busy enough, by midweek the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had acknowledged opening a domestic violence investigation involving Mel Gibson and the Russian model Oksana Grigorieva, with whom he has a child.
Stretched to the limit by budget cuts and a rising caseload — traffic filings alone rose nearly 10 percent to 1.83 million last year — the Los Angeles County justice system has been struggling to contend with what appears to be a growing number of celebrities gone bad, done wrong, or otherwise in need of adjudication.
“The simple answer is, yes,” said Allan Parachini, a public information officer for Los Angeles County Superior Court, when asked whether the rich and famous were placing unusual strain on his institution of late.
In March, the court laid off 329 of its more than 5,000 employees, while using furloughs and weekday closings to help trim a budget shortfall that was estimated at $79 million.
New filings are not scanned into the court's electronic system for days, sometimes leaving judges without access to the latest paperwork in one or another of the roughly three million cases that tumble in each year. And callers get lost in an automated telephone system that because of the layoffs no longer has a human being at its end.
Still, a judge was still scheduled this week for yet another hearing about the division of property between Dennis Hopper , who died May 29, and his estranged wife, Victoria.
By Thursday, the City News Service, which closely monitors the Los Angeles legal scene, was pointing editors and producers toward one session in Vida Guerra's lawsuit claiming she had not been paid for an online hosting job, and another in a suit by Ken Osmond, who played Eddie Haskell on “Leave It to Beaver,” over the collection of foreign revenue by the Screen Actors Guild .
Then there is the matter of Mr. Gibson, who went through the courts in 2006 after a drunken-driving arrest, with an accompanying anti-Semitic outburst, and could be headed back into the mill in the next few weeks if the authorities decide he abused Ms. Grigorieva.
Mr. Parachini and others who deal regularly with the county's court system say it is impossible to tell whether the number of celebrity cases really has gone up, or the definition of celebrity has simply been notched down.
“A celebrity's second cousin twice removed who gets a D.U.I. now becomes a famous person,” said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.
(Hence the attention to Mr. Garrett, whose singing and acting career appears to have peaked in the 1970s, though he had a bit part, as himself, in “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star.”)
What is not in doubt is that courts here are investing far more time, energy and cash in tending the famous than they did only a few years ago, before Web sites like TMZ.com and a host of cable news operations turned courtrooms downtown and in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Santa Monica into one big reality show.
Mr. Parachini and members of his six-person office routinely deploy at celebrity hearings, mostly to keep a media gaggle that often includes 75 cameras and 300 or so reporters — the kind of crowd once reserved for heavyweights like Michael Jackson or Robert Blake — from overwhelming ordinary citizens who have the bad luck to show up on the same day as a Paris Hilton .
A frequent debate concerns whether stars should be required to stand in line with the hundreds of people who arrive daily to deal with traffic violations, or should be given backdoor access to the court.
“Generally, the answer comes down on the side of getting them into the building,” said Mr. Parachini, who noted that what he calls the court's “customers” are often blocked from routine business by those who have come to, say, watch a rap star face charges of bad behavior at the airport. (Last year it was Coolio, the year before, Kanye West .)
Ms. Gibbons insisted that her office does not spend a disproportionate amount of money when it prosecutes a celebrity case, the O. J. Simpson murder trial notwithstanding.
“We handle them the way we handle all these cases,” Ms. Gibbons said. “Our lawyers and our support staff are paid to show up.”
But it is obvious that a well-heeled celebrity can tax both courts and prosecutors by staging a vigorous defense.
“I'd have no way of calculating anything like that,” Douglas Dalton, a longtime lawyer for Roman Polanski , said of the state's cost in pursuing a sex case against Mr. Polanski — who remains in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition — through endless hearings and appeals in the last 33 years.
By and large, a celebrity case means beefed up security, at considerable cost.
“Did you see the number of sheriffs carting her in and out on a misdemeanor case?” Mark Geragos , a lawyer whose clients have included Mr. Jackson and Gary Condit, said of Ms. Lohan and her appearance this week in a long-running prosecution that began when she was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and cocaine in 2007.
(The paparazzi got a bonus when Danny DeVito showed up in the middle of all that security for jury duty.)
At least sometimes, Mr. Geragos contends, prosecutors and judges have needlessly cluttered the courts by, in effect, taking defendants like Ms. Lohan under their wing and trying to help them with elaborate proceedings, rather than resorting to the usual settlements and solutions.
“People get frozen, and don't do what they normally do,” he said. “You've heard about the nanny state, I call it nanny justice.”
Others lay the blame for any excess not with celebrities, nor with those who would judge them, but with those who come to watch.
“The resources are being wasted by the media, not by the prosecutors,” Ms. Gibbons said. “We do our job.”
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Lindsay Lohan was at Beverly Hills