The courtroom was full and the convicted killer told the judge he was ready to be sentenced.

But Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White on Friday couldn't grant Johnathan Allan Baker his wish to be sent away to prison for the rest of his life.

Problem was, the county Probation Department hadn't completed its pre-sentence investigation report that is required by state law to be filed before a judge can put a prisoner on ice.

Friday's delay was Sacramento's first of its kind this year. It likely won't be the last.

Budget cuts have decimated probation funding by 40 percent over the past two years, and the unit that churns out 7,000 pre-sentence reports a year has been chopped down to next to nothing.

The department used to have 38 officers to dig through the convicted felons' criminal histories, interview the surviving victims, plow through the police reports and trial evidence, and make recommendations to the judge on how hard to wield the sentencing hammer.

These days, there are only eight officers writing the reports. And with the delay on Baker's sentencing in last year's murder of Jim Arthur in Boulevard Park, the budget-related backups in the local criminal justice system have now officially begun.

Friday's canceled sentencing took place in the courtroom of Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White, the system's presiding judge. White said the failure to complete probation reports on time holds the potential to shut down the courts.

"It will seize," White said of the local court system in an interview Friday. "The consequence is we cannot sentence somebody to prison if we don't have a pre-sentence probation report, except in unusual circumstances where the parties agree to it and the judge finds it is unnecessary. That is in a very small percentage of cases."

Convicted but unsentenced criminals, meanwhile, will remain housed in the county jails, creating an added financial burden on the Sheriff's Department, with local taxpayers picking up the tab.

"It's a huge problem," White said.

White has been meeting with Chief Probation Officer Don Meyer and County Executive Steve Szalay to prepare for the repercussions.

Meyer is looking at a $26 million budget cut this year on top of a $26 million budget cut last year. His alternatives include closing the highly touted Boy's Ranch lockup for juvenile wards and further decimating his adult supervision unit.

If the court demands that his office make the pre-sentence reports a priority, he can do that, Meyer said. But doing the reports is only one of his agency's 22 legally mandated duties, Meyer said. He said the focus on the reports will come with a consequence.

"I think the court is going to demand that we write the reports," he said. "But then we're going to have to close down a good portion of our juvenile hall. That would affect bookings and will get us back in court (as a defendant) for overcrowding."

Officials in the district attorney's and public defender's offices, where budget cuts of their own promise to translate into laid-off lawyers, are bracing for the dearth of probation reports.

"Any time one part of the system can't fulfill its obligations, it impacts the entire system and how the work gets done," Chief Deputy District Attorney Cindy Besemer said.

Chief Assistant Public Defender Steve Lewis said a probation liaison officer who works in the arraignment courts at the downtown jail has allowed his staff to waive the reports in some cases.

"There are cases, though, where the probation report is necessary, where the district attorney or the public defender or the court needs that additional information," Lewis said.

Probation officers assigned to prepare reports in specialty areas such as the mental health courts already have been scrapped entirely, Lewis said.

"It means the judge, everyone, is operating with less information in making decisions that are critical to these clients," he said.

In Friday's case, Judge White rescheduled Johnathan Baker's sentencing to July 1. Baker was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances of burglary and robbery in the murder of Arthur, whom the defendant stabbed an estimated 140 times. The attack escalated, investigators said, as a result of Baker's gay-hating rage.

The probation report probably won't make much difference in Baker's likely future of life in prison with no chance of parole. But in most cases, White said the sentencing judge "absolutely needs" it to help with the decision.

"If he or she doesn't have a report," the judge said, "the result will be that some people who should be going to prison won't, and some people who shouldn't be going to prison will."