Proposal to rename courthouse shelved
Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia agreed Tuesday to postpone a decision on his proposal to rename the downtown criminal courthouse in honor of a slain sheriff’s deputy after the idea was panned by defense attorneys and failed to receive explicit support from any other Commissioners Court members.
Garcia proposed renaming the 20-story Criminal Justice Center in honor of Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal, who was shot dead during a traffic stop on Sept. 27.
Garcia, while he was Harris County sheriff in 2009, hired Dhaliwal as the first Sikh officer in department history.
“I had made a commitment to the family that we would work to do something that would honor not so much the service of Sandeep … but his heart, and how he really transformed our community,” Garcia said.
Garcia told the Houston Chronicle on Monday he did not speak with Commissioners Court colleagues or Dhaliwal’s family before proposing the idea.
More than a dozen members of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association attended Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting to oppose the proposal. They lauded Dhaliwal as a trailblazing public servant but said naming a court building for a slain lawman could inappropriately influence jurors in cases involving police.
“We spend a lot of time asking jurors whether or not they would consider a police officer’s testimony to be more important than anybody else,” said Susan Criss, a lawyer and former criminal judge. “If we have a building that they’re walking into that’s named after a law enforcement officer, that’s going to make it harder.”
Defense attorney David Ryan, who also serves as a volunteer firefighter in Alief, said he understands how devastating line-of-duty deaths are to communities.
He said renaming a community center or an other nonjudicial building would be a more fitting tribute to Dhaliwal.
Robert Fickman, a past president of the defense bar, said given Dhaliwal’s commitment to justice, he would not want his name on a building if it risked tainting a criminal trial.
“This is a divisive issue, and he was a unifier,” he said. “I can’t believe he’d want his name associated with something that was divisive.”
Fickman also noted the long-term future the Criminal Justice Center, which was heavily damaged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, remains uncertain.
Garcia was not persuaded.
He noted the federal courthouse in downtown Houston is named for a politician, former Congressman Bob Casey, and said that does not appear to have prevented any public officials from receiving fair trials.
He cited the example of the federal courthouse in San Antonio, which is named for U.S. District Judge John H. Wood Jr., who was assassinated in 1979.
“I assume that people are getting fair cases that are getting accused,” Garcia said of proceedings in that building.
He added he did not think renaming the Criminal Justice Center for Dhaliwal would change the rate at which trials ended in convictions.
Each of Garcia’s colleagues on Commissioners Court said Dhaliwal should be honored in some way, though none endorsed the courthouse proposal.
Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis urged Garcia to spend more time on the idea and bring the item back at a future meeting.
“Whether it’s this courthouse or something else, it ought to be something big,” Ellis said.