Release of 300 defendants no glitch
Computer outage that halted court, jail operations is just the latest inexcusable failure of a critical system.
From last year’s failure of the state’s electrical grid to last month’s bungled vote-counting in Harris County, Texans can be forgiven for wondering which critical system is going to fail us next.
We got our answer recently when the Harris County criminal justice system’s case-management software crashed — and sent the whole system into chaos for 48 hours. It was an alarming turn of events that caused nearly 300 criminal suspects and defendants to be released from custody at once, sending impassioned victims’ advocates and police union members warning of violence and mayhem on the streets and politicians looking for somebody to blame.
Fortunately, it turned out that most of those released were facing misdemeanor charges and the mayhem never materialized.
In that sense, the county dodged a bullet — this time. But that doesn’t change the fact that residents have enough to worry about without having to wonder if our criminal justice system is functional enough to process the folks apprehended by law enforcement to face charges.
Officials’ initial responses weren’t reassuring. The so-called “glitch” seemed to be a lot more than that. Rick Noriega, who oversees the county’s IT agency, called the outage “minimal” — an assessment that seemed detached from reality.
Once it became clear that similar outages had happened before, albeit on smaller scales, it should have become clear to our elected officials that the public deserves answers and a plan to take action and prevent future problems. There are efforts underway, but it’s unclear if they’re adequate.
Though the full brunt of the outage wouldn’t be felt until March 25, the technological turmoil in the latest incident had actually begun the night before. Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess told us she answered the phone at about 7 p.m. to learn the county’s case-management system — known as JWeb — wasn’t permitting the district attorney’s office to send cases to her office’s criminal intake division. People were being arrested, but their cases had screeched to a halt before they could even be processed. Courts could not hold probable cause hearings within the required 24 hours. Admissions to the jail
stopped, creating a burgeoning backlog of arrestees at the county’s joint processing center. Meanwhile, telephone service at a 911 call center also went down, for 30 minutes. Internet access and email and communication servers were knocked offline. JWeb was down for seven hours.
When a magistrate finally ordered the release of the nearly 300 inmates, it was the safest thing to do.
“You put that many people that you can’t control into that tight of a space, and everybody’s safety was at risk,” Burgess told the editorial board.
The chaos, which stemmed from an untimely attempt by Harris County Universal Services to update the JWeb platform, officially lasted 48 hours, with many of the systems having to be rebuilt from the ground up by Microsoft. Days after the initial outage, users were still waiting for the system to be fully functional.
Yet when grilled about the computer outage by Harris County commissioners during their April 5 meeting, Noriega, the chief information officer and executive director of Universal Services, offered a banal excuse.
“Mechanical things break,” Noriega said. “When they do, you pull out your tablet and your No. 2 pencil.”
Not all of the county entities that use
the system — including the sheriff ’s office, DA, court clerks and others — have a viable paper backup system. And some that do told county commissioners on April 5 that they didn’t employ them because they were consistently reassured during the outage by Noriega and his team that the system would be back up and running quickly.
In an April 4 letter to the commissioners before the meeting, DA Kim Ogg, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, District Court Administrator Richard Woods and Ed Wells, court administrator of the county’s criminal courts, alleged problems with the case-management system have only grown under Noriega’s watch.
At the meeting, Burgess described unusually high staff turnover at Universal Services since Noriega took over in September 2020, and that consequently, staff lacked the institutional knowledge of systems such as JWeb. Wells said the outage was made worse by shoddy communication throughout the incident.
“If you had brought in the key stakeholders, we would have told you, to do it on Thursday night is the worst possible time,” Burgess said.
Noriega pushed back at the meeting, blaming an aging system that has no centralized backup. In our interview with him on Monday, he insisted his staff knows the JWeb system and was able to work alongside Microsoft to troubleshoot the outage. The problem may have originated with one of the departments that uses the system, he said. Each has control of its own piece of the data, which he said creates a federated system that even Microsoft said made it hard to fix.
“This particular outage, it wouldn’t have mattered if you had Steve Jobs here,” Noriega said.
JWeb is a complex, multi-faceted, cloud-based system with tentacles that spread all over the justice system. No doubt, it’s hard to maintain.
JWeb itself is not an aging system. It went online in 2016 for civil courts and in 2019 for criminal courts.
And yet, Burgess told us, at least “six or seven” minor outages have taken place in the year leading up to the major stoppage last month. Her predecessor, Chris Daniel, told us there was only one similar outage during his eight years in office.
We’re told Noriega’s team is conducting a root cause analysis of the shutdown that could be completed by the end of the month — though it’s unclear how thorough such a self-audit will be.
Harris County commissioners seem to be treating the breakdown with the seriousness it deserves, and they’re off to a good start in preventing another one: They’ve approved a plan to hold regular disaster drills for the county’s IT systems, and they’ve adopted a firm timeline on when a paper backup system should be deployed.
Still, questions remain: Are lines of communication clear enough in the event of a crisis? Does Noriega’s team have the necessary technical background for the work it’s charged with? Should any changes be made to centralize responsibility for data that’s currently managed by so many fiefdoms?
“We’re the third largest county in America,” County Judge Lina Hidalgo said recently, “And with that comes an expectation that our IT systems function efficiently, reliably, and with an effective Plan B, even when something goes wrong.”
The fact that she even has to articulate that says volumes. Last month’s outage wasn’t “minimal” and the action needed to prevent another one shouldn’t be, either.