Prosecutors tackle ‘triage docket’
Harris County must provide DA with the resources she needs to fight this crime wave.
A guy is caught trespassing in a Houston apartment garage one night in April and then briefly runs from police before they arrest him.
Three months later, around a long table at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, six prosecutors are picking apart the evidence, trying to figure out if they’ve got a car thief on their hands or a man just seeking shelter. If they choose right, they could protect the community or an innocent man from prosecution. If they choose wrong, they could let a thief walk free, allowing him to prey on somebody else.
“We do have crews that routinely go to parking garages that will break into cars. It’s like if you want a fresh apple, go to that apple tree,” George Lindsey, deputy chief of the county’s misdemeanor division, explains to a member of the editorial board sitting in on the discussion last month.
Welcome to “evading arrest” night at the DA’s office. It’s early evening and the workday ended an hour ago but the second shift has just begun for the prosecutors — five men and one woman — hunched over laptops in a fourthfloor conference room. The spreadsheet on their screens is more than a list of hundreds of evading-arrest cases from one county criminal court. It is part of a larger rescue mission — the underlying urgency of which is clear by the name prosecutors have given it: “the triage docket.”
Nathan Beedle, a former defense attorney who joined the DA’s office in 2017 and is now bureau chief of the misdemeanor division, leads the group from the head of the table, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Everybody else, rookies and veterans still with their suit coats on, settle in for the second night in a row, forgoing dinner with family and quality time with the kids to pore over police reports and arrest records and make endless judgment calls that they pray are right. For Lindsey, a former U.S. Army major, the work is a welcome change from Baghdad or Kabul and it’s not quite as high-stakes as the capital murder cases he’ll handle soon when he transitions to chief prosecutor for district courts, but it’s yet another night away from his wife and 11-year-old son.
The facts of the apartment case seem unremarkable, and lacking.
One of the rookie prosecutors, James DaRe, a former D.C. police officer, pulls up a police report showing the same man had been warned not to trespass by the same officers in the same parking garage one month earlier. He recites the report with a hint of exasperation at the lack of detail, suggesting he knows lackluster police work when he sees it.
Trespassing cases usually require a written warning to prosecute and there isn’t one.
DaRe tells Beedle that the officers recognized the man from their previous encounter, but the report didn’t explain how the man got in. Beedle suggests he may have known someone at the apartment complex.
“My instinct is there’s probably more to it, but as it stands on its face today, I don't think we can make the case,” Lindsey says. The next morning the case will appear in Judge Franklin Bynum’s queue at Criminal Court at Law No. 8 to sign off on the dismissal.
One misdemeanor down, 66,000 more to go.
What’s at stake in this tedious, granular, case-by-case review is clear to all involved: they must whittle away the massive backlogs that are crippling Harris County’s criminal justice system and adding fuel to a spike in crime that’s been building for months. The extraordinary volume — 139,000 criminal cases languishing, including 73,000 felonies — delays justice for everyone, most notably the tens of thousands of truly violent offenders allowed to roam free and commit new crimes because their cases aren’t going to trial.
When DA Kim Ogg announced in June the plan to re-review more than 30,000 misdemeanors and state jail felonies for “alternative solutions” to jail or ankle monitors, the goal was to start with 4,000 nonviolent cases first — in theory, they’re the easiest to review because they typically don’t involve a victim.
Yet, justice in small cases must be handled the same way as big cases: fairly and carefully. Some of the evasion cases date back years, and the reasons suspects run from police vary: a passenger bolting from a car pulled over at a traffic stop where the driver had cocaine; a group of men fleeing after gambling on the street in a high-crime residential area; a man leaving the house after an assault in progress during a family disturbance. Each case invites a detailed discussion on the particulars, which Beedle and Lindsey use as a kind of Prosecution 101 class for junior colleagues.
“Some are innocuous and some are like, shootings that people are fleeing,” Beedle says. “And to train young lawyers, to give them the confidence and the skills, it takes time.”
Time is not a luxury they have. The Houston area has outgrown its court system . The county has only 367 prosecutors who handle thousands of cases every year. Two years ago, Ogg twice asked Harris County commissioners for money to hire more prosecutors, first requesting 100, then just 10. Commissioners said no, leaving the court system reeling. Ogg told the editorial board that, with 100 new prosecutors, she could clear the backlog in two years.
County commissioners have given Ogg some temporary help — funding the $3 million triage docket as a pilot program — but we urge them to listen closely when Ogg appears before them Tuesday to provide an update on the backlog and ask for an extension on funding 22 prosecutor positions handling intake on new cases. Her request for five attorneys to handle border prosecutions and cases involving violence against women aren’t related to the backlog but they are still needed.
It’s in the best interest of the county, and all residents, to give the DA the resources she needs to fight this crime wave.
Some liberals and criminal justice advocates argue that more prosecutors means more prosecutions of lower-level crimes, but in this state of triage, more prosecutions means more justice and a safer community.
When Ogg announced her intention to review thousands of cases, it wasn’t out of some desire to let people off. It was out of a realization that the backlog itself is a public safety crisis. The public expects important cases to swiftly move to trial and the longer they sit dormant, the less winnable they become. Judges need to do their part — including working full days and extra hours — to move dockets and schedule trials. Prosecutors should be focusing on newer, more serious, cases, especially violent ones, entering the system. Beedle, Lindsey and their team are willing to put in the long hours. Now the county must put in the resources to help them finish the job. Victims of crime and defendants awaiting trial are depending on it.