Harris County is adding 3 new felony courts
Three new felony courts with a $9.2 million budget are expected to open this week, in what officials say is the final stretch in tackling a backlog of criminal cases that have piled up over the past six years.
The Legislature-approved courts — the 486th, 487th and the 488th District Courts — will start their dockets Monday in the criminal courthouse to whittle down the number of felony cases that backed up after
Hurricane Harvey and during the pandemic. The introduction of one other court at 1201 Franklin has helped reduce the pending cases to levels not seen since March 2020, when the pandemic shuttered the courts and forced proceedings to continue online or socially distanced. The jail population also increased during the pandemic.
To start, nearly 4,000 cases from the existing 23 felony courts will be picked at random and divided among the new dockets, said Amanda Cain, spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the District Courts.
The existing courts tackled an average of 1,460 cases in August — a 38% decrease since the pandemic’s peak in July 2021, county records show.
One indication that more cases are reaching a resolution is that the courthouse has been bustling with trials for months as each day puts the pandemic further behind. Jurors on Tuesday heard a burglary defendant’s testimony in the 482nd District Court about using methamphetamines one fateful night in 2021, while jurors in the 338th District Court convicted a man, Gerald Dewayne Washington, and sentenced him to life in prison for killing a woman in 2017 and going on to fatally shoot a man three years later.
The new courts, which will open on the 20th and 14th floors, may push the pending cases to a more manageable level, officials said. Specialty drug courts and the emergency relief docket, which handles older
cases, have been moved to the Family Law Center to make room.
The number of pending cases began declining in July 2021, around when Harris County’s first new court in decades — the 482nd District Court — opened its doors. The new court was heralded as a step in reducing the backlog and an attempt to catch up with the county’s population growth since the creation of the 351st District Court in 1984, when an estimated 2,757,361 residents called Harris County home.
The U.S. Census Bureau counted 4,731,145 people in the county in 2020.
Judge Latosha Lewis Payne, administrative judge over the civil and criminal courts, expects the new courts to make a dent “immediately.”
“Harris County has experienced staggering growth over the last four decades,” Payne said in a statement. This week, “the Harris County criminal district courts will be more able to address the needs of victims and the due process rights of defendants.”
The creation of the courts stems from House Bill 3474, which also allowed the county to spend millions of dollars to staff them with prosecutors, coordinators, clerks, bailiffs and judges.
A cast of rotating jurists will handle the new courts until Gov. Greg Abbott announces who will temporarily oversee those benches, said Susan Brown, judge for the Eleventh Administrative Judicial Region of Texas.
A short-list of lawyers who may run for those new courts in 2024 is already making the rounds among courthouse insiders.
The latest county budget has allocated $9.3 million for the courts. District Attorney Kim Ogg’s office received the most when compared with other criminal justice stakeholders — $3.6 million that her spokesman Joe Stinebaker said would be used to assign three prosecutors to each court, as well as investigators, paralegals and victim assistance coordinators to help them. The office had not finalized which prosecutors would oversee which courts, Stinebaker said.
The budget allotted $1.5 million for the district clerk’s office and an additional $1.1 million to the courts, records show.
The backlog in cases started after the devastating 2017 hurricane that flooded the criminal courthouse and upended proceedings for thousands of cases that were pending trial, according to county data. That August ended with about 19,800 pending felonies — 8,380 of which involved jailed defendants, the data shows. The number of pending cases crept up in the months that followed as courts were forced to operate elsewhere.
The courts had not returned to normal by the time the global pandemic closed them again and caused pending cases to more than double. The jail population filled with the bulk of defendants awaiting trial on violent charges, jail records show. Many inmates were shipped to Louisiana and elsewhere in Texas to make room.
In August, Jason Spencer, spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff ’s Office, called on trials for jailed defendants to get moving as nearly 900 inmates in the Harris County Jail were charged with murder or capital murder, more than ever before.
He recently expressed worry that the cases were not being prioritized and that defendants were unwilling to consider a plea deal unless their trial was imminent.
Ogg and police advocates recently backed changes to state law that now require courts to prioritize pending murder and capital murder cases. The law previously required courts to prioritize cases that included those with jailed defendants, allegations of family violence and child victims.