Harris County Commissioners Court this week approved a package of public safety measures to support state legislation to create additional district courts, expand the county's holistic assistance response team program and look at enlarging the public defender's office. The measures are aimed at ongoing efforts to reduce the ongoing backlog in the county's criminal courts system and relieve persistent jail overcrowding.
The Texas Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would eliminate a requirement to investigate all deaths in county jails, making deaths from presumed natural causes exempt. Advocates say if it becomes law, jails could escape accountability for medical neglect. The state has required an outside law enforcement agency to investigate all jail deaths since 2017, with the passage of the Sandra Bland Act.
A bill that would allow for the removal of district attorneys who institute non-prosecution policies has passed the Texas Senate with bipartisan support. Senate Bill 20, authored by Sen. Joan Huffman (R-Houston), passed the Senate earlier this month. The proposal passed by a vote of 20 to 11, with Sen. Juan Hinojosa (D-McAllen) voting alongside Republicans.
Webb County Commissioners Court will meet Tuesday to discuss various issues including the submission of different grants that will benefit pre-trial services and a juvenile drug treatment court program. An item on the agenda establishes discussion and possible action to authorize Pre-Trial Services to submit a 2023-24 multi-year grant application to the Texas Commission on Indigent Defense.
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Obel Cruz-Garcia, a 46-year-old Dominican man who did not speak English, sat in a Houston courtroom on a Friday in July 2013. He faced a jury that would decide whether to sentence him to death for the gruesome killing of 6-year-old Angelo Garcia — a crime he has maintained he did not commit. His life, quite literally, depended on the outcome of the case.
A Texas bill that would require a 10-year prison sentence for people who use a gun while committing a felony has drawn concern from two groups that aren’t usually on the same side of legislative debates: criminal justice reform advocates and gun rights groups.
Like all teenagers, Fred Harris longed for freedom. At 18, he was small: 5 feet tall, 98 pounds. He also acted much younger than his age, which meant other kids bullied him. His mother, Dallas Garcia, told The Appeal and Type Investigations, “[He] didn’t understand, like, just extremely how different he was.”
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It'd be easy to make Jeanie Ortiz the poster child for all that ails the Harris County court system. After all, when you scroll through the indigent defense data for Texas, Ortiz is the only defense attorney in the county who raked in more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars representing low-income defendants last year.
It’s been almost two years since Jaquaree Simmons died after being found unconscious in the Harris County Jail. Shortly after, 11 employees were fired and another six were suspended without pay. But in the months since, his mother LaRhonda Biggles has waited to see how many of them would face criminal charges in the death of her 23-year-old son.
