Harris County Novel Idea to Protect Public Safety- Give Up!



The number of criminal cases pending before Harris County courts stands at more than 94,000.

That includes 41,000 misdemeanors and 53,000 felonies, numbers so high that if prosecutors stopped filing criminal charges tomorrow, it would take misdemeanor judges a year to clear their dockets; felony judges would need 19 months, based on their average pace for closing cases since 2017.

* * * *

The backlog is so high that the Justice Management Institute, a Colorado nonprofit that has helped the county improve its criminal justice system since the early 2000s, offered a startling proposal last summer: Dismiss most nonviolent felony cases more than 9 months old, which would allow judges to focus on disposing the newest and most serious cases, including murders, rapes and assaults. Piecemeal solutions would be inadequate, the group said.

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