San Antonio Judges Oppose Repeating Harris County's Mistakes With Bail Reform

 

Judges in Bexar County say they are open to making changes to help ensure people aren’t jailed here exclusively because they can’t afford bail, but they resoundingly rejected — and questioned the legality of — a celebrated reform plan recently enacted in Houston.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff convened area misdemeanor judges Tuesday, hoping they would agree to revisions similar to the ones adopted in Harris County. Under that plan, the vast majority of people charged with misdemeanors would qualify for release on no-cash bonds. Harris County’s previous system was declared unconstitutional for creating “wealth-based detention.”

But misdemeanor judges here balked, arguing they don’t have the authority to make that call and that the Harris County plan may run afoul of state law.

“There’s got to be a distinction between what we want as a matter of what’s right and fair, which is nobody should be held in jail because of lack of money — we’re all on board with that,” said County Court-at-Law Judge John Longoria, the administrative head of the misdemeanor courts here.

“Now, can we as judges decide that we’re not going to have cash bond in Bexar County? In our opinion, as judges, no, because that’s a legislative issue.”

The Texas Code of Criminal Procedure dictates rules on setting bail amounts, but county benches also codify administrative rules for magistrates to follow. Magistrates are the judges that preside over bail hearings in Texas.

Harris County used that mechanism to say 85 percent of people arrested for misdemeanors could get no-cash bonds, with exceptions for those arrested for bond violations, repeated drunken driving and family violence.

Longoria said the plan went too far, even though it doesn’t entirely eliminate cash bonds. Their desired outcome would require a fix from the Texas Legislature, he said.

It’s unclear whether that is true, but one could be in the works. State Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, is again pushing for statewide bail reform. Wolff said he supports that initiative and thinks it has a genuine shot to pass this year, though he noted bond companies would lobby against it.

Regardless, the county officials said they would pursue local reform in other ways.

“They’re not buying into this,” Wolff said of the county’s judges. “But what they’re willing to do is look at other avenues for us to solve the problem… So there’s a positive attitude toward looking to do that, but there is not a positive attitude to go this far.”

Perhaps the most potent of those avenues is prosecutor discretion. One of the judges in the meeting noted that newly-elected District Attorney Joe Gonzales can have a lot of influence at bail hearings, Wolff said.

Judges recently allowed public defenders to represent all defendants at the hearings, a policy that Wolff and other county commissioners had championed for a long time. Bexar joins Harris County as the only counties in Texas to offer that service to all defendants, and Wolff said it’s a reform that could lead to others.

“If they’re in sync,” he said of prosecutors and public defenders, “they can recommend in many of those cases not to issue a cash bond.”

OnExpressNews.com: San Antonio's greenhouse gas emissions are tied mostly to energy use in buildings, vehicles' exhaust 

Gonzales, who was in Washington on Tuesday and did not attend the judges’ meeting, said his office is working on a plan to do just that. He has instructed prosecutors to explore when they can ask judges for personal recognizance bonds, which allow defendants to be released on the condition they promise to appear at their next court date without having to post a cash bond. He is working on guidelines to provide prosecutors in the next month or so.

“That’s something that we can immediately do to alleviate the necessity to go to jail,” Gonzales said, emphasizing that they would do so in misdemeanor cases when the defendant doesn’t pose a risk to the community. But the decision whether to grant the no-cash bond would still come from judges, he said.

In convening Tuesday’s meeting, Wolff and Longoria wrote that they were concerned people were being jailed here “only because of cash bond requirements.” Sheriff Javier Salazar has said roughly 120 people are jailed in Bexar County every week on low-bail, misdemeanor charges.

The officials said Tuesday the county has already made progress. Wolff made criminal justice reform a top priority when campaigning for a new term last year, but the county’s efforts have rarely been implemented without resistance or blunders.

The public defenders’ presence at bail hearings is one of those reforms, but it took time for judges to agree to it. Another is a revamped cite-and-release program under Gonzales, which would allow people accused of certain low-level crimes to receive citations instead of being arrested in the first place. A pilot program under Gonzales’ predecessor, Nico LaHood, was marred by problems from the start.

And in December, the county opened a $33-million facility to process the people it arrests. Officials hailed the new building as a state-of-the-art replacement for the city facility it had previously been using, but it created a rift with San Antonio police, who objected to certain design aspects. The police department, which accounts for about 60 percent of arrests in the county, refused to move to the new building.

Some of those efforts gained new urgency in December after the death of Janice Dotson-Stephens, a grandmother with mental illness who died in the Bexar County jail after spending five months behind bars on a criminal trespass charge. Her bond was just $300, and her death drew the rebuke of people ranging from presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris to professional football player Doug Baldwin.

Wolff said the county is considering bolstering mental health assessments at the jail, a system that failed in Dotson-Stephens’ case. While Tuesday’s meeting didn’t go as he hoped, Wolff said it was a positive step toward progress.

“It’s very, very hard to change an existing system that’s been in place for decades,” Wolff said.

To see more CLICK HERE.

Analysis-

County politician is pushing a failed system that even the Harris County district attorneys says has increased crime.  SEE HERE.

The Houston Police Officer's Union has issued report saying that the failure to appear rate for misdemeanor courts, under the new system, is 75%.  Yes you read that right.  SEE HERE.

Under this new system, the backlog has grown so much that 72% of misdemeanor cases were dismissed in 2021 and 2020.  SEE HERE (see B-2).

Finally, the system used by Harris County fails to comply with SB-6 passed by the Texas Legislature because it requires a court to review the defendant's criminal history before bail is set.  Harris County misdemeanor courts are ignoring Texas law and hiding behind a settlement in the ODonnell case.  The problem with this is that ODonnell was reversed in January of 2022 and Harris County refuses to do anything to come into compliance with Texas law.