Facts Are Usually Something Not in Dispute
In Harris County a lawsuit was filed saying that the county must change its misdemeanor criminal justice system. At the time it was a system where defendants failed to appear 10% or less of the time.
After new judges were elected, the county and the judges vowed to settle the litigation and to give the plaintiffs what they wanted. So they did. The settlement did not make incremental changes to the criminal justice system. The county and the judges threw out the old system and created a new one. They argued that the new system would be a shining beacon for the rest of the country.
The new system assumed that most defendants would appear for court without a bondsman. The county spent over $100 million to implement this new system. Of these funds, a portion was spent to make changes to the district clerk's website so that the county could track the failure to appear rates, which was required by the settlement. In the settlement, the county agreed that defendants could fail to appear three times before the county could take negative action against the defendant.
The Harris County district clerk is the official recordkeeper for the courts. So the clerk's records represent the court's records.
Over the last year, there has been a dispute over what the failure to appear rate is for the misdemeanor courts in Harris County. The monitor issues a report every six months setting out one number. The district attorney issued a report stating that the failure to appear rate was over 50%. The Houston Police Officer's Union issued a report concluding that the failure to appear rate is even higher at over 75%.
In an attempt to find the true "facts," two years of data was downloaded from the district clerk's website and made available on a new site to allow the public to see the actual failure to appear rate for each misdemeanor court in Harris County for any day in the last two years. The public can see for itself if defendants are not appear for court and the court's are not holding them accountable for it.
The numbers are jaw dropping. The average failure to appear rate for 2022 for all 16 misdemeanor court year to date is over 80%. This number is so large that this is not something that can be hidden. It is something that is very evident any morning when anyone walks through the halls of the misdemeanor courts. The halls are empty.
So, an individual is arrested and they are released under the new reforms on a free personal bond without ever seeing a judge. The statistics say that there is over an 80% chance that the defendant will not appear for court and the stats that Harris County reports to the state demonstrate that there is a 72% chance that the case will be dismissed.
So what is the impact from these misdemeanor reforms? First, the failures to appear have skyrocketed. The current system is 800 times worse than the system it replaced. Second, the courts are not doing anything about it. Even though the courts are required to issue a judgment nisi when a defendant fails to appear for court, the misdemeanor do not do so. Therefore, when a defendant fails to appear for court and discovers that the court is not going to do anything about it, it would be natural that other defendants would see this and conclude that they did not have to appear for court as well.
When the defendants fail to appear at rates of 80% or more, then these numbers are known by the courts and the elected officials. They know the numbers. But they are not sharing them with the public. Why? Could it be because they spent over $100 million implementing this boondoggle?
However, the problems with these reforms do not stop in Harris County misdemeanors. The advocates for change have held up these reforms and have argued that they work. Reformers appears in Ohio over the summer arguing that the Ohio legislature should adopt these same reforms and apply them to the entire state of Ohio. Therefore, it would be natural for their use to bleed over into felony cases as well - and that has happened in Harris County. But the result has been that the bad failure to appear rates that are found in the misdemeanor cases are also showing up in felony cases.
When reformers go to other states and argue that the other states should adopt the Harris County reforms as the gold standard of what reform should look like, they never disclose that the District Attorney published a report stating that the failure to appear rate was over 50%. They never disclose that the Houston Police Officers' Union found that the failures to appear were over 75%. No one discloses that to prevent the current system from collapsing the misdemeanor courts are dismissing 72% of the cases disposed in 2020 and 2021.
Harris County's own records demonstrate that the misdemeanor reforms are not working. Instead, defendants are arrested, they never see a judge and they are released on a free personal bond. They then have over an 80% chance that they will not return to court and a 72% chance that their case will be dismissed. This is starting to feel like this is not criminal justice reform. It is starting to feel like a backdoor decriminalization of misdemeanor crime setting Harris County on track to follow the bad example of California.
To see more CLICK HERE.
Additional resources:
Timeline for what happened in Harris County- CLICK HERE.
The Harris County Court Watch Website- CLICK HERE.
The District Attorneys' Report stating that FTA's were over 50%- CLICK HERE.
The Report Issued by the Houston Police Officer's Union- CLICK HERE.
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