‘We will no longer hear that justice delayed is justice denied’

HAYS COUNTY — Hays County courts have long struggled with an immense load of backlogged criminal cases. Now, there might be some relief and justice finally served.

The Hays County Commissioners Court unanimously approved four new positions and related equipment and expenses for the District Attorney’s (DA) Office during its regular meeting on March 28.

During the meeting, First Assistant DA Gregg Cox shed some light on the two-part request and current state of the DA’s Office. Ultimately, the new positions are geared to help reduce a backlog of unfiled cases in the DA’s Office and provide more comprehensive services for domestic violence and stalking victims.

According to agenda documents, the annualized financial impact is $436,538. Salary savings within the General Fund have been identified to fund the request for the remainder of the Fiscal Year 2023 at $195,081, and will be budgeted accordingly for the Fiscal Year 2024.

Cox, who, along with DA Kelly Higgins, both took office following the November 2022 election, said that a healthy intake unit would give an office of the DA’s size between 800 and 1,200 cases a year in an unfiled status, with 1,200 being a “bad scenario.”

“We ran the numbers when we came into office and discovered that we had [more than] 5,600 cases in our backlog. That is a staggering amount of cases in that status. We started digging into it and discovered that we had offenses and arrest dates from summer and fall of 2021 that still had not been given to an attorney for review as to whether or not [to] proceed with charges, which is completely unacceptable,” Cox said. “It harms victims. It harms the defendants. It harms the jail overcrowding situation.”

Cox explained that the office’s intake backlog is broken into two categories: cases in “OR” status and cases in intake status. OR status indicates that staff still has the case file and are working to prepare it for an attorney to review. Once assigned to an attorney, the case is moved to intake status.

The majority of the cases in the DA’s Office were in OR status. Cox stated that the previous administration had built a process as an “overreaction to the passage of the Michael Morton Act” that kept these cases in this limbo-like status for a long period of time. The act is intended to reduce wrongful convictions by creating an “open-file” policy for county and district attorneys to disclose evidence to the defense.

“They were building the entire case file before they even let a lawyer look at the file,” Cox said. “We’re having to do a lot of repair work, a lot of changes, to fix this problem. We dealt as much as we could with existing staff. We revamped our process for building the files, we reorganized our support staff into a completely different way of looking at this thing and we’ve made great progress.”

Cox said the office has taken cases in OR status from more than 4,000 in mid-January to about 2,000. The future is looking bright, too. As of Feb. 1, all new cases are being handled differently — they’re getting a file built and assigned to a prosecutor within five days of hitting the office. But, while new cases are moving fast, the intake backlog is what’s lagging and where additional support is needed.

Through the request, the additional two lawyers and one legal assistant would comprise an intake unit dedicated to moving the backlog forward. This will also help provide a structure to prevent a backlog from occurring again, Cox said.

“There’s always been a priority for people sitting in jail but for defendants out of jail on bond, those have always taken a backburner. Some of those cases are very, very old even though they deserve attention and they deserve quick action,” he added.

The second part of the office’s request is in a similar vein, but focused on domestic violence victims. Cox said that the DA recognized that there is inadequate staff to handle domestic violence cases at the “level of importance they deserve.”

While the office currently has victim assistance coordinators (VACs) and one is assigned to each court, this does not give them the bandwidth to dedicate someone to all of the special needs that come along with cases like this.

“They need to be able to move from court to court and assist with safety planning, lethality assessments … We want to engage with them earlier,” Cox said. “What we’re finding on these older cases is we’re reaching out to the victims and they have moved on. That’s a different part of their life. They don’t want to pursue the case anymore. They may have reunited with their abuser.”

Cox said that by having a dedicated VAC for domestic violence cases, a relationship with these victims would be better established and they can be better protected moving forward. By adding a VAC, protective orders are also likely to increase. Protective orders are a civil action that grants victims two years of legal protection from their attacker. As such, a paralegal is also needed to be assigned specifically on working on these applications.

“We understand that a mid-year request is an unusual way to approach things but we came in with what the prior administration had asked for and had built, and they did not build enough bandwidth into the attorney ranks to do this,” Cox told the commissioners.

Overall, the court was supportive of the DA’s request, including Judge Ruben Becerra.

“You are dealing with people’s lives. Their livelihoods. These are our neighbors. Whether they’re guilty or innocent, we need to give them their day in court,” Becerra said. “Leaving them in jail for an unnecessary amount of time serves no one. It doesn’t benefit the taxpayer, it doesn’t benefit the residents of our community.”

With the approval of the request, Higgins believes the office will be able to catch up within six months.

“It’s very true that the delay that’s represented in our backlog has hurt not only defendants who have speedy trial rights, but victims who [have] been disregarded and ignored by the system — by the DA’s Office, not the system. This office,” Higgins said. “They re-accommodate. They find other ways to readjust to life. You go a year without hearing from the DA’s Office about your dead child who was killed in an intoxicated manslaughter, you stop believing that that office cares at all.”

“[It’s] pretty optimistic, but within six months we’ll be caught up through the backlog. We’ll have the intake division established going forward so that five-day period is routine and not just the newest thing we can do,” he continued. “We will no longer be hearing that justice delayed is justice denied.”