Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare recently held a press conference announcing what could be a defining victory for his career: finally defeating the massive Harris County criminal case backlog.
During the conference, he touted the fact that the total number of pending cases in Harris County is now below pre-pandemic levels. But many Houstonians are still wondering if the problem has really been solved for good.
Gary Polland, a Houston attorney and publisher of the Texas Conservative Review, says we aren’t quite out of the woods yet. “We had a backlog related to hurricanes and COVID, and they’ve made progress,” he explained. “But have they eliminated the backlog? No. You can only try one case at a time in a court.”
He says one of the biggest factors in the continuation of the backlog has been staffing at the DA’s office. According to Polland: “There’s a number of courts that only have two lawyers when typically they have three. What happens when you’re overloaded as a prosecutor is you don’t have time to think about a case.”
Polland went on to call for the DA’s office to request—and be given—more funding to hire more lawyers from the county commissioners so this backlog can truly be eliminated.