State District Judge Karen Sage revoked an order Friday that would have paid jurors $27,000 each for hearing three days of testimony in a high-profile case and issued sharp comments to Travis County District Attorney José Garza, whose office initially did not object with the payments but later called them “absurd.”
Sage said that Travis County District Clerk Vela Price should pay 12 jurors and two alternates according to the law, reducing their individual payments to about $175.
In her order, Sage cited comments from Assistant District Attorney Dexter Gilford who initially said prosecutors had “no objection to even extraordinary measures to compensate the jury.” Garza’s later public statements denouncing the payments were “troubling to the court,” Sage wrote.
Her new order is the latest development in a courthouse furor that erupted earlier this week when the American-Statesman revealed the juror payments in the now-dismissed cases against former Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody and former assistant county attorney Jason Nassour. Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed jurors should receive more than the standard $58 per day after they remained on call while prosecutors appealed one of Sage’s decisions that they said gutted their case. The appeal lasted two years.
“We thank the jurors for being on call for the two years that they were waiting for this matter to be resolved,” Price, the district clerk, told the Statesman. “The law says we have to pay them for being in attendance, in court, and we are following the law.”