After years of turmoil that damaged public confidence in the El Paso District Attorney\u2019s Office, newly released data shows progress under District Attorney James Montoya \u2013 though legal experts say the numbers also reveal unresolved challenges.<\/p>\n
The report presented snapshots of misdemeanor and felony metrics beginning with the last year of Jaime Esparza\u2019s administration in 2019 and continuing through Yvonne Rosales\u2019 troubled tenure from 2020 to 2022, Bill Hicks efforts to rebuild the office in 2023 and 2024 and Montoya\u2019s first complete year in 2025.<\/p>\n
El Paso Inc. spoke with attorneys and retired judges with extensive knowledge of the DA\u2019s office to review the data and provide insight into the current state of prosecutions in El Paso.<\/p>\n
Nearly everyone interviewed expressed optimism that the dysfunction that plagued the office during Rosales\u2019s administration has ended. They credited Hicks with rebuilding staffing levels and addressing thousands of backlogged cases, while also recognizing Montoya\u2019s role in maintaining that momentum.<\/p>\n
\u201cBill Hicks started that process, but these numbers clearly indicate that our criminal case filing process at the DA\u2019s office is functioning the way it should be,\u201d said attorney Justin Underwood, an El Paso trial lawyer who was one of a number of high-profile figures who pushed for Rosales\u2019 resignation at the end of 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think these numbers are strong indicators that we have a functioning district attorney\u2019s office that actually knows how to screen, assess and properly file cases,\u201d Underwood said. \u201cI can say that the people of our area should be generally pleased with the work that Mr. Montoya and his team are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Montoya\u2019s office in 2025 recorded the highest number of felony cases \u201cdisposed\u201d \u2013 either dismissed, resolved in trial or settled through plea agreements \u2013 with 8,804 cases disposed and a conviction rate of 54%. His office also resolved more family violence felony cases than any other administration covered in the report, with 544 cases disposed and a conviction rate of 45%.<\/p>\n
The DA\u2019s office also received high marks for its prosecution of child sex felonies. Montoya\u2019s office had a conviction rate of 72%, with 41 of the 57 cases ending in guilty verdicts or guilty pleas.<\/p>\n
Hicks, whose administration from 2023 to 2024 handled 71 child sex felony cases with a conviction rate of 46%, said he was impressed with Montoya\u2019s team in those cases.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are some of the hardest cases to prosecute in the criminal justice system, and his SVU unit proved themselves well in 2025,\u201d said Hicks, who was appointed to replace Rosales and then lost to Montoya in the 2024 election.<\/p>\n
Hicks raised concerns, however, about the homicide data in Montoya\u2019s report, which showed 46 resolved cases with \u201conly 28 convictions for his homicide cases and having an unusually high number of 18 cases dismissed or not guilty,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat low conviction to not-guilty rate is concerning, especially considering the people in the homicide unit that he failed to retain when taking over from my administration,\u201d Hicks said.<\/p>\n
Hicks added that it was difficult to fully assess the effectiveness of Montoya\u2019s homicide prosecutions because it was unclear whether the data included capital murder or intoxicated manslaughter cases.<\/p>\n
When Montoya released the report Jan. 9, he stressed one metric: a reduction in the case backlog from December 2024 to December 2025.<\/p>\n
For December 2024, the report shows more than 4,700 pending misdemeanor cases and more than 7,000 pending felony cases \u2013 a total of nearly 12,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of December 2025, we had reduced the active pending caseload by almost 2,000 cases. We reduced the felony caseload by 1,000 cases and the misdemeanor caseload also by approximately 1,000,\u201d Montoya said. \u201cThis is the overarching headline that I\u2019m most proud of, and it is the reduction in the number of pending cases that we have here in our courthouse.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tackling the case backlog<\/p>\n
At the height of the campaign to remove Rosales from office, estimates of the backlog ranged from 10,000 to 14,000 cases, though exact figures were never disclosed. Montoya\u2019s report shows pending cases steadily increasing beginning in 2019 under Esparza, then accelerating during Rosales\u2019 administration.<\/p>\n
During that period \u2013 marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and turmoil in the DA\u2019s office \u2013 cases presented by area law enforcement agencies were bottlenecked in the intake section. Although the cases were logged, many were never assigned attorneys or court dates.<\/p>\n
According to the current DA\u2019s office, the region\u2019s 40 law enforcement agencies presented the Rosales administration with a total of 63,872 cases for possible prosecution \u2013 more than 25,000 in 2020, about 17,000 in 2021 and more than 21,000 in 2022.<\/p>\n
During his recent press conference, Montoya confirmed the backlog of cases during the Rosales administration was \u201cabout 10,000 cases, 14,000 cases\u201d and also announced that the \u201cbacklog in our intake section, \u2026 that is gone. Those cases have been filed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosales declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Retired El Paso County Magistrate Judge Penny Hamilton reviewed the DA\u2019s new report and disputes the claim that Montoya eliminated the backlog.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t, based on the data that he showed,\u201d she told El Paso Inc. \u201cIn looking at these metrics, one of the things that stood out to me is he kept saying he disposed of 10,000 cases, that he got rid of the backlog and disposed of 10,000 cases, and I do not see that in the data anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hamilton oversaw the jail magistrate courts and worked for more than 20 years in the DA\u2019s office with Esparza. She was hired by Hicks to help tackle the case backlog.<\/p>\n
Eliminating the backlog in the intake section, she said, occurred under Hicks\u2019 administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a heroic effort that we ended up filing almost 20,000 cases in 2023. That, to me, was clearing out the backlog,\u201d Hamilton said. \u201cThat happened in 2023 and 2024. And when those cases got filed, then they ended up going into the courts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Montoya\u2019s statistics show Hicks filed 37,204 cases in 2023 and 2024. In 2023, his office filed 19,766 cases \u2013 the most cases filed by any administration in the report, including Esparza\u2019s final year in 2019.<\/p>\n
Montoya\u2019s office filed 16,840 cases in 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen his administration started, the DA\u2019s office was already back on track for getting the cases filed,\u201d Hamilton said.<\/p>\n
Matthew James Kozik, an El Paso criminal defense attorney who has also been a prosecutor, reviewed the data and was surprised by the number of cases resulting in not-guilty rulings.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat stands out, and has to be concerning to any resident of El Paso, is the fact that of the approximately 8,517 misdemeanor cases charged, 5,374 of those charged were found not guilty \u2013 a staggering 63%,\u201d Kozik said in an email.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat means out of 10 residents of El Paso charged, 6.3 residents were found not guilty,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kozik noted that nearly half of the more than 8,000 felony cases filed in 2025 also resulted in not-guilty findings. The total number of misdemeanor and felony cases filed in 2025 was 16,840, and 9,404 not-guilty rulings were made that year, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOverall, in cases brought by the El Paso District Attorney\u2019s Office, 56% are found not guilty \u2013 that is a staggering high number,\u201d said Kozik, who added that these numbers \u201cappear not to show progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
The misdemeanor conviction rate under Esparza in 2019 was 45%, while the felony rate was 69%, the highest in the report. Misdemeanor conviction rates plunged under Rosales, hitting a low of 20% in 2021, before rising to an average of 29% under Hicks and 30% in 2025 under Montoya.<\/p>\n
Felony conviction rates dropped from Esparza\u2019s 2019 high of 69% to 65% under Rosales in 2020. In 2021, it plunged to 43% before rising in 2022. Hicks had a felony conviction rate of 59% in both 2023 and 2024. Under Montoya, the overall felony conviction rate fell to 54%.<\/p>\n
\u201cEither the district attorney\u2019s office is more concerned with metrics and increasing charged offenses, therefore bringing low-quality cases yet having the lives of these falsely accused El Pasoans upended for years, or there needs to be a significant increase in trial advocacy skills training within the DA\u2019s office,\u201d Kozik said.<\/p>\n
It could also be, he said, that \u201cthe El Paso defense bar easily controls the tempo and outcome of this jurisdiction,\u201d said Kozik, adding that \u201cthe results in the El Paso Walmart shooting case, i.e. a plea deal that accomplished nothing, would suggest the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials from the DA\u2019s office cautioned that the data reflects cases at varying stages, some originating in prior years, and that year-by-year analysis may not fully capture an administration\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n
Still, the release of the internal data by the region\u2019s top law enforcement agency provided a rare view for the public and the legal community.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn looking at the statistics that DA Montoya compiled, I was moved by how hard everyone at the DA\u2019s office had been working from 2023 through the last days of my administration, and clearly continuing through DA Montoya\u2019s administration,\u201d Hicks said.<\/p>\n
Montoya described the release of the data as an \u201cunprecedented\u201d decision by his office, and said it\u2019s part of keeping a promise he made to El Paso voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the campaign, I tried to make it a point that, in my opinion, being transparent is more than simply answering questions or making oneself available for questions,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about being open and honest about what is actually happening in our court system, not just in one case or two cases or three cases, but systematically.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After years of turmoil that damaged public confidence in the El Paso District Attorney\u2019s Office, newly released data…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[61519,61574,61518,294,10813,2314,10810,4383,138,31717,140,139,3697,2461,10811,61522,7403,48,865,61521,10812,61520,636,49657,61523,26112,10815],"class_list":["post-147785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-acquittal","tag-case-backlog","tag-conviction-rate","tag-crime","tag-crimes","tag-criminal-justice","tag-criminal-law","tag-district-attorney","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-district-attorney","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-felony","tag-homicide","tag-issues-in-ethics","tag-judiciaries","tag-justice","tag-law","tag-law-enforcement","tag-legal-procedure","tag-misconduct","tag-misdemeanor","tag-murder","tag-plea","tag-plea-bargain","tag-prosecutor","tag-public-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}