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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gary Polland<\/a>, a Houston attorney and publisher of the Texas Conservative Review<\/a>, says we aren\u2019t quite out of the woods yet. \u201cWe had a backlog related to hurricanes and COVID, and they\u2019ve made progress,\u201d he explained. \u201cBut have they eliminated the backlog? No. You can only try one case at a time in a court.\u201d<\/p>\n He says one of the biggest factors in the continuation of the backlog has been staffing at the DA\u2019s office. According to Polland: \u201cThere\u2019s a number of courts that only have two lawyers when typically they have three. What happens when you\u2019re overloaded as a prosecutor is you don\u2019t have time to think about a case.\u201d<\/p>\n Polland went on to call for the DA\u2019s office to request\u2014and be given\u2014more funding to hire more lawyers from the county commissioners so this backlog can truly be eliminated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare recently held a press conference announcing what could be a defining victory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,66,223,27],"class_list":["post-211157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-local","tag-news","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211157","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=211157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}