Jury building to help Houston court system deal with backlog

Efforts to reduce a backlog of tens of thousands of cases in Texas’ busiest court system got a boost Monday with the reopening of a newly restored building for jury selection.

Officials and attorneys say bringing some normalcy back to the jury selection process is one of many solutions needed to bring relief to the criminal justice system in Houston Harris County s criminal courthouse is still under repair following damage from Hurricane Harvey and there are more than 89,000 pending felony and misdemeanor cases — a number that grew during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’ll make a difference but I’m not going to pretend like the jury assembly room is open, all of a sudden we’re going to get to (needed case clearance rates). That’s not going to be the case overnight,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s top elected administrator, said Monday.

Harris County, the country’s third most populous county, isn’t alone in facing growing court backlogs due to the pandemic. Other states, including Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, have also dealt with backlogs. But Harris County is unique in that even before the pandemic, its criminal justice system slowed down to a crawl because of Hurricane Harvey

The Jury Assembly Building in downtown Houston had been closed since being inundated by at least six feet of water during Harvey in 2017. Severe flooding damage to the assembly building and the criminal courthouse across the street greatly slowed the flow and resolution of criminal cases in Harris County.

Jury selection for trials moved to cramped, outdated buildings before the process was shut down by the pandemic in the spring of 2020. When the jury selection process resumed in the fall of 2020, it was moved nine miles away to NRG Arena, a county owned facility that usually hosts concerts and trade shows.

Many defense attorneys did not like the move to the arena as potential jurors had to be spaced sufficiently apart due to the pandemic in makeshift courtrooms where attorneys could not always see facial expressions or body language that they normally use in picking a jury panel, said Joe Vinas, president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association.

“It was not, in my opinion, a constitutionally sufficient method to select a jury,” said Vinas, who added he was “very happy” jury selection had returned on Monday to downtown Houston.

Some judges also resisted having jury selection in the arena, said Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess.

“We have been able to satisfy and provide juries for anybody that wanted one but many, many people did not want to do it,” Burgess said.

Vinas said he used to tell his clients that a case could be finished in about a year. Now he has cases that are taking four to five years to complete.

“It’s not good for anyone to have this many cases sitting out when we don’t have the infrastructure in Harris County to manage them,” Vinas said.

Hidalgo said county officials are hoping to address the backlog as well as rising violent crime with a budget for fiscal year 2023 that includes $1.4 billion for justice and safety programs. Some of the initiatives the county is hoping to fund include money to hire visiting and associate judges, to improve starting salaries for prosecutors and to improve systems for processing and sharing evidence such as body camera footage.

Although officials will only be able to have about 522 people in the repaired jury assembly building, which is half of the number of people that could be in the facility pre-pandemic, Burgess said this is a good first step

“I think we will start having an impact in working on the backlog by being back here,” she said.

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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70