Tag: Texas

Judges in Harris County, Texas seek additional courts

The population of Harris County, Texas, which encompasses Houston and its environs, has swelled to nearly five million in recent years. Its local judges are seeking seven additional non-felony district courts for the county in order to keep up with the associated increase in case filings.

Houston Public Media reports:

The proposed expansion includes three new civil courts, three family courts and one juvenile court. According to Judge Latosha Lewis Payne, administrative judge for the county’s 67 district courts, the shortage of non-felony courts has led to increased legal costs and delays in case resolutions.

While six new felony courts were created last year, the county’s judicial system is still stretched thin, according to Payne, as no new non-felony district courts have been created in more than 50 years.

“We want to advocate for a balance and to address the needs of all of the aspects of the Harris County judiciary and the justice system,” Payne said. “All of our divisions are equally important.”

The request will need to go the state legislature for consideration.

Texas expands virtual court program for criminal cases

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has announced plans to expand remote court appearances for inmates using videoconferencing technology. Rather than being transported to county courthouses for hearings and other legal proceedings, inmates would appear before the court using secure video.

Video hearings offer much in the way of efficiency and even safety, relieving the state of the burden of having to transport parties to and from the courthouse. But they still need to provide all the constitutional guarantees of due process. If the video technology is unreliable or if there is a real sense that not being in the courthouse deprives a party of his or her day in court, the program would need to be revisited.

These types of video hearings took off during the pandemic, and some states made the hearings available for public viewing on YouTube or their own websites. I watched a few during that period (mostly from Michigan), and the prisons offered inmates with a hearing a private, quiet space for the videoconference. If Texas can continue that tradition, this seems like a meaningful advance for all involved.

Weekend tibdits: Dog bites man, 3L runs for judge, Arkansas judges make nice

A few interesting state court stories from the last couple of days:

  • Repairs on a courthouse elevator in Texas were delayed after the technician was bitten by a dog on his way into the building. A few rabies shots later, the tech and the elevator were both doing fine. The dog remains at large.
  • A 24-year old student at Brooklyn Law School is planning to run for magistrate judge in his local Pennsylvania community this spring, and will campaign while completing his studies. The judicial position does not require a law degree in any event. He plans to file as both a Democrat and Republican for purposes of the state primary.
  • The Arkansas Judicial Council, working to mend fences after the new chief justice attempted unsuccessfully to fire ten senior court employees, issued a formal resolution recognizing the employees’ service to the judiciary.

About that cat video…

The viral sensation of the week is this video from a virtual hearing in a Texas state court:

The apparent backstory is that the lawyer’s secretary sometimes brings her children to the office, and one of them was using the office computer and installed the cat filter without telling anyone. And we can all relate: just two days ago my young son was using my computer for a Zoom playdate, and that evening I logged into my class from what appeared to be low-earth orbit. (Fortunately, I was able to switch the background pretty quickly.)

Still, I love how the judge handled the situation. Faced with an absurd and unexpected event, he showed extraordinary patience and grace — in fact, it was the judge himself who guided the lawyer through the steps of removing the filter. Moreover, the judge’s behavior was exactly what we should expect of judges. The fact that his dignified handling of the matter has gone viral may have the marginal benefit of reminding the public that courts are overwhelmingly serious, professional, and dignified places.

Kudos to Judge Bauer, and all involved, for injecting professionalism into a moment of absurdity.

Cybersecurity breach affected federal courts

The SolarWinds cybersecurity breach that affected several federal agencies and private tech companies last month apparently also infiltrated the federal court system, according to reports. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts yesterday announced additional safeguards to protect sensitive court records. According to the AO’s press release,

Under the new procedures announced today, highly sensitive court documents (HSDs) filed with federal courts will be accepted for filing in paper form or via a secure electronic device, such as a thumb drive, and stored in a secure stand-alone computer system. These sealed HSDs will not be uploaded to CM/ECF. This new practice will not change current policies regarding public access to court records, since sealed records are confidential and currently are not available to the public.

Shades of the cyberattack that hit the Texas courts earlier this year. That involved ransomware, but it equally exposed the courts’ vulnerabilities involving modern technology

Texas commission recommends move to nonpartisan judicial elections

The fifteen-member Texas Commission on Judicial Selection has issued a formal report recommending that the state move away from partisan judicial elections in favor of nonpartisan elections. A bar majority of the commission members — eight — supported the change. But since most dissenters are state legislators, it seems unlikely that the commission’s recommendations will be followed anytime soon.

The Texas Tribune has an excellent summary and analysis here. A snippet:

“I do not believe the citizens, my constituents of the state of Texas, want this right taken away from them, and I’m not gonna be in a position or be the one who does that,” state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, said at the committee’s final meeting in December. Huffman, who served as a trial judge in Houston, and said the experience of campaigning for the bench had been valuable.

The counterargument to that came most persuasively from former judges, who have been pointing out for years that while Texans say they cherish their ability to elect judges, they typically have little idea who they’re choosing between.

In Houston, for example, there are dozens of judges on the ballot, lists long enough that even top local attorneys struggle to familiarize themselves with every candidate.

In the absence of better information, voters often turn to the demographic clues they can glean from the ballot itself. In this year’s Democratic judicial primaries, for example, female candidates got more votes than male candidates in every gender-split race, about 30. And in Republican primaries, judicial candidates with Hispanic-sounding surnames have often fared poorly, owing, experts say, to a largely white electorate.

“Judges can be elected even though no one knows who they are,” pointed out Wallace Jefferson, who was the first Black chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Instead of vetting the qualifications of the judicial hopefuls they are choosing between, he said, voters often choose based on party affiliation, “or they vote based on the sound of your name.”

 

Election 2020: a quick state court roundup

Even with all eyes trained on the Presidential election, voters in more than thirty states also cast ballots this week for (or against) state judges. Here are some of the preliminary stories coming out of Election Day:

In both Dallas County and Harris County, Texas, Democrats swept the contested judicial races, making it yet another election cycle in which a single party has taken control of the state judiciary in Texas’s two largest metro areas. In North Carolina, a party sweep of another type took place, with Republican judicial candidates winning each of their judicial races. Neither case should be seen as good news. Party sweeps strip the courts of critical judicial experience, replacing it only with a partisan fetish that a judge with an (R) or a (D) next to his name will rule in a certain way. If the judges are fair, the partisans are more often than not disappointed by some case outcomes. And if the judges give the partisans what they want every time, the integrity of the judiciary is compromised. (Just a thought: perhaps it is finally time to eliminate partisan judicial elections altogether.)

In Illinois, for the first time, a sitting supreme court justice lost his retention bid. A little less than 57% of voters chose to retain Justice Thomas Kilbride, but under the state’s unique rules, at least 60% of voters needed to favor retention for Kilbride to keep his seat. Thus we have the unusual circumstance in which a judge whom most voters wanted to retain nevertheless will have to leave the bench. (The unusual nature of Illinois’s judicial retention system has an equally unusual history, which I might try to unpack in a future blog post.)

In Tampa, Florida, a state trial judge who lost his primary race in August pushed the state supreme court not to certify this week’s judicial election results. The judge is arguing that the current state law allows judicial races to be settled in the primaries, whereas the state constitution requires that they be decided during the November general election.

And in Arizona (where ballots are still being counted as of this writing), the Maricopa County Democratic Party campaigned against the retention of two state trial judges, including the only Native American judge on the Maricopa County Superior Court. Both targeted judges were deemed by the state’s independent Commission on Judicial Performance Review to have met performance standards. Unlike Illinois, a simple majority in favor of retention is enough to keep the judges on the bench.

The challenge of reopening courts

A number of recent news stories have emphasized the reluctance of many white-collar workers to go back to the office, even when their places of business are authorized to reopen. Extensive safety precautions, combined with the ability of many employees to work effectively from home, has even led some to proclaim the death of the modern office.

As admirable a job as courts have done with videoconferencing during the coronavirus pandemic, they do not have the same luxury of transitioning everyone to a long-term work-from-home arrangement. And so courts are reopening around the country. And they are finding difficult challenges in front of them. Safety and social distancing guidelines means that there is less space for observers and unsettled questions about enforcement of safety norms. Returning judges and attorneys are also facing heavily backlogged dockets and the further postponement of trials and hearings. It will require patience and creativity to get things back on an even keel.

Face mask requirements pose a new challenge as courts reopen

Courthouses around the country are slowly reopening, with a panoply of health and social distancing guidelines. One of the most basic rules is that everyone in the courthouse must wear a face mask — a wholly sensible approach from a public health perspective. But mandatory face coverings also pose interesting new challenges for lawyers, judges, and juries, because of our reliance on facial expressions to assess emotion and credibility.

Courts are awakening to the problem, and trying to develop creative ways to permit certain participants to uncover their faces while protecting public health. One possible solution is to conduct voir dire by videoconference.  Another is to cover witness and jury boxes with clear plexiglass, an admittedly second-best solution. As one Texas judge noted,

in Harris County, the courts are already installing plexiglass to protect the clerks, court reporters and bailiffs, who sit in high-traffic areas of courtrooms.

“I joke our courtrooms are going to look like a hockey rink,” he said. “We’re not putting plexiglass up around the jury box, because we haven’t figured out how we are going to conduct the jury trials. This is an issue that’s causing a lot of concern, because people sitting in the jury box are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.”

Whatever the solution, the courtrooms will certainly feel different for a while.

Texas holds first Zoom jury trial

Yesterday, Texas held the first jury trial to be conducted exclusively through Zoom videoconferencing. The one-day summary jury trial was also livestreamed on YouTube.

This represents a major development, given that every other jurisdiction has simply postponed jury trials until courthouses reopen.  And judges are increasingly opening to the idea of remote trials in some form. On the other hand, some judges remain steadfastly opposed to trials outside the physical courtroom, and with courthouses beginning to reopen in the coming weeks, it remains to be seen how common videoconference trials will become.