Harris County had big plans to reform its criminal justice system. What went wrong? Houston-area DA Kim Ogg in crisis.
This story was produced in partnership with the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing. It was 2016, and history was being made in Houston. For the first time in 40 years, a rapidly changing Harris County had elected a Democrat as its top prosecutor—arguably the most influential role over criminal justice policy in the state’s most populous county.
accused of relatively minor nonviolent crimes, including crimes associated with poverty, like trespassing and theft. In February 2024, as Ogg fights to remain in office and early voting is about to begin, she’s in a war in Houston politics—not against police groups and conservative activists who have defied and even
Ahead of a March 5 primary, Ogg had been admonished by the Harris County Democratic Party and out-fundraised by challenger Sean Teare, a former employee. Part of Ogg’s“No one person or office can be blamed for the problems in the criminal justice system in a place as massive as Harris County,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “But politically, that doesn’t always matter … she’s made enemies.
Soon after, her office began pursuing fewer nonviolent juvenile cases, which dropped from about 3,500 new misdemeanor cases filed in 2016 to fewer than 500 last year. Some of the lawyers Ogg dismissed seemed likely targets, those tied to overzealous prosecutions, scandals, or tightly connected to Ogg’s predecessor and opponent. But Ogg also axed some who were well-respected for their work in specialized areas like innocence review and public integrity. —again before her job had officially started—and blasted some of the soon-to-be unemployed lawyers.
Ogg found even more detractors when she changed how the office decided whether to pursue criminal charges. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office has long used a rare, well-loved system for accepting cases: Instead of first reviewing a police file sometime after a person has been arrested and taken to jail, local law enforcement agencies often consult a prosecutor by phone who decides on the spot whether to accept the case as it stands.
Ogg overhauled the division, eliminating the rotation and instead staffing intake positions with people whose full-time job was deciding whether or not to accept cases. She argues it’s a more consistent and cost-effective system. Bunin and Teare say that change has increased the number of people being unnecessarily jailed and boosted case dismissals and courtroom losses for prosecutors. In 2022, more than 4,500 criminal charges were dismissed, after judges found the case lacked probable cause, the lowest burden of proof needed to justify an arrest, according to the, and shot up starting in 2021. In the four years before Ogg took office, about 6,800 felony cases were dismissed each year.
“Evidence is suppressed because we can’t comply with discovery because our labs are so far behind,” she said. But she also pushed to take several people off of death row, including the high-profile cases of Duane Buck—whose trial wasin 2019 that former death row prisoner Alfred Dewayne Brown was innocent. Brown’s conviction in the 2003 murder of Houston police officer Charles Clark had already been tossed in 2015, and then-District Attorney Devon Anderson, a Republican, had dismissed the case, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to retry Brown.
A month later, in April 2017, the federal judge found the county’s misdemeanor bail practices to be unconstitutional and discriminatory against the poor. It was a landmark court ruling that one Harris County official deemed “as big as Still, dramatic instances of violence have more impact than statistics. A month before the bail settlement was signed, Alex Guajardo, 22, was accused of stabbing his pregnant wife, Caitlynne Rose Guajardo, to death. He had been let out of jail on a no-cash bond only days before on a misdemeanor domestic violence charge after allegedly punching her in the face.), heralded tragedies as clear failings of the new judges and their bail practices.
Newman said when he was a prosecutor in the 2000s, the standard bond for a murder case was $50,000. He quipped that a bond set at that amount now would lead to calls for the judge’s execution. Still, this February, the jail remained overcrowded with a population above 9,200 and remained noncompliant with state safety standards. About 1,000 people wereAlong with a batch of relatively new judges on the bench, Ogg has been blamed for the case backlog. Though she did eventually win some funding to hire new prosecutors, about 15 percent of prosecutor positions remained vacant in November.
Ogg pushes back on accusations against her, blaming low morale instead on the widespread, loud criticism of her office: “I’m proud of the record we have. Our programs are more progressive than anywhere in the state.” Ogg blames Teare, her March primary opponent, for what she called a “misinformation campaign” against her. Some of the loudest condemnation came from Ogg’s pursuit of cases that lobbed accusations against Ellis and Hidalgo’s staff. In 2021, ato charge Ellis for storing a cache of African art in a government warehouse without authorization. In 2022, three Hidalgo aides were indicted for allegedly favoring a politically connected vendor in a vaccine outreach contract.
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