Cameron Langford
HOUSTON (CN) – Harris County, which runs Texas’s biggest jail, must face a class action accusing it of running a “wealth-based detention system,” jailing misdemeanor defendants who can’t afford bail, a federal judge ruled. And, siding with the plaintiffs, the sheriff-elect called the system unconstitutional.
Booking an average of 330 people per day, Harris County Jail in downtown Houston is the biggest in Texas. In August and September, 76 percent of its inmates were awaiting adjudication of their cases, according to a county report released in November.
Harris County is the most populous county in the state, with more than 4.3 million residents. Houston is the county seat.
Lead plaintiff Maranda Lynn ODonnell, 23, filed a class action in May, accusing the county, its Sheriff Ron Hickman, and its criminal and municipal judges of maintaining a de facto policy of refusing to grant personal no-fee bonds to misdemeanor defendants with no history of skipping court appearances, even in the face of jail overcrowding.
In the lawsuit, ODonnell blames the crowding for the deaths of 55 people in pretrial custody at the jail from 2009 to 2015.
Sheriff-elect Ed Gonzalez filed an affidavit in support of the plaintiff class and opposing Sheriff Hickman’s motion to dismiss.
“Though I respect Sheriff Hickman, I respectfully disagree with his and his lawyers' position that the sheriff should not even be a party to this case,” Gonzalez wrote in the Nov. 22 affidavit. “I believe that the current operation of the money bail system, including the sheriff’s active participation in that system, violates the United States Constitution. I believe that the sheriff should be a party to the current lawsuit, and I look forward to participating in the lawsuit in my official capacity once I am sworn into office on January 1, 2017.”
Poor misdemeanor arrestees in Harris County are denied due process hours after they are booked into the jail when they appear before magistrates via video without attorneys at probable cause hearings that last a minute or less, during which magistrates set their bail based on a fee schedule with no regard to their ability to pay, according to the complaint.
“The ability to make bail is to be regarded, and proof may be taken upon this point” is one criterion judges are supposed to consider in setting bail, under the Harris County Criminal Courts at Law Rules of Court, adopted by majority vote of the county’s 16 criminal judges in March, according to U.S. District Chief Judge Lee Hyman Rosenthal’s Dec. 16 ruling.
The Texas Code of Criminal Procedures contains identical wording, as does a 1987 agreed final judgment in the federal case Roberson v. Richardson, which challenged Harris County’s bail policies, Rosenthal noted in her 78-page memorandum and opinion.
However, sheriff’s officers and magistrates warn misdemeanor defendants at the hearings not to say anything because they could incriminate themselves. So they cannot request lower bail until they are assigned court-appointed attorneys and arraigned a few days later before county judges, who simply rubber-stamp the bail amount without reviewing it, ODonnell claims in court filings.
ODonnell says that if an attorney files a motion for a bail reduction or waiver, it usually takes a week to get a hearing.