“I don’t want anybody to think that that our prosecutors are sitting on their hands, and taking time off and just ignoring these cases,” said the district attorney.
BEXAR COUNTY, Texas — As the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office has chipped away at the number of backlog cases, more backlogged cases have been added, according to district attorney Joe Gonzales.
Last November, the office identified 6,330 backlogged cases. This year there are 7,000.
The DA’s office has two criteria for what they consider a backlogged case. Someone gets arrested and bonded out, and the case is six months or older and cases that are filed where someone isn’t arrested, but law enforcement filed a case, and it’s older than a year, is considered a backlogged case.
Gonzales said the office does prioritize cases involving jail time and violent crime.
For the past year, a group of 45 attorneys have been voluntarily working overtime to process the backlogged cases.
“If you think of it in terms of raw numbers, [it’s] a backlog of an additional 700 cases,” Gonzales said. “And as I mentioned today, if all that group did was to focus on the 6,300 cases, they did that. They made charging decisions on 5,000 of the 6,300. So there was only 1,300 cases left over.”
The group called the high-risk intake team was formed after the DA faced backlash following a rash of shootings involving police last summer.
The district attorney attributes the growth in the numbers to the ongoing crime occurring in the county.
“If you consider the fact that crime is not stagnant, right?” Gonzales said. “Crime continues to occur. We continue to accept cases. We continue to have to make charging decisions.”
That saying, the high-risk intake team was making significant progress. From January to May 2024, the office increased the number of indictments it processed by 42 percent, but from June through November, the team saw a 10 percent decrease in comparison to last year.
That’s around the same time the county switched to Odyssey, its new court records system. The upgraded technology, Gonzales explained, will eventually streamline their work, but there are some issues to be worked out.
“There’s a lot of kinks that need to be worked out,” he said. “For example, in charging someone with a crime. There’s some issues with charging language. There’s some issues with the electronic signatures that we see on these indictments when they return from injury.”
The Bexar County Crime Lab has had its own backlog that is impacting the district attorney’s office.
The Bexar County DA’s office has 5,276 drug cases awaiting a charging decision. As of Dec. 6, the Bexar County Crime Lab has 4,778 controlled substance submissions to test. Gonzales said that a drug case cannot be indicted without a conclusive lab result.
Gonzales stated that at any given time, the office has had staff shortages that have been impacting their work.
“As of sometime late last year to now, we average about 21 lawyers that are vacant, those positions that are vacant per month,” he said. “So in a perfect world, I’d love to be fully staffed. That would be 250 lawyers. What happens is the lawyers that are left behind are left with doing not only their job, but the job of the person that’s not in that position anymore.”
Additionally, issues with evidence transfer is also causing a slow down. But one external process contributing to the slow down Gonzales doesn’t see a solution for any time soon, is the amount of digital evidence today’s prosecutors have to go through.
“Today, you’re going to have several police officers respond to a scene,” Gonzales explained. “Everyone’s got a body camera, and so we are ethically obligated to review every one of those body cameras, to make sure that there isn’t anything in there that rises to the level of defense or, or causes us some doubt about whether or not we can prove the case. So a case that took maybe, a couple of days to review now takes weeks and sometimes months.”
The district attorney’s office wants the public to know they are working through the cases as quickly as they can, but Gonzales doesn’t know when the issue will resolve.
“It’s anybody’s guess whether it’s going to take another year or another couple of years,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to think that that our prosecutors are sitting on their hands, and taking time off and just ignoring these cases. Everyone, including the intake division, is focusing their attention on the job that needs to be done.”