New national caseload standards ring alarm for our loved ones forgotten in Harris County Jail!
What do attorney caseload standards have to do with the world’s largest human rights violation of mass incarceration? Everything, actually! And it’s happening more than anywhere else right here in Harris County (Houston), TX.
This week, a national study on public defender caseloads was published. We join the other organizations supporting this work in their statement on its release. Here are it’s caseload findings.
Alongside these numbers, it’s important to realize that Harris County is the world's largest driver of mass incarceration. Here’s the data to prove that. According to Harris County's Jail Population tracker, our jail population consistently hovers around 10,000 people, second only to Los Angeles, which averages around 14,000 people. Texas has the largest prison population in America by far, with about 134,000 people in prison, 33% more than California in second place. Despite America having only 5% of the world's population, our country has 25% of the world's incarcerated population. These numbers show that the world's biggest mass incarceration problem starts and ends right here in Harris County (Houston), TX.
Our push for caseload limits for court-appointed attorneys is the easiest way to start to stop the bleeding of our County's world driver of mass incarceration. As recently covered by the Chronicle, we have a massive caseload issue here - the attorney in that article has an active caseload of 683 high-level felonies, despite the recent national best practices finding above shows that a competent attorney should only handle a maximum of 21 high-level felonies per year. This means that at any given time, at least around 500 people are being completely ignored and forgotten by him (most are in our local jail), based merely on sheer constitutional workload standards.
One of those forgotten people was our client Nikki. She wrongfully sat in jail for over a year without even a visit from this court-appointed attorney. When we took over her case, his case file was empty. A year of “representation,” and not a single document or note produced on her behalf. He failed to communicate plea offers to her, and even set her case for trial without doing any work or even telling her about the trial settings. She found Restoring Justice and we found out he had been ignoring requests by the complaining witness to drop the charges and there was no way the State would be able to prove their case. We secured a dismissal for her after 10 days of representation. This is not a claim of how great we are - it’s a sad reality of how much of a crisis this situation is for people like Nikki. She described to us surprising her son while he slept after she was released from jail. Family reunification increases public safety, and we cry every time we think about the year she missed from her five year old’s life - all because this overloaded court-appointed attorney was allowed to ignore her for an entire year while she was locked in a cage. Simply establishing caseload limits will fix this problem.
There's been a LOT of work on this here - in the past, a majority of our Commissioner’s Court have verbally expressed support for caseload limits in public and recorded meetings, but they stopped short of actually taking the actions supported in those meetings.
We hope this new public defender workload report is a catalyst for the low-hanging fruit solution for caseload limits to finally be implemented here. The implementation process here is not that complicated. Our felony judges can unilaterally make the change or Commissioner’s Court can simply decline funding appointments by judges of court-appointed attorneys that exceed an established caseload limit, which could be set and monitored by expanding our Managed Assigned Counsel Office into felony courts. Funding for that MAC expansion can even be available from our state Indigent Defense Commission.
Please join us to keep pushing for this change until it’s done - it makes too much sense - for the sake of our friend Nikki, everyone else wrongfully trapped inside Harris County Jail, and all other victims of mass incarceration and their families.