Austin American-Statesman: ‘A real problem’: Could Travis County taxpayers be put on the hook for DA Garza’s missed indictment deadlines?

Two years into Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial immigration enforcement effort known as Operation Lone Star, a team of Washington, D.C., attorneys filed a novel civil rights lawsuit in November 2023 against a border county jailing arrestees.

The suit, brought on behalf of a 38-year-old Mexican immigrant and countless others like him, claimed Kinney County had kept them behind bars for days, weeks and months past a state-mandated deadline to levy formal charges.

County officials asked to be dismissed from the suit, arguing they hold no liability. But a judge rejected their argument earlier this year, ruling the case against them could proceed.

Travis County has no procedure to ensure cases are addressed within legally required timelines. Instead, it has relied on the district attorney’s office, which handles only felony cases, to act within 90 days.

But when he took office in 2021, Garza dismantled a unit tasked with gathering preliminary evidence and presenting cases to a grand jury in that time frame. He instead assigned the responsibility to court prosecutors, who are famously time-strapped.

Each Travis County case the Statesman identified in which arrestees were held longer than 90 days involved indigent defendants who couldn’t afford attorneys.

The issue of arrestees remaining in jail past deadlines has seldom resulted in lawsuits in Texas. When it has, the cases have targeted defense attorneys for malpractice claims for failing to get their clients released.

That’s what happened in November 2020 after police charged a 20-year-old man in Tyler with possession of a marijuana derivative and he was held on a $1,500 bail.

He remained in the Smith County Jail for 115 days without an indictment and was freed only after a concerned jail employee contacted the Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit that advocates for the incarcerated. The group posted the man’s bond and gave him money to return to his grandmother’s house in Louisiana.

After a trial three years later, a jury awarded Glenn Hayes $450,000 in damages in a malpractice suit against his court-appointed attorney.