HOUSTON — Virtually 300 Houston-space defendants had been ordered unveiled soon after a personal computer glitch prevented them from finding an preliminary court docket hearing in the time period demanded by point out law, according to officials.
The personal computer method that is applied by all law enforcement agencies in Harris County, exactly where Houston is found, to file charges with prosecutors crashed on March 24 and was down for about a pair of times, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Business.
Below Texas regulation, defendants are frequently not to be held for processing for a lot more than 24 several hours in misdemeanor scenarios and 48 hrs in felony scenarios. The glitch prevented defendants from showing prior to a justice of the peace choose for a possible result in hearing inside these time periods.
The community defender’s office environment filed motions to have the defendants released because they were not showing in advance of justice of the peace judges within just the necessary time period of time. The motions had been granted. Most of the defendants released experienced been arrested on nonviolent rates.
In a letter to local regulation enforcement businesses, the district attorney’s business office mentioned that officers will have to have to refile expenses and some men and women might need to be rearrested. It really is unclear how quite a few instances will need to be refiled.
The Houston Chronicle documented the outage occurred soon after a required program update and that Rick Noriega of Harris County Universal Solutions, the agency that handles complex issues for the county, explained the outage as “negligible.”
Officials say this was the fifth time the method experienced crashed due to the fact August.
“The safety of the public, safety of our criminal justice method and effectiveness of our courts need that the county give Universal Services the means to resolve this and guarantee it hardly ever occurs once more,” reported Dane Schiller, a spokesman for the district attorney’s business.