Nearly 300 Texas defendants freed due to computer glitch

Nearly 300 Houston-area defendants have been released after a computer glitch prevented them from getting a first hearing within the time required by state law, officials said.

The computer system used by all law enforcement agencies in Harris County, where Houston is located, to file charges with prosecutors crashed on March 24 and was down for about a few days , according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

Under Texas law, defendants generally should not be detained for treatment for more than 24 hours in misdemeanor cases and 48 hours in felony cases. The glitch prevented the defendants from appearing before a magistrate judge for a probable cause hearing within that timeframe.

The public defender’s office filed motions to have the defendants released for not appearing before the magistrates within the required time. The motions were granted. Most of the released defendants had been arrested on non-violent charges.

In a letter to local law enforcement, the district attorney’s office said officers will need to file new charges and some people may need to be re-arrested. It is unclear how many cases will need to be refiled.

The Houston Chronicle reported that the outage occurred after a required system update and that Rick Noriega of Harris County Universal Services, the agency that handles technical issues for the county, described the outage as “minimal.” .

Officials say it was the fifth time the system had gone down since August.

“The safety of the public, the safety of our criminal justice system, and the efficiency of our courts demand that the county provide Universal Services with the resources necessary to resolve this issue and ensure this does not happen again,” said Dane Schiller, spokesman for the district attorney’s office.