In public forums and letters to the local newspaper, Uvalde County residents have called on Nolasco to resign and refrain from running for office. But Nolasco is pressing ahead, and he faces three opponents in the Republican primary on March 5; one of them, Otto Arnim, has highlighted the sheriff’s role in the failed response to the massacre. 

But Uvalde County DA Christina Mitchell is running unopposed in her own Republican primary on the same day, despite complaints that she has helped shield local cops from consequences for their failures during the shooting. She’ll also face no Democrat in the general election, as none filed to run against her by the December deadline. 

And so it goes across the state: Hundreds of local elections will shape the future of law enforcement this year, but whether they lead to any change or accountability of course depends on who actually is running. 

Sheriffs who run some of Texas’ largest lockups and have long faced scandals over deaths and abuses behind bars are now asking voters for another term, with some facing competitive races. But of the 14 counties whose jails are on notice with the state jail commission for violating minimum safety standards as of February 2024, seven are overseen by incumbent sheriffs who are running unopposed this year.

District attorney races may also shift the policy landscape in some of Texas’ largest cities, with disagreements over prosecution practices shaping contests in Harris County (Houston) and Travis County (Austin) in particular. But in large swaths of the state, these elections have already been decided: Only 28 percent of the state’s DA races this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, leaving dozens of incumbents like Mitchell virtually certain to secure another term.

This includes populous areas that have not seen a contested election in years. In Montgomery County, a county of nearly 650,000 north of Houston, Republican DA Brett Ligon is running with no primary or general election challenger for the third consecutive cycle.

Still, there’s plenty to watch in politics around criminal justice in Texas this year. With a recent state law granting local law enforcement new powers to arrest people whom they suspect are undocumented, sheriffs face mounting questions over how they’ll choose to cooperate with the state’s crackdown on immigrants; some are racing to bolster the law, while candidates in more Democratic counties like El Paso are promising to resist it.

Far-right officials and activists are also going after justices on the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in this year’s GOP primary—an intra-party grudge match that, as Bolts has reported, stems from the court’s 2021 ruling that limited Attorney General Ken Paxton’s authority over voter fraud prosecutions in the state. Meanwhile, organizers in the High Plains city of Lubbock are petitioning for a local ballot measure to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, even as Paxton sues to block similar ordinances that voters recently passed in several other Texas cities. 

To kick off our coverage of elections that will shape policing and criminal punishment in Texas this year, below is Bolts’ guide to some important storylines to start watching in the run-up to the March 5 primaries.

Deadly jails, and sheriffs that run them 

Jail deaths have surged across the country in recent years, including in many of Texas’ largest counties. This year, with all of the state’s sheriff’s offices on the ballot, some are seeking re-election amid criticism over spiking deaths on their watch. 

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, jail deaths have risen dramatically under Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Republican who first entered office in 2017 and is seeking re-election this year. At least 60 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody since Waybourn took over, compared to 25 in-custody deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him, according to state records and data compiled by nonprofit oversight group Texas Justice Initiative. 

Waybourn, who is unopposed in the Republican primary next month but will face a Democratic challenger in November, has become a sort of national right-wing celebrity for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and efforts to police elections in Tarrant County. But at home, criticism has mounted over the rise in deaths and other scandals on his watch—including allegations of a cover-up following one particularly questionable jail death; a pregnant woman with severe mental illness who delivered her baby alone inside her cell (the child later died); and a disabled woman who left the jail comatose and covered in bruises. Last year, a group of Tarrant County activists working with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice seeking an investigation into the local jail. 

“The Tarrant County Jail has failed the community at every turn,” the letter stated. “It has failed to provide medical care, to protect incarcerated people from risks associated with poor mental health, to perform checks, and to protect individuals from harm from jail staff and others in the jail.”

Both of Waybourn’s Democratic challengers—Patrick Moses, a retired federal officer, and Indya Murray, a local police officer—have cited problems at the jail as a reason for running. Voters will choose which of them moves to November’s general election against Waybourn on March 5.

In a recent forum local officials organized to discuss problems at the jail, Waybourn defended his running of the facility and downplayed the scandals on his watch, blaming the deaths on drug addiction and other health problems that he said were outside the control of his staff—like “excited delirium,” a supposed condition that medical associations have long rejected but which cops still cite to explain in-custody deaths. 

Other sheriffs who oversee large scandal-plagued lockups in Texas are also on the ballot this year, including Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat first elected to the post in 2016, and Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar, another Democrat first elected that same year. As Bolts has reported, Harris County’s jail system, the largest in the state, has struggled with overcrowding and violence in recent years. The Bexar County jail has also seen a rise in deaths in recent years and a high suicide rate, a persistent problem at the jail for more than a decade. 

As of publication, Harris County is one of the 14 counties with jails currently flagged by state authorities as non-compliant with minimum safety standards. Besides Gonzalez, the other sheriffs who are facing competition in these counties are all Republicans in rural areas like Newton County, which like Harris County is shipping people out-of-state as a solution to its jail overcrowding.

Boss Ogg fights her own party 

When she won the Harris County DA race in 2016, Kim Ogg became the first Democrat to run Texas’ largest prosecutor’s shop in 40 years. She promised a vision of change that seemed to distance the office from its tough-on-crime heyday, focusing on reforms aimed at diverting people accused of low-level crimes, like marijuana possession, from jail. 

The county has kept morphing politically since her first win, including electing other reform-minded Democrats to key offices as part of a blue wave in 2018, and adopting bail reform for misdemeanor cases in the aftermath of a lawsuit and federal ruling striking down the county’s previous practice of routinely detaining people with petty charges who couldn’t afford to pay for their pretrial freedom. 

But during that time, Ogg has largely parted ways with this broader movement to reform Harris County’s criminal legal system, in part by fiercely resisting the efforts at bail reform. Now Ogg is running for a third term—this time with a much more sour relationship to many in her party. She first faces a challenge from a former staffer in the March 5 Democratic primary. 

In recent years, reform-minded local officials who have butted heads with Ogg have found themselves in the crosshairs of her powerful office. Under Ogg, the DA’s office filed complaints with the state in an attempt to unseat a Democratic criminal court judge who was vocally critical of the DA. Her office attempted to prosecute another Democratic judge who had publicly sparred with her over bail reforms. Ogg’s office is also currently prosecuting former aides of Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county executive who has repeatedly clashed with the DA over criminal justice policy, over alleged improprieties involving a county contract. 

Pushback from Ogg’s own party reached a boiling point late last year when Harris County Democrats officially admonished the DA. Local party precinct chairs voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution stating that Ogg has “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” 

Ogg has dismissed the intra-party fight as “political drama” and argues she helped steer the office through Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic, crises that wreaked havoc on the local criminal legal system. (Ogg’s office and campaign didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment for this story.) 

Ogg’s critics say her charging decisions have contributed to the deadly crisis at the local jail. Defense attorneys and former prosecutors have accused her of mismanagement and bungling some of the office’s core functions, such as screening charges filed by police. According to a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle, cases prosecuted by the DA’s office that judges later tossed for lack of probable cause have skyrocketed under Ogg after she changed how the office reviews charges, resulting in more and more Houstonians jailed without a firm legal basis. 

Sean Teare, a former prosecutor who is challenging Ogg in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that problems with the DA’s intake division reflect a larger “culture of fear” that she has fostered in the office. He claims that prosecutors are reluctant to dismiss weak cases, or allow for pretrial release or plead down charges when appropriate, for fear that a case might later generate critical headlines. Teare argues that the environment has compounded the looming backlog in criminal cases facing the office. 

“You can make the recommendation for plea bargains at the highest level possible, just never move off of it, and the case will never plea,” he said. “It will pend for three and a half years and someone else will have to try it—even if we know we can’t make the case or that’s not the right recommendation, because that’s the way you don’t get in trouble.” 

While Democrats have come to dominate countywide elections in Harris County, the primary winner will face Dan Simons, a local Republican lawyer, in the general election.

Austin’s election unfolds under a removal threat

Just a month before a Minneapolis officer murdered George Floyd and sparked a national uprising, Austin cops had killed Mike Ramos, another unarmed Black man whose name, along with Floyd’s, eventually became a rallying cry during the seismic protests that hit Texas’ capital city that summer. Austin police only reinforced their reputation for violence during the 2020 protests, shooting crowd-control munitions like “bean bag” rounds at unarmed protesters, resulting in numerous severe injuries. 

José Garza, a former public defender and labor rights organizer, successfully ran for Travis County DA that year, vowing to hold police accountable. Within months, prosecutions against abusive cops started to rise. In early 2022, about a year after taking over, Garza announced charges against more than a dozen Austin officers accused of assault and deadly conduct during the 2020 protests. 

Garza’s first term has been a lesson in what kind of policy changes local reform-minded DAs can enact—from prosecuting police to improving the office’s historically harmful treatment of sex assault survivors and piloting a restorative justice program. Garza says the office has also dramatically expanded access to pretrial diversion programs, so that most people charged with non-violent offenses are now connected with some kind of service, whether job training or treatment, instead of being convicted. In an interview with Bolts, Garza pointed to a recent case, a single father charged with cocaine possession, as an example: diversion meant prosecutors sending the man to the local carpenters union for a training program and dismissing the charge when he completed it.

“The carpenters told us he was their best student, and so he ended his contact with our criminal legal system in Travis County, not as a convicted felon but as a carpenter’s apprentice,” Garza said. 

But as he stepped up police prosecutions and other reforms, Garza has drawn the hostility of law enforcement unions and their allies, a familiar pattern to other progressives in his office. And as he now seeks a second term, Garza first faces a March 5 Democratic primary against Jeremy Sylestine, a former prosecutor who has accused him of painting a “political bullseye” on APD officers.

Sylestine has also aired campaign ads accusing the DA of being too lenient on plea deals (Sylestine’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story). Daniel Betts, the only GOP candidate, has encouraged Republican voters to cross party lines to vote in the Democratic primary against Garza, which is allowed under Texas’ open primary system. 

In their efforts against Garza, police groups are also looking beyond elections. Last year, Republicans in the Texas legislature rewrote state law to allow for courts to remove local DAs who choose not to pursue certain types of crimes. Aimed at a handful of ”rogue prosecutors” who, like Garza, had promised not to prosecute people for abortion, the new law also threatens to undermine local attempts to decriminalize marijuana possession. 

Law enforcement groups launched a website to collect complaints against Garza the week the new prosecutor-removal law took effect last September. In December, the GOP candidate who lost to Garza in the 2020 general election helped file a petition to remove him from office, citing the new law. 

Garza in December ended up dismissing the criminal charges against most of the Austin police officers his office was prosecuting for excessive force during the 2020 protests. Garza says those cases were derailed late last year when APD sent his office an internal review showing that police officials knew ahead of the protests that the department’s crowd-control munitions were dangerous and could maim people. Garza also says police conveniently did not investigate or disclose those facts until the three-year statute of limitations had passed for any potential indictments against higher-ups. 

Garza insists that police prosecutions are among the most difficult cases his office handles but he says he’s using his perch to push for police oversight and accountability in ways that go beyond prosecuting cases. In December, even as he dropped the charges against officers who injured protesters in 2020, Garza says he asked Austin’s mayor to join him in calling for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into APD’s use of force and crowd-control tactics during the 2020 protest.

“I’m really more convinced than ever that there really needs to be deep, systemic change in the Austin Police Department,” Garza said. 

The post The Texas Elections That Will Shape Policing and Punishment This Year appeared first on Bolts.

Guards put Bland in a jail cell alone with little supervision despite her telling them that she was depressed and had attempted suicide the previous year. The Rangers investigation would later show evidence that jailers lied about how often they checked on Bland, leaving her unmonitored for nearly two hours before they found her hanging in her cell three days after her arrest.

Bland’s treatment by Texas law enforcement in July 2015 quickly blew up into a national scandal. In the following years, her family channeled that public pressure over her death into a $1.9 million settlement agreement with Waller County that also mandated changes at the local jail, as well as into a statewide reform bill the Texas legislature passed in 2017 bearing Bland’s name. The Sandra Bland Act required Texas police to collect more data on traffic stops and make a “good faith effort” to divert people with mental illness away from jail. 

The new law also required Texas sheriffs to commission an independent investigation whenever people die in their jails. That job has mostly fallen to the Rangers, and state police investigations into jail deaths have spiked since 2018, when the requirement went into effect, helping spotlight the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions that can lead to preventable deaths. 

But those investigations could soon dry up because of a bill, filed in the Texas legislature this month by a Republican lawmaker, that would allow sheriffs to investigate themselves for deaths in their jails. Under the bill, the current mandate for an independent investigation would no longer apply if a death is due to “natural causes or occurring in a manner that does not indicate an offense has been committed,” even though such conclusions are what an investigation is supposed to determine in the first place. 

Cannon Lambert, the attorney who represented Bland’s family and helped them negotiate the 2017 reforms, says the proposal, Senate Bill 1896, would undermine a key plank of the reforms that bear her name. “It’s antithetical to the purpose of the act,” Lambert told me, saying Bland’s family had wanted systemic changes that would lead to greater oversight of jail conditions and accountability for deaths in custody. 

“Having a situation where law enforcement is investigating itself, it causes concern for what the result of that investigation will be,” Lambert said. “It shouldn’t be someone trying to cover something up or trying to massage facts, it shouldn’t be any of that, it should be what are the facts, what do they bear out, and how should they be dealt with.” 

The broadly-written exception in SB 1986 could be stretched to cover the vast majority of state police investigations into Texas jail deaths in recent years. In 2021, a former colleague and I obtained and reviewed more than 400 Rangers investigations into Texas jail deaths. Most had not immediately raised suspicion and almost all were initally ruled by medical examiners to be either suicides, accidental (largely drug overdose) or due to “natural causes,” a blanket term including anything from heart attacks to COVID-19 to complications from withdrawal. But the investigations later conducted by the Rangers often revealed troubling new facts in those cases. Reports I have reviewed detail jail staff across the state ignoring people with deteriorating health, taking hours to respond to emergencies, denying treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease, and even mocking dying people while they moan in pain.  

Dean Malone, a civil rights attorney who represents families of people who have died in jails across Texas, told me the Rangers investigations sometimes help uncover initial facts that make it possible to bring a case because their reports often point to lapses and systemic problems that likely contributed to someone’s death—even when ruled to be from “natural causes.” 

Malone pointed me to a lawsuit he filed earlier this month on behalf of the family of Lonnetta Johnson, a 41-year old woman who died last January after a heart attack in the Harrison County jail in rural East Texas. Like many people who die in Texas jails, Johnson struggled with serious mental illness that resulted in her arrest and incarceration at the county jail more than a dozen times over the previous decade. The Harrison County sheriff’s office shared a boilerplate press release after her death that said Johnson experienced “labored breathing” at the jail and was sent to a hospital, where she was later pronounced dead. 

But the Rangers investigation that the sheriff was then required to commission later painted a different picture. Their investigation report, which I reviewed, showed that jailers had put Johnson on suicide watch inside a solitary cell without a mattress for more than two weeks, with nothing more than a smock and a blanket to cover herself. While jailers were told to check on Johnson every 15 minutes, that usually just meant peering through her cell window. Guards interviewed by the Rangers said Johnson’s health seemed to be deteriorating before her death. The investigation showed that Johnson had been sitting on the floor of her cell, hunched over what looked like a puddle of urine, for several hours before jailers finally entered, discovered she was “cold to the touch” and called an ambulance. One guard said it felt like 60 degrees inside the cell. (The Harrison sheriff’s office did not reply to my request for comment.) 

Malone says that he worries the language in SB 1896 could preclude independent police investigations into the vast majority of jail deaths, including many from “natural causes,” like Johnson’s, that deserve a closer look. Like most investigations into law enforcement, Rangers reports rarely result in consequences or charges for jail staff, let alone convictions, and sometimes they reflect the kind of pro-police bias that independent investigations are supposed to prevent. These lawsuit settlements offer the only semblance of justice most grieving families can ever hope to see. 

Michele Deitch, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on prison and jail oversight, told me that the Sandra Bland Act gave Texas “one of the best statutes in the country when it comes to allowing for independent investigations of deaths in custody.” She said that this part of the 2017 law provided “a vehicle for identifying measures that can prevent deaths in the future.” SB 1896, she says, would create “an enormous loophole” that could reduce overall reporting of jail deaths, which sheriffs already undercount. A 2019 report by state jail regulators highlighted how sheriffs across the state already skirt the requirement to report and commission outside investigations into deaths by abruptly releasing people in medical crisis from custody right before they die. 

“This reduces transparency at a time when we need increased transparency about these deaths,” Deitch said. 

The author of SB 1896, Republican state Senator Brian Birdwell, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment or any of my written questions about his bill. The topic surfaced during a Senate committee hearing Birdwell hosted last November, when the senator invited sheriffs to testify about the crushing deployment of state police and national guard troops to the border in recent years. Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, whose jail has seen a spike in deaths and numerous allegations of brutality and medical neglect in recent years, suggested during the hearing that state police were wasting precious time and resources investigating him. 

“For instance, last week I had a death in custody, he was in my jail for 20 days, he was in stage-four cancer, died in the hospital, had been up there for 12 days, and now I’ve gotta take up the Rangers’ time looking at that,” Waybourn told senators. “I just think that maybe we can look at a better way of doing that. We want accountability, but sometimes it’s like, golly, well couldn’t he be doing a murder case or something else than reviewing this?” 

Waybourn’s office initially sent me a written statement claiming the exception in the bill would only apply to “the death of inmates who are in custody, but are in the hospital under the medical supervision of a physician and pass away.” The actual language in the bill, however, is much more broad and, as currently phrased, it expands the exceptions for sheriffs to even report any jail deaths. In fact, the state’s criminal code at present already specifies that the reporting mandate does not apply to deaths that occurred “while attended by a physician or registered nurse”; the new bill would strike out that clause, replacing it with broader language. In answer to follow-up questions, Waybourn’s office said he’s “happy with the current language of the bill.”

The Rangers investigations into jail deaths are currently part of a larger patchwork of jail oversight in Texas that might look solid on paper but in practice still repeatedly fails to keep people safe. Law enforcement are required to report all deaths in custody to the state attorney general’s office, which also compiles reports on jail deaths that typically just restate whatever the sheriff’s office said.

Then there’s the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a governor-appointed commission with minimal staff and a shoestring budget, which is tasked with inspecting more than 240 jails across the state and also looks into deaths to determine whether facilities complied with minimum state jail standards. However, those jail commission investigations have limitations; commission inspectors are not police, are not looking for potential criminal violations, and the commission itself has said that it often encounters “opposition when requesting inmate medical records,” which can cloud their inquiry. Civil rights activists and even another state auditing agency have criticized the jail commission for failing to hold sheriffs accountable; jails across the state, from rural counties to the largest, regularly fail inspections and sometimes cycle out of compliance for years. The commission’s executive director has defended its work, saying regulators have tried to “remain respectful of local government.” 

Even with the increased investigations required by the Sandra Bland Act, circumstances surrounding jail deaths remain opaque. It often takes a lot of persistence and money to get records from the Rangers, and sometimes sheriffs will kick jail death investigations to a much smaller local police department, which usually refuses to release any documents at all. Malone says people mourning loved ones usually struggle to get even basic information about what happened to them. “Even if there’s an investigation, the family has to fight to get the records,” Malone told me. “But if there’s no investigation, then nobody knows what’s going on in these jails, and I’ve seen some pretty horrific situations described in these records.” 

Deaths and overcrowding behind bars are on the rise in Texas, while Republican and law enforcement officials push to restrict pretrial releases. Civil rights activists as well as some sheriffs have warned that more people experiencing homelessness and mental health problems are now getting stuck in county jails on low-level charges like criminal trespass. Most people who die in Texas jails are pretrial detainees, like Bland and Johnson, who weren’t convicted of the charges that put them in jail.
 

“When you lose a loved one in jail, it’s like an unspoken death sentence,” says Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors conditions in local jails and advocates for better conditions. “Answers are nearly impossible to come by without a thorough and impartial investigation. All families want and hope for is to know what happened to their loved one so they can find some sense of closure. And this bill will take away what little those families are currently able to get.”

Gundu helped organize a group of people who lost loved ones to Texas jails to attend the state jail commission’s most recent meeting in February, begging for help. Among them was Deborah Smith, who held up two poster-sized images of her daughter, Kristan, 38, as she testified before commissioners. One of the photos showed her daughter with a beaming smile; in the other, Kristan is hooked up to a ventilator. While an autopsy into Kristan’s death at the Harris County jail last May is still pending, Deborah says her daughter was diabetic and struggled to get proper medical treatment in jail. 

“This is what I gave to Harris County,” Deborah said, showing the photo of a smiling Kristan around the room before grabbing and holding up the image of her daughter lying in a hospital bed. “This is what I got back.”

The post Texas Bill Tries to Shroud Jail Deaths in Even More Secrecy appeared first on Bolts.

“I’m not a conspiracy [theorist]. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president, and I believe Joe Biden is the president—I believe all that,” the famously right-wing sheriff told county commissioners at their Feb. 21 meeting. “But I do know that there are people who are concerned, and they have a concern, and it’s a legitimate concern.” 

Waybourn launched the new Election Integrity Task Force “to investigate and prosecute individuals perpetrating voter fraud within Tarrant County” last month in coordination with newly-elected District Attorney Phil Sorrells and Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, both of whom promised to ratchet up policing of elections when campaigning with Trump’s endorsement last year. In his presentation to county commissioners, Waybourn said the task force, which will solicit and investigate complaints about elections, would be staffed with existing county employees, including two sheriff’s investigators, two DA’s investigators and one prosecutor. 

“The whole idea of the DA and sheriff standing together, I think it’s a very important message to the community, and I think it’s a very important message that we’re centralizing that,” the sheriff told commissioners. “I think it’s a very important message that this is being handled by professional investigators and professional prosecutors.”

Roy Brooks, one of the two Democrats on the five-member commission, told Waybourn “there is no demonstrable issue with election integrity in Tarrant County.” Brooks spoke slowly but sternly as he told the sheriff, “I am concerned that we are enshrining in our current county infrastructure the ability to deny the results of any election that the three of you (Waybourn, Sorrells, and O’Hare) take exception to.” 

When Brooks called the task force a “conspiracy” to undermine election results that local conservatives don’t like, he drew audible gasps and jeers from the more than a dozen people in the crowd who had signed up to testify in support of the sheriff’s idea.

The meeting followed years of conservative activists in North Texas spreading baseless conspiracies about widespread voter fraud. As Bolts reported last year, Republican lies about the 2020 election have emboldened conservative activists in Tarrant County, a county of more than 2 million people that’s home to Fort Worth and the last urban Republican stronghold in Texas, to further question local election results and political trends that reflect the increasing left-leaning population of the county. (The county voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a bare majority.)

These conspiracies continue to rage despite Tarrant County’s election administrators being widely lauded for running smooth and secure elections. A state audit of the county’s 2020 general election concluded that elections staff delivered a “quality, transparent election,” while the former Republican-appointed secretary of state (someone who briefly aided in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election) recently praised Tarrant County Elections Administrator Heider Garcia as the “prototype for an election administrator.” 

Garcia, who was appointed in 2018 by a bipartisan county election commission, gave the public a lengthy presentation during a county commission meeting last spring, walking people through each step of the voting and counting processes while explaining the various systems for ensuring ballot security. He even threw a mock election ahead of last year’s midterms to try and build confidence in the voting systems. 

That did not satisfy Garcia’s conspiracy-minded critics. Last year, Garcia testified in a letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the torrent of racist messages and death threats he’s received since the 2020 election. “To this day,” Garcia wrote, “not a single person or entity has been held accountable for the impact this whole situation had on my family and myself.” 

When announcing the Tarrant County election integrity task force last month, the GOP officials who launched it confirmed to reporters that they hadn’t consulted with Garcia, who was also notably absent from the meeting where the sheriff presented the plan to county commissioners. The commissioners were also not informed of the move before the press conference. 

Kat Cano, a Democratic appointee to Tarrant County’s early voting ballot board, which processes early votes, urged Waybourn and other officials to consult with election workers if they want to improve voting. Cano called for better training and pay for elections staff over more policing, and told commissioners that both parties lost election workers last year, in part due to the onslaught of harassment against them by election deniers. 

“This is an election complaint task force, not an election fraud task force,” Cano told Bolts when reached after the meeting.

Waybourn’s new election task force fits into a broader attempt by conservatives to police elections since Trump’s 2020 loss and Republican lies about widespread fraud. In recent years, state legislatures across the country have proposed dozens of laws to increase criminal penalties for people who, even unintentionally, cast an improper vote. An investigation by Reveal found that 14 states last year tried to implement laws that would enable law enforcement to pursue voting crimes more aggressively. 

This year, Texas Republicans have proposed a bill that would allow Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, to ask prosecutors from neighboring counties to pursue election fraud cases if the county district attorney refuses. Another proposed law would allow Paxton to remove prosecutors from office for refusing to pursue certain cases, which could apply to election-related cases that he wants to see prosecuted. Republicans have also proposed bills that would increase voting violations to a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Some red states and counties have also started creating specialized law enforcement groups with the express goal of seeking out and punishing improper voters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has created perhaps the most infamous version, sending out armed law enforcement to arrest almost two dozen people, many of whom were told by public officials that they were eligible to vote.

In other states, elected county sheriffs have picked up the baton, using their politicized position to advocate for additional scrutiny of voters. In Kansas, a sheriff claimed to be investigating multiple cases of voter fraud, but could not produce public records about them. A Wisconsin sheriff conducted an intrusive investigation into voters at nursing homes, but the prosecutor refused to pursue the case. 

Waybourn hasn’t been specific about whatever complaints prompted him to create the new task force in Tarrant County. When pressed by Democratic commissioners, who questioned the need for it, Waybourn offered only sparse details, saying his investigators are currently “looking at 11 cases,” while also stating that they’ve been sifting through “a package of emails and probably 60 or so phone calls, or 70 phone calls.” It’s unclear how many of the tips Waybourn has received so far even alleged actual voter fraud; Waybourn, for instance, characterized some complaints as, “somebody felt like they were intimidated or something to that effect.” 

(The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Democratic commission member Alisa Simmons, the longtime president of the local NAACP chapter who was elected last year, told Waybourn that many of the complaints he described should be referred to elections officials rather than law enforcement after the sheriff offered up an example of someone complaining after arriving at a polling place and being told they weren’t registered. 

“This is just political posturing,” Simmons told Bolts. “The reason I’m opposed to this unit is because Tarrant County already investigates claims. We already have an elections administration, with 43 staff members, whose jobs include investigating claims of fraud or prohibiting further fraud, educating others, answering their questions, and therefore, there is not a need for the creation of a voter fraud task force.”

While Waybourn has become a sort of right-wing media star since his 2018 election, his critics have accused him of failing at the more core duties of his job, pointing to the spike in deaths at the Tarrant County jail on Waybourn’s watch. Pamela Young, a local activist who has protested the sheriff and called for his ouster over the multiple allegations of brutality and medical neglect inside the lockup he oversees, called his new election crimes task force “a circus they are putting on as red meat to their base.” 

“This was expected and orchestrated,” Young told Bolts. “These people have been plotting for years on how to keep Tarrant County red.” 

O’Hare vowed to create a new “election integrity officer” to do the job of the task force when he ran for Tarrant County’s executive last year, but last month said he settled for the sheriff and DA’s plan because it wouldn’t create any added costs to the county. O’Hare was formerly a city council member in Farmer’s Branch, where he spearheaded ordinances to make English the official language and to require apartments to check the immigration status of renters. He also founded Southlake Families PAC, which funds candidates for local school boards who ran on platforms that supported “Christian values” and opposed efforts at diversity and social justice.

Tarrant County has a history of harsh prosecutions for voter fraud that have drawn pushback from voting rights advocates. Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years of prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election, which was never counted, while she was still on probation; she is currently appealing her conviction for the second time. Another woman was sentenced to eight years in prison for voting with a green card. In both cases, the women said that they did not realize that they were not permitted to vote. By contrast, a judge was given probation for forging signatures to make the 2018 primary ballot. 

During the meeting last month, many of the concerned citizens who testified in support of the task force asserted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, local elections were hopelessly corrupted. Some sounded the alarm over the creeping threat of communism and socialism while others called for the elimination of all electronic voting equipment. 

“I’ve seen plenty of surveillance camera footage of all kinds of questionable things happening all over the country,” one woman said, seeming to address Brooks and Simmons, the skeptics on the commission. “And to say that ‘oh, I don’t have a leg to stand on’ is really unfair to me.”

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On the list of bullet points Fearer splashed on a big screen behind him was the name of Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a tough-talking cop who first won in 2016 with an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote but only narrowly prevailed when he went up for re-election in 2020. To Fearer, that slide is enough to suggest fraud. “There was no glaring issue with the job that he (Waybourn) had done that we could perceive, yet in 2020 the margin was only 5 percent,” Fearer said. 

That remark would shock Waybourn’s local critics, who have organized against the scandal-plagued sheriff and his policies for years. They have protested the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions that pervade inside the jail he oversees, which has seen a spike in deaths since he took office. 

While Waybourn has become a fixture of right-wing media and a reliable dial-a-quote for comments demonizing migrants, protesters, and leftists, his rhetoric and numerous alarming incidents on his watch—including a pregnant woman with mental illness giving birth alone while locked inside her cell in 2020—have galvanized a coalition of local activists who have demanded his resignation and supported his Democratic opponent in 2020. The group has continued to organize against the sheriff and his policies under the name “New Sheriff Now Tarrant County,” testifying in front of the county commission to demand justice for people harmed in Waybourn’s jail, including a woman with mental disabilities who recently left the lockup bruised and in a coma.

But Fearer’s slideshow to the Tarrant County group drew on rhetoric that has spread among conservatives, pointing to bare election results they dislike as reason enough for suspicion. Rather than providing documentation that justifies those doubts, they treat outcomes that deviate from their expectations—including Trump’s loss, Waybourn’s close call, and even signs of increased civic engagement, like recent record-high turnout—as signs of fraud.

The conspiracies often carry a racist tinge, from Trump’s lies that widespread illegal voting by immigrants cost him the popular vote in 2016 to claims made by Roy Moore, the losing 2017 Republican nominee in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race who was accused of molesting teenagers. Moore pointed to “anomalous” high turnout in the state’s Black communities as evidence of fraud when he refused to accept defeat and sued to block his opponent’s certification. His lawsuit called it “inexplicable” that Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, would have a higher turnout rate than the rest of the state. In 2020, Trump supporters similarly twisted high turnout into a sign of fraud, and Trump pointed to President Joe Biden’s large majorities in predominantly Black cities and counties as reason to doubt the results. 

Fearer and his Tarrant County group, which deny Trump’s 2020 loss, have employed the tactic to spread doubt about local election results in recent years. The group argues without evidence that the record high turnout in Fort Worth’s hotly contested mayoral race last year could indicate fraud. (The Republican candidate prevailed in that race.)

Following the election, the group began mailing out postcards asking residents to “verify” their votes by entering personal information into a non-secure website, spooking state and local election officials, who urged voters not to respond. Last week, Votebeat and the Texas Tribune reported that organizers with Tarrant County Citizens for Election Integrity are physically combing through about 300,000 ballots cast during the county’s 2020 GOP primary elections in search of irregularities. 

And the group has moved to police the vote in other ways. In his January presentation, Fearer displayed a series of photos that he said showed vacant lots and dilapidated properties where people were registered; Fearer also included many places that poor and vulnerable people might be staying like halfway houses, rehab centers, shelters, budget motels and RV parks on his list of “potentially fraudulent addresses.” Fearer, who did not respond to multiple efforts to contact him for this story, said during his presentation that the group is also organizing with activists monitoring elections in other Texas counties and across the country. 

The organizing by North Texas election deniers is part of a larger attempt by some conservatives to police elections across the state. Bolts reported in April on a group of stop-the-steal activists who are raising money for private investigators to search for voter fraud in the Houston area—and whose actions have already led to the armed assault of an innocent truck driver wrongly accused of fraud. In Texas, these activists have benefited from the support of state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race.

This suspicion about election results has also inspired new restrictions and threats against people who engage in the electoral process. Republicans across the country in recent years have used the specter of widespread fraud to pass laws establishing new barriers to voting while further criminalizing the elections process; 26 states have enacted, expanded, or increased the severity of 120 election-related criminal penalties since the 2020 election, according to a recent analysis by States Newsroom of data compiled by Voting Rights Lab . States like Florida and Tennessee have also ramped up their policing of elections this year.

The North Texas group’s conspiracy theories also extend to Tarrant County Election Administrator Heider Garcia, who was appointed to the post by a bipartisan county election commission in 2018. In April, they posted a video attacking Garcia that focused on his Venezuelan heritage and accused him of eroding the security of local elections. Two weeks later, at a county commission meeting, Garcia delivered a lengthy presentation running the public through every step of the voting and counting systems and explaining the various processes involved to ensure security; he even included sped-up surveillance footage of voting machines sitting in a room overnight, free from tampering after an election. 

The meeting was packed with residents, many of whom applauded Garcia and later testified to express confidence in the county’s election systems. But when Fearer testified, he urged county officials to consult with Tina Peters, an election-denying county clerk in Colorado. 

The group has also hosted virtual forums with Peters, who was criminally indicted this year on charges that she tampered with voting equipment in an effort to boost Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election; Fearer’s group hails Peters as an expert and hero. Peters handily lost her bid to become Colorado’s secretary of state last month, but refused to concede and promptly claimed the results were false. “We didn’t lose,” she said on election night. “We just found more fraud.”

The post North Texas Conservatives Police High Turnout and Close Races as “Anomalies” Suggesting Fraud appeared first on Bolts.

Starting when he joined the Texas House in 2013, and continuing session after session since, the Fort Worth Republican has filed bills seeking to end or restrict no-fault divorces in the state. And he has mounted other efforts to preserve his conservative Christian ideal for marriage and family over the years, including being one of the state’s most staunch anti-abortion lawmakers and pushing to end benefits for same-sex spouses of government employees—even after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Texas and across the country in 2015. In recent years, Krause, like much of the Texas GOP, has trained his sights on transgender children, their families, and medical providers who give them gender-affirming care. 

Now he is running to be a culture warrior as the next Tarrant County District Attorney. Krause thinks that prosecutors should be on the frontlines in the latest wave of conservative efforts to police trans families. 

During a recent candidate forum for a Fort Worth GOP group, he bragged about helping kick-start the latest round of attacks. After failing to pass legislation he authored last session banning gender-affirming care for minors, Krause filed a legal request eventually ballooned into state GOP attempts to reclassify abuse outside of the legislative process; Krause’s request eventually snowballed into a misleading legal opinion by Attorney General Ken Paxton that called gender-affirming care for minors “child abuse.” Governor Greg Abbott then cited that opinion in his directive to state child protection workers to investigate families for seeking such care. A Texas Supreme Court ruling last week largely allows those investigations to continue. 

“My approach went after the medical community more than it did the parents,” Krause explained in between asking voters for their support. “I absolutely think that we ought to be prosecuting those medical professionals that engage in this practice.” 

Similar decisions await the county’s next DA on a range of issues from the fate of abortion access in a post-Roe world to conservative efforts to ramp up the involvement of law enforcement in elections. The shifting political and legal landscape on civil rights in Texas has emboldened right-wing attacks to carry severe criminal consequences. The attorney general’s office has sought to bring its investigative powers to bear on how people are voting, and the DA’s office in a county far smaller than Tarrant made national headlines recently for charging a woman with murder over an allegedly self-managed abortion.

Krause faces Phil Sorrells, a Trump-endorsed former judge, in a runoff election on Tuesday to decide the GOP nomination for the Tarrant prosecutor’s seat. Whoever prevails will be well positioned to win the November general election and replace longtime Republican DA Sharen Wilson, who is perhaps best known for sending Crystal Mason to prison for a voting mistake. Mason, who is Black, argues that her prosecution was politically and racially charged, and her conviction has since been called into question by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), the state’s highest criminal court.

Krause and Sorrells, neither of whom responded to repeated requests for comment for this story, have both promised in forums and campaign materials to follow in Wilson’s footsteps if elected. Both have indicated they may even dedicate more resources to policing elections; this has been a priority for conservatives in Texas and elsewhere, raising alarms that increased risks of criminal prosecution may ensnare voters over simple mistakes or intimidate others away from voting. Krause said in a campaign forum that he would dedicate a prosecutor to election crimes full time while Sorrells wants to start an “election integrity task force” inside the DA’s office. 

Sorrells and Krause have also both slammed a recent CCA ruling that limited Paxton’s ability to prosecute election crimes, saying they’d fill in the gap and prosecute more cases. 

Krause has claimed that Wilson, the outgoing DA, effectively asked him to run after announcing that she’d step down last year, before anyone had officially joined the race; Krause had initially launched a campaign to challenge Paxton but bailed from the attorney general race and filed to run in Tarrant County just before Thanksgiving. In the first round of the primary in March, he edged out Mollee Westfall, a longtime judge who had accumulated endorsements, and joined Sorrells in a runoff since neither received 50 percent of the vote. 

Sorrells, who is older and folksier than his runoff opponent, also has unimpeachable far-right credentials and is running with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Political connections likely helped Sorrells, a longtime judge and former prosecutor, get Trump’s support —Sorrells’ campaign consultant is also a political strategist for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a far-right figure who has reportedly helped influence the former president’s endorsements in the state and is notorious for his xenophobic tirades. 

Sorrells sounds most Trump-like when talking about undocumented immigrants, whom he has made central to his campaign. “The people who are crossing the border illegally, they’re coming here to Tarrant County to commit crime,” he said during a recent campaign forum. “My goal is to hold those people in state custody for as long as we possibly can… until we get somebody else in the White House who’s actually gonna enforce our immigration laws.” 

Sorrells’ main critique of his GOP opponent is that he has zero experience in criminal law. But Krause, who worked for a conservative Christian legal advocacy group famous for its homophobia before joining the Texas legislature, is playing up his political career. He tells voters that his experience at the capitol has prepared him to be “a faithful conservative fighter as your next Tarrant County DA.” 

Waiting in the wings is longtime prosecutor Tiffany Burks, who has already secured the Democratic nomination. Tarrant County has been a longtime GOP bastion, and Republicans continue to hold all statewide offices—a rare feat for an urban area. It has, however, started to trend blue, narrowly voting for Joe Biden in 2020, the first win by a Democratic presidential candidate here since Texan Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but Democrats have yet to break through locally, failing to oust the sheriff in 2020. They are now eying midterm elections for DA and other local offices like county judge.

Burks, who was chief of the Tarrant DA’s criminal division before resigning last year, told Bolts in an interview that she chose to leave and run to lead the agency because she disagreed with the direction it was taking. Burks also claimed the office was beset with morale problems.

“For me there was no consistency, I wasn’t quite sure what the criteria was for the decisions that were being made,” Burks said. “The community deserves to have a DA that cares about the concerns of all of its citizens, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or a libertarian—everyone’s needs in the community matter.” 

In addition to facing criticism over her selective prosecution of election laws, Wilson has also drawn the ire of North Texas activists and victims of police brutality who accuse her of failing to hold law enforcement accountable. 

During a recent campaign forum, Sorrells insisted one of his main priorities as DA would be to “back the police,” saying, “They have to know that if they need help on anything, that the DA is ready and willing to help—and I’m that guy, I’m going to help them.” Krause also points to his support from local law enforcement officials; he is running with the endorsement of Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Trump favorite who has become a fixture of the national conservative media in recent years even as deaths have spiked at the local jail on his watch. 

Local jail monitors have called for fewer people to be detained pretrial as one remedy to dangerous and deadly conditions, and the county’s bail policies are emerging as one of the major fault lines in the general election. 
Burks told Bolts that the DA’s office could help address problems at the jail and reduce crowding by requesting lower bond amounts, and in some cases no cash bonds, when dealing with low-level, nonviolent cases. Sorrells, meanwhile, said at a recent campaign event, “I would oppose all the low bails that are being issued right now, because we’ve got to keep those people in jail.” Krause reiterated his support for state laws to restrict some jail releases.

Pamela Young, an organizer with United Fort Worth who has called for Waybourn’s resignation over the string of scandals at his jail, said local activists tried to schedule a forum for people impacted by the criminal legal system to ask questions of all three Democrats running for DA before the March 1 primary. Only one participated, Albert Roberts, who was his party’s nominee against Wilson in 2018, losing by six percentage points. Burks was a no-show for the forum alongside a third candidate. (Burks easily won the primary with 60 percent of the vote.)

“That speaks to where we have to continue moving—putting people forward who have been impacted the most, whose communities have been harmed the most and affected the most by the criminal legal system,” Young told Bolts. “No matter who is in that DA’s office—even if Sharen Wilson ran and won again—no matter who is there, we have to continue the work of fighting to get our people free, bottom line.” 

The news earlier this month that the U.S. Supreme Court may be poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade now also looms large over this DA election. 

Texas has a so-called trigger ban that would immediately criminalize abortion in the state if Roe falls next month. Elizabeth Sepper, a scholar of health law at the University of Texas at Austin, told Bolts that a pre-Roe law on the books in Texas could threaten charges against not just abortion providers but potentially also others who help pregnant people access abortion—like partners, family members or friends. Texas also made it a felony last year to give someone abortion-inducing medication after seven weeks of pregnancy, effectively criminalizing medication abortion. Sepper suspects that some prosecutors in Texas are eager to test the bounds of those laws. 

Sepper also worries about more pregnant people in the state being at risk for prosecution in a post-Roe future, pointing to a case last month where authorities near the Texas-Mexico border jailed and prosecuted a woman for murder, allegedly after self-managing her own abortion, despite state law clearly exempting pregnant people from such charges. The woman was released and the case dismissed only after intense pressure from abortion rights activists and calls from across the country demanding that prosecutors drop the charge.

“If Roe is overturned, I suspect that enterprising prosecutors would comb through the criminal code to try and figure out whether a variety of general criminal laws that aren’t abortion-specific could be used to bring even other abortion related crimes,” Sepper told Bolts. “Right now we’ve seen Texas legislators get pretty creative over anti-abortion laws. The next step, if Roe falls, could be prosecutors who get creative and try going after pregnant people who aren’t subject to these abortion specific criminal laws.”

Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever—Tiffany Burks has no plans to do that.” Democratic prosecutors who serve in the state’s big urban centers, including neighboring Dallas County, issued a joint statement last month that said they would not prosecute cases related to abortion. Neither Sorrells nor Krause have addressed in detail how they would handle cases relating to reproductive rights, and the question did not come up in a series of forums reviewed by Bolts.

But if Krause makes it into the DA’s office at least, he would bring a history as an anti-abortion crusader with him. 
“I think one of the things in this race that could help me or hurt me is that I’ve got a long record from like 10 years in the Texas House on these kinds of issues,” Krause said during a recent campaign forum when asked about the recent investigations into trans families. “You know exactly where I stand.”

The post The Culture Warrior Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

Last week, Garza’s office announced indictments against 19 Austin cops accused of assault and deadly conduct during the 2020 protests, including an officer who’s currently running for a Texas House seat. The indictments have rocked the local police department, and come on the heels of other charges Garza filed against law enforcement officers in his first year on the job.

The raft of indictments were also a reminder for Texas voters of the potential for DA elections to quickly change the landscape on policing and other criminal justice policies, just as early voting started for the state’s March 1 primary. Fifty districts are electing their next prosecutor across the state this year.

How these DA elections affect the criminal legal system in Texas will largely come down to races in four populous counties—Bexar (San Antonio), Dallas, Hays, and Tarrant (Fort Worth). In Bexar and Dallas counties, a pair of Democratic incumbents are seeking a second term after drawing conserative ire for reforms they’ve rolled out since winning in 2018. 

In Hays, a Republican incumbent is retiring after overseeing an explosion in the local jail’s population. In Tarrant County, the GOP’s last urban stronghold that has been drifting blue, a right-wing lawmaker notorious for pushing book bans looks to replace a retiring Republican DA whose selective enforcement of election laws led to lengthy prison sentences for Rosa Ortega and Crystal Mason—women who mistakenly thought they could vote, and whose convictions have been cheered by the Texas GOP in the party’s crusade against voter fraud. 

The results of these elections —in the March 1 primaries, May 24 primary runoffs, and November 8 general elections—could have profound consequences on local policies such as bail, the severity of sentences, the death penalty, and prosecutions that target reproductive and voting rights. 

Despite this critical role, more than three-quarters of the state’s 50 DA elections this year only drew one candidate by December’s major-party filing deadline—most of them incumbents. (See the full list of elections and candidates.) That trend holds in the state’s most populous counties with DA elections. Besides Bexar, Dallas, Hays, and Tarrant, only four other counties with at least 100,000 residents drew more than one candidate, and reform stakes are not at the forefront, at least not yet. The vast majority of smaller Texas counties with DA races are also uncontested. (Most Texas DAs are on the ballot in 2024 rather than 2022.)

There is plenty more to watch in Texas besides DAs this year. While the state will only have a handful of sheriff’s races, other local offices with great influence on the criminal legal system are on the ballot. A prosecutor is deploying a tough-on-crime message to unseat a Republican incumbent on the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, for instance. And Austin has several referendums in May, including one to decriminalize marijuana possession.

To kick off our midterm coverage in Texas, below is a guide to the year’s DA elections.

1. A dual rematch in Dallas 

Dallas County’s DA election is a replay of 2018 in more than one sense. The same three candidates who ran four years ago have filed again. In the Democratic primary, former felony court judge Elizabeth Frizell will again face John Creuzot, the sitting DA who beat Frizell by a mere 589 votes in the 2018 primary. Just like four years ago, the winner will then face Republican Faith Johnson, who was the incumbent at the time. Johnson, who had gained national attention for actually trying killer cops for murder, then lost to Creuzot in the general election by a wide margin of 20 percentage points.

But the script has also partly flipped this time. In 2018, local reform advocates largely backed Frizell in the Democratic primary, but Creuzot deployed reforms after winning. He started refusing to prosecute certain drug cases and changed how it handles low-level theft, criminal trespass and other charges often associated with poverty. These changes triggered major attacks against Creuzot, from a police union calling for his removal to Republican Governor Greg Abbott accusing him of stoking crime. Ahead of next week’s primary, Frizell has echoed some of those same right-wing talking points, calling Creuzot’s reforms “dangerous.” Johnson, meanwhile, has overseen one of the nation’s largest and most-scandal plagued prisons systems since Abbott appointed her to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice after her 2018 loss.

2. A family rematch in San Antonio

Bexar County DA Joe Gonzales made jail diversion and other criminal justice reforms the focus of his winning campaign in 2018. But he said it was a personal threat from the county’s former DA that first inspired him to run. As a defense attorney before becoming San Antonio’s top prosecutor, Gonzales claimed that then-DA Nico LaHood threatened to destroy his law practice after Gonzales confronted him about withholding evidence in a case. Gonzales unseated LaHood in the Democratic primary and then won the general election that year, while LaHood eventually faced probation and a fine by the state bar.  

Nico LaHood’s younger brother, Marc LaHood, is now running to unseat Gonzales. He is one of two Republican candidates vying to face the incumbent DA in the general election (Gonzales is unopposed in the Democratic primary). In a statement to the San Antonio Express-News, Marc LaHood delivered standard tough-on-crime attacks, like accusing the incumbent of “severing ties with law enforcement agencies.” LaHood must first face former prosecutor and local defense lawyer Meredith Chacon in next week’s GOP primary, and Chacon has also played up her proximity to law enforcement, saying she would stop treating police “as the enemy.” Gonzales has drawn predictable hostility from the local police union since taking office and expanding diversion programs meant to prevent arrest and convictions for people accused of minor offenses, like misdemeanor marijuana possession.

3. A race to the right in Tarrant County

Local DAs who espouse baseless claims of widespread voter fraud have become key foot soldiers in the Texas GOP’s efforts to police the vote. And Tarrant County DA Sharen Wilson, a Republican who announced her retirement this year, has been a prime example of how prosecutorial discretion can turn mistakes into “voter fraud” convictions that GOP lawmakers wield to justify stricter laws. 

The GOP primary for Tarrant County DA could push the office even further to the right. Donald Trump has waded into the race to endorse Phil Sorrells, a judge and former prosecutor who vows to targeted undocumented immigrants as one of his main campaign issues. 

He faces state Rep. Matt Krause, a member of the chamber’s “Freedom Caucus,” which has successfully pushed for arch-conservative legislation like the state’s near total ban on abortions. Krause helped spark the book-banning hysteria that has gripped school districts across the state. And he backed legislation, passed by Republicans in 2021, that created new voting restrictions and criminal penalties around voting and election administration—a notable record for a prospective DA in the county where Ortega and Mason were prosecuted. Mollee Westfall, a current felony court judge, is also running in the GOP primary for DA. 

The winner will face one of three Democrats competing in next week’s primary. Tiffany Burks, a former deputy prosecutor under Wilson until last year, faces Albert Roberts, a former prosecutor in a neighboring county who came within 7 percentage points of unseating Wilson in the 2018 election. Former judge Larry Meyers has not run an active campaign, according to the Fort Worth Report. Tarrant County has trended blue in recent cycles, but Republicans continue to dominate local politics. 

4. Hays County candidate takes pride in never having been a prosecutor

The two candidates in the open election in Hays County, home to one of the state’s public universities and the fastest-growing county in the nation, could not have introduced themselves to voters more differently.

David Puryear, the only Republican, puts his work as a staff prosecutor in various offices front and center. Kelly Higgins, the only Democrat, is a defense attorney who does the opposite. “I submit that not having been a prosecutor is, in this county at this time, a blessing,” Higgins writes on his website. “I’ve always been the guy who insists on the protection of the Constitution.” 

Higgins vows to bring a “sea change” and “progressive vision” to the DA’s office and faults the retiring DA, Republican Wes Mau, for leaving cases to drag pretrial. The number of people detained pretrial in Hays has more than doubled since Mau became DA in 2015, according to data supplied by the county. 

Higgins told Bolts that, to reduce the volume of criminal cases and trials, he would seek to grow the availability of diversion programs and review the legal basis for arrests and charges more rigorously; this is to stop what he describes as the cynical prosecution of cases “based on the calculation that there is enough evidence to proceed.” Higgins also said he would consult reformers elsewhere in Texas, noting that “Travis and Bexar Counties have elected progressive DAs.”

Higgins and Puryear, who did not reply to a request for comment on his own platform, will face each other in November.

5. Heated primaries in McLennan, Hidalgo counties 

Only four other Texas counties with a population of at least 100,000 have contested DA races, and at this point in the campaign none of them are defined by major contrasts on criminal justice policy. It is still very early in Galveston County, which won’t see a contested race until the general election. 

But in Kaufman, Hidalgo, and McLennan counties, primaries will likely decide the next DA. That may explain the acrimony unfolding in some of those races.

McLennan County DA Barry Johnson faces challenger John Tetens in the Republican primary, with both ratcheting up fearmongering rhetoric about crime. Tetens has support from local police associations and promises to pursue harsher punishments. Johnson has responded to the criticism in unusually strong terms. 

“There is always an element of law enforcement that wants a rubber stamp in the DA’s office, and I am not going to do that,” Johnson told the Waco Tribune-Herald. But he has also turned to one of the uglier staples of “tough-on-crime” campaigning: attacking Tetens over his work as a criminal defense attorney, which Johnson says has contributed to putting “criminals back on the streets of McLennan County, where they can continue to prey on you and your family.” The GOP nominee will face Democrat Audrey Robertson in this conservative-leaning county.

Another DA candidate is attacking an opponent’s defense work in Hidalgo County, where Democratic DA Ricardo Rodriguez is retiring. One of the Democrats looking to replace him, Nereida Lopez-Singleterry, has blamed rival Toribio Terry Palacios for securing plea deals for his clients as a defense attorney. Palacios has also questioned his opponent’s ethics. Neither replied to Bolts’s questions about their policy platforms or their dispute. The winner of this Democratic primary will then face Republican Juan Tijerina; Hidalgo is a blue county, but Republicans are hoping to make gains in South Texas this year.

In Kaufman County, finally, the only challenger to Republican incumbent Erleigh Norville Wiley is Republican Rob Farquharson, who is emphasizing a traditionally tough-on-crime platform.

6. Most still run unopposed

In much of the state, there will be DA elections on the ballot but no contested races. Of the 50 districts with DA elections this year, 38 of them drew only one candidate, according to a Bolts analysis.That means 76 percent of the state’s DA elections are uncontested in 2022, the exact same rate as in 2020, when there were many more prosecutorial elections.

In 13 counties with at least 100,000 residents, only one candidate filed to run. Incumbents are completely unopposed in Brazoria, Comal, Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, Lubbock, Randall, Rockwall, Smith, Taylor, and Wichita. In Gregg and Jefferson counties, candidates who aren’t even incumbents effectively won just by filing to run, though John Moore and Keith Giblin have each worked for their respective DA offices in the past. (All of these unopposed candidates are Republicans other than in Fort Bend.)  

These counties have a combined population of 4 million. Some are undergoing massive upheavals—Denton, for instance, swung toward Democrats by a net 24 percentage points between the presidential elections of 2012 and 2020.  Public scandals around the criminal legal systems have swirled in other counties with uncontested DAs. But voters in these places won’t get a chance to weigh in on an office that largely drives criminal justice policy for another four years.

The post The DA Elections That Will Shape Prosecution in Texas This Year appeared first on Bolts.

In Tarrant County, historically a Republican stronghold in Texas, a sheriff election is shaking up the status quo.

Sheriff Bill Waybourn has gained notoriety outside the county, which is home to Fort Worth, for his Trumpian posturing, especially his fear mongering remarks at a White House press briefing on immigration last year. Locally, critics have decried his cooperation with ICE, poor conditions in the county jail system, and his unwillingness to take measures to reduce the jail population during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Next month, Waybourn is facing off against Democratic challenger Vance Keyes, a Marine Corps veteran who has worked for the Fort Worth Police Department for two decades. Keyes believes the nation is “at a tipping point” regarding criminal justice reform, and his platform reflects what would amount to serious changes for the county. He wants to significantly reduce the jail population by making fewer arrests and advocates an end to cash bail. He has committed to changing the jail’s approach to healthcare and diverting more people to treatment facilities. And Keyes plans to get rid of the office’s 287(g) agreement with ICE.

Demographics in Tarrant County are shifting, and electoral politics seem to be following. After going for Donald Trump for president in 2016, the county voted for Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz for Senate in 2018. Now both parties have their eyes on Tarrant County, and bigger players have gotten involved in the sheriff race; O’Rourke has stumped for Keyes and former governor Rick Perry has endorsed Waybourn. 

Locally, criminal justice reform advocates see an opportunity to change policies to curb deportations, keep people out of jail, and improve conditions for those who are locked up.  

“In this election, specifically, what we know is that Sheriff Waybourn is a danger to our community,” said Sindy Mata, an organizer with the group New Sheriff Now Tarrant County, which has been trying to replace Waybourn, “whether it’s through 287(g) or the perpetuation of harmful rhetoric or the continuation of a culture that is resulting in deaths of people detained in the jail.”

Since January, 10 people incarcerated at the Tarrant County Jail have died. And many people—including county commissioners—have expressed concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the sheriff’s office.

Other local officials, like County Judge Glen Whitley, have defended the number of fatalities at the jail by saying it is in keeping with comparable counties. According to a data comparison done by the Texas Justice Initiative, it is true that there have been fewer deaths in the Tarrant County sheriff’s custody than in counties with similar jail populations during that same time frame. But advocates have countered that even one life lost is a tragedy and that Waybourn’s approach to running the jail has made it more dangerous for the people held there. 

Texas Justice Initiative found that the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office has reported that 67 percent of its deaths in the last 15 years have been from natural causes. But Krishnaveni Gundu, the executive director and co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, does not trust that classification. “If your blood pressure meds are delayed, or you have diabetes and you die and they say it’s a natural cause, that’s not true,” she said. “It’s negligence.” 

Gundu explained that the current system of prescribing and administering medication is divided between a local mental health authority, a healthcare provider, and the jail—an arrangement that often causes patients to fall through the cracks. With multiple entities involved, “it’s very easy for them to point fingers at each other,” she said.

A former jail supervisor who worked in two Tarrant County correctional facilities from 2007 until January of this year spoke to The Appeal: Political Report on the condition of anonymity because he hopes to work in the system again in the future. He told a similar story: “There are not enough caseworkers or psychologists to see every inmate every week. … I’ve gotten complaints from inmates saying their medication has run out and they can’t get any more.” 

The former supervisor also said that misclassification during booking has led to people with mental disabilities or medical needs being placed with the general population or in single cells instead of on the medical floor. He said this has led to incidents of violence and has meant that vulnerable people were not receiving the monitoring they needed. In May, the Tarrant County Jail lost state certification for nearly a week after an internal investigation into a suicide exposed that jailers had been late conducting welfare checks. In the same month, they failed to notice that a pregnant woman had given birth unassisted in her cell; the baby later died.

A spokesperson for the jail said via email that some characterizations of the facility were inaccurate, but did not provide specifics or respond to requests for further details.

Waybourn did not respond to the Political Report’s requests for comment. He told Fort Worth Weekly that he is committed to improving reentry programs and that his office is working on a mental health diversion center that would allow it “to take people who would benefit from mental health care out of our jail and place them in an environment that would help get them the care they need.” Yet local advocates have little faith in this plan, pointing out that Waybourn has thus far instituted few reforms. 

Keyes said he would introduce a model for redirecting people who need healthcare to treatment facilities “in cases where a pre-existing mental or physical condition exists, such as a detoxing or medically ill defendant.” In an email he said that “booking will refuse to accept prisoners until they have received proper medical attention.”

Keyes also said he plans to implement a policy requiring the jail to guarantee that prescriptions are renewed within a week. And he would require classification officers to administer a psychosocial and medical assessment before prisoners are housed, to ensure that those in high-risk categories would be diverted to the medical floor.  

Beyond these reforms, Keyes said he wants to make sure fewer people end up in jail in the first place. 

He said he would work with the local district attorney’s office to advocate for an end to cash bail. And he wants to change the way sheriff’s deputies handle certain low-level offenses so that they arrest fewer people. 

This would take the form of giving verbal warnings or issuing citations instead, he said. For instance, he pointed out that when an officer stops someone for a traffic violation, like a broken tail light, sheriffs in other jurisdictions have partnered “with garages to get the cars fixed so that person doesn’t have to go to court.” He pointed to other minor offenses, including shoplifting and possession of less than two ounces of marijuana, as ones where he would consider implementing such strategies.

Advocates have also been frustrated by Waybourn’s refusal to consider compassionate release for incarcerated people during the pandemic, especially given that jails are known hotspots for the novel coronavirus. “With COVID, Sheriff Waybourn has not made any changes to reduce the amount of people incarcerated by releasing people with minor offenses or those who are the most vulnerable,” said Mata. “And that’s something that needs to happen immediately.” Keyes told the Political Report that he believes in compassionate release for people who are high risk. 

One of the biggest contrasts between the candidates, though, has emerged on another critical issue in Tarrant County: immigration.

During his run for sheriff in 2015, Waybourn said he was opposed to sanctuary cities and wanted deputies to work alongside ICE to apprehend undocumented immigrants. After taking office, he entered into a 287(g) agreement with the agency, which allows local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law. 

During a community meeting in 2018, Waybourn justified the decision by saying his department was “not enforcing immigration laws on the street. We’re going after the child molester, we’re going after the murder suspect.” But last year, the bigotry underlying Waybourn’s immigration policies became clear when he called undocumented immigrants in custody “drunks” who will “run over your children” during a White House event. 

Jonathan Guadian, a member of ICE Out of Tarrant, a coalition of organizations including United Fort Worth and RAICES, said Waybourn has actually used 287(g) to target undocumented immigrants arrested for low-level offenses, like marijuana possession. “We were finding that many of the people arrested … were immediately handed over to ICE before being issued charges from public administrators like judges,” Guadian said. “They weren’t even getting their day in court to dispute the charge.”

Keyes has committed to revoking the 287(g) agreement, which he says has created mistrust between the undocumented population and law enforcement. “If they’re victims, how much less likely are they to come forward if they believe they or a loved one are going to be deported?” he asked.

Immigration rights advocates nationwide are pushing sheriffs to cut off all sorts of modes of cooperation with ICE, though in Texas they are also challenging a state law called SB4 that requires sheriffs to assist the agency in certain ways. In spite of SB4, the 287(g) program remains voluntary in Texas. 

Tarrant County may be part of a burgeoning trend of criminal justice reform becoming an issue in sheriff’s elections, according to Emily M. Farris, an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University.

“Over the last decade there’s been this progressive reform movement in district attorney’s offices,” Farris said. “We see folks elected to DA offices who have reform ideas and make real change. It’s interesting to parallel that with sheriffs and think, ‘Are we seeing similar types of candidates turn up in sheriffs offices?’” 

Farris noted that a key difference between both offices is that DAs can be elected after serving as public defenders or holding a variety of other jobs within the legal system. Sheriffs, on the other hand, more often have a background in law enforcement. “If you’re going to be an officer you’ve bought into certain ideas of what the criminal justice system is,” Farris said. “The range is much more narrow. But [Keyes], I think, is on the end of pushing what that range is.”

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Amid the national reckoning over police budgets, opposition is building in Fort Worth, Texas, against a sales tax that has funded law enforcement programs for more than two decades. Voters will decide on Tuesday whether to renew it, and the Black Lives Matter movement’s concerns about policing are front and center in the campaign.   

The tax, which is called the Crime Control and Prevention District (CCPD), raised nearly $80 million in 2019 and funds police equipment, salaries, and various initiatives. If renewal fails, it would significantly reduce the resources of the Fort Worth police.

Voters have renewed the CCPD four times since it was established in 1995; it received 85 percent of the vote in the most recent referendum, in 2014. But this year’s election (Proposition A) is playing out in a different context marked by more visible activist calls to shrink the presence of the police department.

“Policing is necessary when people’s needs are not met,” Jen Sarduy, an organizer with Fort Worth Futures, an advocacy group formed this year that is urging voters to reject the tax, told the Appeal: Political Report. 

The group has in recent weeks released graphics on social media about the sort of public services that the city should boost to “reimagine public safety,” including public housing investments, programs for the city’s elderly  residents, and expanded public transit access, as local transportation advocates are demanding. 

Strengthening these services instead of funding police, these advocates argue, would improve safety outcomes. “When our money is so tied up in crime reaction and control, we are not addressing the root causes of violence or investing in building safer communities,” Sarduy and Lizzie Maldonado, another local activist, wrote in a commentary piece this week. 

Fort Worth’s referendum is just one of the electoral tests for this perspective in Texas next week. On the same day, Austin is voting for its next district attorney, and one candidate is running by making a case for strengthening systems other than criminal justice. “Public safety is a good job, it is access to healthcare, it is a good school to send your children,” the candidate, José Garza, told the Political Report last week. 

Austin’s City Council already approved a measure last month to transfer some police funds to social services as part of a broader public safety package. Because of pressure from the Black Lives Matter protests, city leaders around the country are envisioning similar moves as they rethink the roles usually assigned to police.

Fort Worth is more conservative than Austin and many of those municipalities. It is a rare big city with a strong GOP presence—the mayor, Betsy Price, is a Republican who supports the tax. But that has led to a  set of unlikely bedfellows in the push against the CCPD: progressives seeking police reform and conservatives intent on reducing taxation.

The Texans for Freedom PAC, a group that campaigns against bond packages and tax ratification elections, has jumped into the Fort Worth debate. “No more police tax,” says a website it created for the CCPD campaign. A representative for the PAC did not answer a request for comment. As opposed to progressive advocates seeking to spend the tax elsewhere, the conservative group wants this revenue source eliminated altogether. 

Still, some residents motivated by anti-tax politics are connecting this issue to the protests against police brutality.

“As a Libertarian, I’ll always vote against taxes, but there’s a lot of great reasons to vote against this particular tax,” said John Spivey, former chairperson of the Tarrant County Libertarian Party.  “Much of the $80 million in CCPD funds have been used to militarize our police which in turn is used to terrorize people of color. … Instead of militarizing the police, I’d rather seek ways to end feeding the always hungry prison industrial complex with a steady stream of people of color.”

Proponents of the CCPD, which include Price, Police Chief Ed Kraus, and the Fort Worth Police Officers Association, a police union, point to a substantial decline in crime since the district’s creation to  say the tax helps fund crime prevention programs that are essential to public safety. Crime plunged nationwide over that same period.

Protests against police practices have been simmering in Fort Worth long before the latest wave. In 2016, Jacqueline Craig, a Black mother of two, called the police to report a crime. Instead, a white officer aggressively handled and arrested her, resulting in an uproar. Three years later, a white officer killed Atatiana Jefferson, a Black woman, in her home, occasioning further protests. 

In response to Craig’s arrest, in 2017 the city formed a task force to study racial inequity and bias in housing, transportation, workforce development, criminal justice and other areas, and released recommendations in 2018. The only three criminal justice reforms included were civilian oversight of the police, more people of color in the ranks, and a Police Cadet program recruiting high school students.

Pamela Young, an organizer for United Fort Worth, a group that pushes for policing changes and is now calling for a vote against the CCPD, says these recommendations left gaping holes such as effective community oversight, and that grassroots groups should have been more involved.

United Fort Worth released recommendations of its own. “We wanted to get what we were asking for, not a top-down approach,” Young said. “Problems arise when the city refuses to take the advice we are giving.”

Young views the CCPD in a similar way. “The underlying issue is there is no community involvement,” she said, noting that City Council members who run it take donations from the police union, which can influence how the revenue raised through the tax district is spent. 

Jason Adams, a graduate student at the University of North Texas studying public administration, agrees that those donations are evidence that “we cannot trust that the council will place any substantive value on community input in the allocation of CCPD funds.”  Last month, he helped delay a public meeting regarding the police union’s  agreement with the city to allow for more public input.

Even some beneficiaries of the funds allocated through the CCPD are now opposing the tax. 

LaTasha Jackson-McDougle, the founder of Cheryl’s Voice, a group that educates children and families about domestic violence and that receives grants from the CCPD, came out on Facebook against renewing the tax.

“We as citizens need to vote NO on prop A and have a citizen meeting with adjustment of allocation of funds,” Jackson-McDougle wrote.

Sarduy, of Fort Worth Futures, also assails the city for allocating revenue without community input, but stresses that local advocates are now “keeping track” of the budget and eager to transform the city. 

“We want a different definition of public safety,” Sarduy said. “This is where we’re starting.”

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