Harris County

The Texas jail is bursting at the seams as officials push for more pretrial incarceration.

Two years’ worth of data shows how disproportionately the city’s police and prosecutors target certain neighborhoods.

As Texas lifts its COVID-19 restrictions, the city’s jail remains overcrowded and its police and prosecutors continue to operate as normal.

On Tuesday, Harris County Commissioners will decide if the D.A. and Sheriff will get more money to continue their neglect in the face of a public-health crisis.

Houston area voters re-elected Gonzalez after he supported bail reform, cleaned up the county jail, and provided aid to incarcerated people living with opioid use disorder.

Though domestic violence is often cited as a reason to maintain the carceral status quo, advocates say there are more humane—and effective—alternatives.

Lamar Burks has maintained his innocence for nearly 25 years in a murder case that has been marked by conflicting eyewitness accounts and the conviction of a DEA agent on corruption charges.

Videos contradict officers’ claims that they didn’t ‘kettle’ protesters.

Sheriffs wield enormous power, and they can direct it in ways that will help contain the spread of COVID-19 and protect incarcerated people.

With few exceptions, news outlets in Harris County, Texas, spotlight singular instances of crime to allege that legal reform policy is a threat to the public.

She withstood challenges from two of her former assistant district attorneys who wanted to reform the office and reduce prosecutions of low-level offenses.

The attitude behind the Harris County district attorney’s message to ‘put down your gun and pick up an employment application’ is outdated.

Jones is challenging incumbent Kim Ogg in the 2020 election.

A Texas judge approved a Batson motion, then overruled it. But a transcript shows that a Black man was struck unfairly, the attorney said.

The incumbent in the race, Jones’s former boss Kim Ogg, will not support a blanket refusal to prosecute sex workers, her office says.

Carvana Cloud, until recently the chief of the Special Victims Bureau, is entering the race to unseat her former boss.

Kim Ogg ran as a reform-minded district attorney candidate, but her office has sought two death warrants for Dexter Johnson, whose lawyer says cannot name everyday objects and has an IQ of 70.

In California, Texas and Florida, advocates sent letters to district attorneys, demanding that they refuse to work with officers with histories of misconduct.

Last week, in a 4-3 vote on the 2019-20 budget, the City Council in Durham, North Carolina, voted against funding 18 new police officers. It voted instead to raise the wage for part-time city workers to just over $15 an hour. With that, the city joined jurisdictions around the country that are critically evaluating requests for increased […]

Records show Kim Ogg’s office appeared to misrepresent felony prosecutor caseloads in its $21 million budget request.

In 2000, Lamar Burks was convicted of murder and given a 70-year sentence. But the federal indictment of a DEA agent and witnesses who say Burks is innocent have raised new questions about his case.

Audia Jones pledges to tackle ‘brokenness in the system’ by unseating Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg.

‘How are we making sure that we’re not just building and building a system that we know is not necessarily effective?’

Harris County Judge Darrell Jordan discusses his newly elected colleagues’ decision to withdraw an appeal of a landmark bail reform lawsuit.

Prosecutors denounce bail reform efforts when people miss court dates, but ‘failure to appear’ rates obscure the fact that many who miss court aren’t on the run.

Republican misdemeanor judges in Houston have clung to an unconstitutional bail system. But their intransigence could cost them their seats.

A Texas jail suicide involving a woman who couldn’t make bail in a shoplifting case highlights of the plight of pretrial detainees with mental illness.

An email obtained by The Appeal shows Kim Ogg’s office is intentionally asking for unaffordable bail amounts to hold certain people in jail in Texas.

In February 2017, Mweze Kyungu was pulled over by Houston police officers in Harris County, Texas for a defective brake light and then arrested. “You kill people like me,” Kyungu told the arresting officers, “all you do is kill black people.” Thus began a nearly year-long ordeal for Kyungu in Harris County’s criminal justice system, […]

A 14-year-old Houston teenager may be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life after he was charged with having sex with his 12-year-old girlfriend. The seventh grader, whose name has not been revealed, has been charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child. His girlfriend is in the sixth grade, the Houston Chronicle said. […]