In our last story we talked about how Travis County District Attorney José Garza appeared to say that he knew of no other cases where accused violent criminals had gotten out of jail because his office failed to indict within 90 days as required by state law. It had recently come to light that a judge had to release two people accused of murder from jail because of that law and the failure of Garza’s office to indict within 90 days (one of the charged is back in jail after Garza’s office issued an indictment).
After all that, Garza’s office released a statement saying they were “conducting a review” to see if there had been any other cases where this occurred. But, they maintained that they had “not discovered any other case” of the type in question.
Well, we found another one, from December 2023. In that case a judge let a man accused of aggravated assault go free because Garza’s office didn’t indict within 90 days. Within a few months, that man was arrested for a subsequent murder. The case was reported in the media at the time.
KXAN reported on December 28, 2023 that Hilario Chavez Adrian, 56, was “charged with murder after a homicide this month on Congress Avenue.” According to KXAN, bond for Chavez Adrian in the 2023 case was originally set at $40,000 and then lowered to $1 — after Garza’s office failed to meet the 90-day deadline to indict.
At the time DA Garza refused to comment on the situation because, in KXAN’s summary, “The Travis County District Attorney’s Office would not comment on the case because it’s still active.”
KXAN didn’t stop its inquiries there and found, “the court coordinator for the judge’s office that was set to handle the aggravated assault case said the DA ‘failed to return an indictment’ and that it is illegal to hold a defendant in jail for more than 90 days without an indictment.”
In other words the case is almost identical to the ones discussed in our previous story, which was based largely on reporting by Tony Plohetski in the Austin American-Statesman and on KVUE . Therein, as already noted, a district judge said she had no choice but to release two accused murderers because Garza’s office failed to indict within 90 days. The only difference in the case we’re adding to the list today is that the person released is charged with a murder that happened after he was released on $1 bond; released because Garza failed to indict within the 90-day deadline.
Also, according to Travis County records we were able to find in an online search, this case appears to be set for trial on March 17 in the court of District Judge Karen Sage. (Anyone who might plan to attend should check this link to make sure scheduling hasn’t changed.)
Plohetski Strikes Again
Meanwhile Plohetski published a second story in the Statesman and on KVUE. The Statesman headline said a lot: “As defendants sit in jail, Travis County DA José Garza says indictment deadline isn’t firm.”
The story began: “For nearly 50 years, local prosecutors in Texas have interpreted a section of state law as a holy grail deadline: They have 90 days to indict felony defendants or allow them to be released. But as his administration faces mounting scrutiny for repeatedly missing that target, Travis County District Attorney José Garza issued a striking assertion: He doesn’t believe his office is under any obligation to indict cases that quickly– even as many defendants sit in jail long after the deadline has passed.”
Plohetski also directly quoted what seemed like a rather peeved Garza on the topic, ‘“To the question of whether we have an obligation or a deadline to indict within 90 days, the answer is ‘no.’”
That’s right. José Garza doesn’t think he has to follow the same “holy grail” law that other Texas DAs have followed for almost 50 years (the law was passed in 1977). Instead Garza believes, as he told Plohetski, “We actually have as long as the statute of limitations to indict a case.”
That’s right. José Garza doesn’t think he has to follow the same “holy grail” law that other Texas DAs have followed for almost 50 years.
Of course the statute of limitations for felony crimes is way longer than 90 days. For instance the Texas statute of limitations for assault with a deadly weapon is five years from the date of the alleged assault. The same is true for armed robbery. For murder there is no statute of limitations.
This is a truly amazing claim by Garza. For instance he believes that he could keep an accused armed robber in the Travis County Jail for five years without indictment. Taking Garza’s belief to another logical extension, he evidently believes he could keep an accused murderer in jail for life without indicting that person and without granting him or her a trial. That’s simply un-American. Come on man.
It also goes against the core themes of both Garza’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns in which he sharply criticized his predecessors for giving overly harsh sentences. That view was reflected in a recent statement that Garza gave to KXAN when they asked him about State Senator Sarah Eckhardt saying she has “grave concerns” about his office. Somehow that prompted Garza and his PIO team to drag his predecessor Margaret Moore into the mix. “We were elected to take over an office that was broken,” read the statement. Among the examples of brokenness provided in Garza’s statement was, “innocent people sent to rot in prison.”
Since the Garza statement uses the term “prison” that appears to imply that he is referring to “innocent” people who were somehow convicted despite their innocence and then sent to prison. Yet, in the position Garza is taking now, he doesn’t even have to give accused criminals a trial. No, according to Garza’s view of his powers and responsibilities, he can just let prisoners rot in the county jail without a trial or even an indictment; as long as the statute of limitations remains in place.
Multiple Unindicted Prisoners Still In Jail Beyond Deadline
Garza is actually engaging in carrying out his theory of this particular law. As Plohetski also reported in his most recent article, “On Feb. 18, the day the Statesman and KVUE revealed the cases involving the accused murderers (meaning their original story), there were 26 felony defendants in the Travis County Jail who had been there for 90 days or more without an indictment. One on the snapshot-in-time list had been there for 224 days straight after a third-offense drunk driving arrest, an analysis by the news outlets found. (The person in the last example has since been released in a plea bargain.)”
Travis County District Attorney José Garza (from his campaign website, photo at top by Daryl Slusher)
Then there’s the actual operational issue of how these deadlines were missed. For that Plohetski turned to Charlie Baird, whom he describes as “a former Travis County district judge and former judge on the state’s highest criminal court.”
Baird said, “This is one of the biggest deadlines in any prosecutor’s office.”
Baird is saying that there needs to be a system to keep track of deadlines; so deadlines don’t get missed, like accused murderers getting out of jail on a $1 bond. Who would have ever thought that there needed to be a system in place to monitor and enforce indictment deadlines?
Ooops, Garza’s Democratic predecessors in Travis County thought of that.
Who would have ever thought that there needed to be a system in place to monitor and enforce indictment deadlines?
Ooops, Garza’s Democratic predecessors in Travis County thought of that.
Plohetski writes: “Until 2021, the Travis County District Attorney’s Office had a “grand jury intake unit,” where prosecutors were tasked with indicting jailed defendants, or otherwise resolving their cases, within 90 days.” Plohetski continues that Garza largely did away with that office and “mostly placed indictment duty with prosecutors in the county’s nine criminal district courts.” Plohetski added, “Defense attorneys contend prosecutors are already overwhelmed with court settings, hearings and trials.”
Other DAs’ offices also thought of establishing a process. One was neighboring Williamson County. Plohetski continues, “Both urban and smaller district attorney’s offices have frameworks built around ensuring jailed defendants are indicted in 90 days. The Williamson County District Attorney’s Office policy, for example, says ‘absent extenuating circumstances, all defendants should be indicted within 90 days of a defendant’s arrest.’”
Also, prosecutors are directed to “constantly monitor the status of unindicted cases.”
Yet Garza contends the 1977 law provides only “a trigger” for defense attorneys to free clients but “is not a deadline” for prosecutors.
What Does It All Mean?
What are we to conclude from all this? First of all it looks like José Garza doesn’t think he has to follow the same rules as everybody else. And, when he gets caught breaking a rule, or in bad management, well that’s somebody’s else fault; like an unnamed assistant prosecutor whom he blamed for the two accused murderers getting out of jail. Garza also, as noted in our previous article, blamed the judge for letting out the accused murderers, saying, “It sounds to me like the judge misunderstood the law,”
Now, he says he doesn’t have to follow the same law that judges and prosecutors have felt bound to follow for almost 50 years; and still feel bound to follow.
That kind of attitude seems vaguely familiar. It reminds me of someone in national politics right now.
That’s really ironic because, as we have noted before, Garza accused his opponent in the 2024 Travis County Democratic Primary of being “the MAGA candidate.” Plus, a group of 10 self-described “elected Democratic officials in Travis County” called on Garza’s opponent to “renounce Republican money and Republican attacks in the Democratic Primary.” None of them have come to Garza’s defense during his current days of crisis; nor have any said they think Garza is wrong on the law. (The Ten are: Greg Casar; Sheryl Cole; Lulu Flores; James Talarico; Delia Garza; Vanessa Fuentes; Chito Vela; José Velasquez; Zo Qadri; and Jim McDonald.)
OK, I think can hear some Democrats saying, why is he bringing that up again. The answer is the same as the last time I brought it up. Travis County Democrats own this disaster in the District Attorney’s Office. The local media for four years made very clear that Garza was excessively tolerant of violent crime and violent criminals, in particular involving assaults by men on women.
The local media also gave examples of Garza’s dishonesty and incompetence. For instance both of those traits were driven home in KXAN’s November 2023 report on Garza’s methodologically crude and factually inaccurate portrayal of his record on prosecuting violent crime. That episode ended with Garza summarizing, “You know, at the end of the day, we are attorneys, not statisticians” — another example of failing to accept responsibility for his actions.
I know that every voter makes their choices for their own reasons and that is each person’s individual right. At the same time I also know that it didn’t take much more than the MAGA charge for thousands of Travis County Democratic voters to stick with Garza. It was that, and support for Garza’s plea that he needed to continue “reforming the criminal justice system.” Well he’s got three years, 9 months and a little over two weeks left in his second term to keep doing that. Be careful out there.
Now, here are a few shorter items.
Did You Hear the One About the Same MAGA Tactic Being Used Against Gary Bledsoe?
The “my opponent is MAGA affiliated” strategy also worked recently for one of Garza’s ideological allies, now Council Member Mike Siegel. The amazing part is that Siegel was able to put longtime Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe in the MAGA camp, and it worked on Austin voters; although this time not just in the Democratic Primary, but in a heavily Democratic Council District. See our earlier story on that here.
Democrat Van Jones of CNN Offers Blunt Take on Democrat’s Plight
Here’s some food for thought which to some extent foreshadows some of the discussion I have planned for future weeks. Appearing on CNN Newsroom over the weekend staunch Democrat Van Jones offered this assessment of the party’s status.
“Look, man, we’re screwed,” Jones said, with a chuckle.
He continued, “”Listen, the Democratic Party is going through a massive set of internal crises. You have a party that got trapped two ways. One, defending a broken status quo that nobody likes, because they thought that Donald Trump was going to make it worse. But when you’re defending the status quo, you’re going to lose.
And then offending most people in the country, calling everybody sexist and racist and transphobic and every other name, and then saying, ‘please follow us.’ That’s not a good strategy, folks. Defending a broken status quo and offending most of the country, turns out, is not as popular as my party thought it was going to be. And so it’s going to take a while for people to get it figured out.”
Trump Fails to Deliver on Major Issue Affecting Everyone
Speaking of MAGA, I want to close with my own criticism of Donald Trump. I try to, as much as possible, stick to local issues here because a lot fewer people are covering those. In the new world that is emerging, however, federal policies are going to have a much quicker and probably deeper impact on local issues than before. I am still thinking that through, and how it affects what I write about.
So I could today write about how Elon Musk’s (a guy with major connections to Austin) approach to DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is cruel, inhumane and ineffective. I am one of those who thinks that there should be strong efforts to expose waste and fraud in government. But, doing it, for instance, by firing employees who happen to be on “probationary” status is in no way an approach aimed at seriously reducing government fraud or increasing government efficiency.
In fact it’s just a cynical way to fire the employees who are currently the most vulnerable because of their probationary status. And that does not mean probationary as in disciplinary — except possibly in a few cases. Rather it can mean firing really good employees who are on probationary status because they were recently promoted. This is just a cruel and ineffective policy that reveals a preexisting hatred of, and prejudice against, federal employees. It is particularly galling coming from the richest man in the world.
That is all really bad and probably worse than the policy I’m about to note, on which Trump failed to deliver. But, here goes.
I’m talking about Daylight Savings Time. Both Trump and Musk were against it during the campaign. Since taking office (again) Trump has rapidly rolled out policies on a wide array of fronts; “flooding the zone” as Steve Bannon recommended years ago.
But, Daylight Savings Time is back and Trump failed to stop it.
By the way I realize that time itself is not a natural occurrence. It’s a way humans contrived to provide some agreed upon order organized around the natural system.
It’s not natural though to change how it works every six or seven months and remove the seasonal differences. That’s not natural and it’s not good for getting to work on time in the morning, or not with enough rest anyway. In my view it’s bad all around. At least on that, I thought Donald Trump agreed with me, but he failed to deliver. And, now it gets dark way too late.
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