Sean Teare
After months of declining criminal caseloads in Harris County courts, prosecutors on Tuesday declared victory in clearing out a crippling backlog of felony cases caused by Hurricane Harvey and exacerbated by the pandemic.
“The backlog is not numbers,” District Attorney Sean Teare said at a news conference. “Every single one of these (numbers) is reflecting a group of people: the accused and the victims who have to deal with this in a real, meaningful way.
The backlog improved soon after Teare took office in January 2025, and three new state district courts opened their doors to lighten the load for other courts in 2024. The average number of cases then dropped to levels not seen since Hurricane Harvey wreaked havoc on the criminal justice infrastructure in downtown Houston in 2017.
In the weeks before the storm, which flooded the criminal courthouse, the county’s 22 courts had an average of about 930 pending cases, records show.
The number climbed as courts worked out of other county buildings, and the pandemic later forced in-person proceedings to stall even more. By 2021, the average more than doubled to over 2,200 cases amid a nationwide rise in violent crime, according to a review of state district court statistics.
One court stopped holding trials altogether for more than a year. The jail population also increased, prompting authorities to spend millions to house inmates elsewhere.
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This year, the situation surrounding caseloads is far different — the backlog dropped to an average of 730 cases spread across 29 courts by the end of February.
Commissioner Adrian Garcia credited some members of the judiciary for calming the backlog. He named four judges — [Te’iva] Bell and [Matthew] Peneguy, as well as Brian Warren and Natalia Cornelio — as some of the top performing courts.
Teare also attributed the sustained decline in caseloads to pushing more cases to trial — which allowed other prosecutions to end sooner. A defendant can face multiple charges, but not go to trial on all of them.
Teare’s prosecutors dismissed more than 26,000 felonies during his first 10 months in office — about double what his predecessor, Kim Ogg, did in the same amount of time during her first term in 2017, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from his office.
About half of the felonies dismissed by Teare involved defendants being convicted in other cases — a sign that older cases were coming to a close. This played out when prosecutors dismissed eight charges against Xavier Davis last April after a jury convicted him for a 2021 home invasion triple killing and sentenced him to death. The additional charges stemmed from assaults and jail contraband that prosecutors used to argue for his punishment.
About a quarter of the other dismissals were attributed to a lack of evidence or discretionary reasons, the data shows.
Teare called the first wave of dismissals a “significant reduction.”
“We were disposing of cases with dismissals that should have been dismissed long before that,” Teare said.
This is why we elected Sean Teare. He’s come in and gotten the job done, and there’s been no drama. I don’t know what else you could want.
I think Sean Teare is doing a good job and it shows in the day-to-day operations in the courtrooms. But the cases are now divided divided among more courts, each with its own prosecutors. That increased staffing probably has had at least as big an impact on the backlog.