Erica Grieder: Fears about felony bonds shouldn’t be dismissed, but should be put in context

Houston City Councilmember Michael Kubosh was in a sunny mood on Friday, despite spending much of the week studying some of the most distressing murders the region has seen of late. He had just filed a grievance against District Judge Hazel B. Jones, the eighth such grievance he filed this past week. At issue was a sickening crime: the murder of a 5-year-old boy, Samuel Olson, who was reported missing in May 2021 and whose little body was discovered in a motel room in Jasper the following month. This week, Theresa Raye Balboa — a former girlfriend of the boy’s father — was charged with capital murder and tampering with evidence of a corpse. According to authorities, she at one point stashed the child’s body in a storage unit. And Balboa, notably, was out on bond at the time of the murder, having been charged in November 2020 with a third-degree felony for allegedly assaulting the boy’s father.

“The criminal justice system failed this little boy,” Kubosh said, summarizing this grievance — a point that would be hard to argue with. But was the critical failure point, in this case, the decision by the judge? How can a judge anticipate, without the benefit of hindsight, if a person charged with assaulting an adult will go on to commit more heinous acts? Those are among the questions Kubosh is raising, at the moment. The at-large councilmember last week announced that he plans to file grievances with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct against most of Harris County’s district court judges, who oversee felony cases. At a press conference, he read off the names of 156 murder victims — all of whom were slain, allegedly, by people who were out on bond at the time. All of the county’s elected state district judges are Democrats ; Kubosh is elected on a nonpartisan basis. His issue, Kubosh explains, is particularly with personal recognizance bonds, also known as “PR bonds” or “free bonds,” and with low bonds being set for defendants with violent pasts.