Nearly 300 defendants released from Harris County jail after computer glitch

Almost 300 Harris County defendants were ordered to be released from jail due to a computer system glitch that prevented those inmates from going before a magistrate before the state-mandated time frame. JWEB — the system used by local law enforcement and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to file criminal charges — crashed and was down from 7 p.m. March 24 through 9 p.m. March 26according to the documents obtained by the Chronicle. The glitch turned into a two-day outage for the county system during a required update. A statement from Rick Noriega of Harris County Universal Services, the agency which handles technical issues for the county, described the outage as “minimal.”

Generally, defendants are not to be held for processing for more than 24 hours in misdemeanor cases and 48 hours for felonies, according to the Texas Code for Criminal Procedure. Prosecutors with the District Attorney’s Office petitioned magistrates in the probable cause court to postpone the release of some inmates for an additional 24 hours, providing a list of the inmates in question. Some inmates were held on felonies, other misdmeanors. Magistrates approved most of the motions — meaning that some inmates were allowed to be held for longer — on Friday and Saturday. One of those magistrates, Courtney St. Julian, then denied a similar request Sunday and ordered the release of at least 280 defendants, citing an “insurmountable” backlog of cases in their court and that too many defendants had gone without a review of probable cause or a bail hearing. Records of the extensions were not available on the Harris County District Clerk’s Office website and were provided to the Chronicle by other county government agencies. Some of the defendants who were eligible for pretrial services were released on personal recognizance bonds, while some others charged with more serious offenses had bail set at $10,000, according to the court documents.