HOUSTON – The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said a computer system went down last Thursday, an issue which continued into the weekend, leading to a backup and some defendants being released from the joint processing center.
“You can try to sugar coat things or whatever but the bottom line is it’s a huge embarrassment and that’s reality,” said Andy Kahan, Victim Services Director for Crime Stoppers of Houston.
Kahan said the issue is connected to the requirement that a probable cause hearing take place by 24 or 48 hours. He said someone tipped him off about the situation.
“That person basically said ‘Hey, we just cut loose close to 300 people because they weren’t given their probable cause hearings in due time,’” Kahan said.
The sheriff’s office estimates between 180 and 200 defendants were released but KPRC 2 is still working to get a final number.
Criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto said one of her clients was among those impacted.
“My client was coming up around 40-42 hours and so he was one of the people that was just summarily released on a general release order from the magistrate,” said Detoto.
The sheriff’s office said most were Class B type misdemeanors and the defendants released will be re-arrested through a warrant.
“To have to be re-arrested, it just sets a whole ball in motion that’s unfair to the accused,” Detoto said.
“The latest Harris County Universal Services’ computer-system failure has the full attention of the district attorney, police chief and sheriff because it resulted in the temporary release of accused criminals,” said Dane Schiller, spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, in a statement. “The safety of the public, security of our criminal justice system and efficiency of our courts demand that the county give Universal Services the resources to fix this and ensure it never happens again.”
Universal Services sent KPRC 2 a statement regarding the planned outages:
On Mar. 24 at 7 p.m., during a planned network hardware change to improve system bandwidth, the network core stopped functioning. The restart process took approximately 45 minutes to troubleshoot and restore the network.
During this time, data remained secure, however our customers lost the ability to access a very small percentage of databases.
County agencies rely on us to ensure that information technology systems are functioning properly, and we take seriously the impact this network outage has had on our customers. Our teams have been working 24/7 to ensure our customers regain access to their databases.
We are investigating the root cause of the outage and will take the necessary steps to ensure technical failures like this don’t happen again. We also look forward to working with the justice community and law enforcement agencies to ensure we have systems in place that avoid a single point of failure.
Kahan is asking what’s going to happen to make sure everybody is accounted for and what’s going to be done to make sure this doesn’t happen again.