HOUSTON – District Attorney Kim Ogg provided an update on the county’s murder and capital murder cases and convictions since the creation of a specialized homicide division.
The division was implemented after the state law required trial courts to make murder trials a priority.
Ogg created the homicide division in 2022, assigning 12 veteran prosecutors and six skilled investigators to a unit dedicated to capital murder cases and pending cases. In addition, Ogg and her senior leadership secured the funding to create an overtime program in which prosecutors meet after hours and on weekends to review more than 30,000 nonviolent, mostly victimless misdemeanor and state jail felony cases. Those cases are then considered for solutions other than incarceration.
Ogg was joined by Leticia Ybarra, mother of murder victim Jessica Perez, and members of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office Homicide Division.
During the news conference, Ogg said that the county has made great strides in 2023 by sending more killers to prison and for longer years in decades.
During the height of the pandemic, only 37 people charged with murder or capital murder were sent to prison due to prosecutors’ limitations and court closures, according to the district attorney.
In 2013, Ogg announced 271 killers were sent to prison for a total of 7,903 years.
“That is a lot of dangerous people taken off the streets for a long time,” Ogg said.
Leticia Ybarras thanked the District Attorney’s Office for sending away the man who she says brutally murdered her daughter, Jessica Perez. She said while the resolution of the case will never make their family whole again, it has allowed them to move on from ever seeing the suspect and just grieve.
Here’s how many murder cases have been filed by the DA since 2016:
By the numbers
- 225 murders in 2016
- 171 in 2017 (Hurricane Harvey)
- 364 in 2022
- 301 in 2023
Here’s how many murder and capital murder convicts were sent to TDCJ since 2017:
By the numbers
- 114 in 2017 (Hurricane Harvey)
- 125 in 2018
- 98 in 2019
- 37 in 2020 (COVID-19 pandemic)
- 110 in 2021
- 187 in 2022
- 271 in 2023
“I want to give the courts credit,” Ogg said. “They’re trying more cases, we’re resolving more cases, we need to do even more.”
Watch the full news conference below: