Bexar County DA reports 40% reduction in felony backlog after targeted program

The Bexar County District Attorney's Office reported substantial reductions in its felony backlog after a court-authorized backlog-reduction program that used budget-neutral funds and extra prosecutor hours.

"As of last night ... we now have a decrease of 6,330 cases down to 3,851," the district attorney told commissioners, characterizing the reduction as about 40 percent. He said that prosecutors logged roughly 8,349 hours in the program and that the office had used about $397,333 of previously allocated funds supporting the effort.

Gonzales said the work involved prosecutors adding weekend and evening hours to handle long-queued bond and at-large felony cases and that the effort also freed experienced prosecutors to return to district-court assignments after the office hired 23 new misdemeanor prosecutors. "This has been a successful program," he said, but he described it as a temporary fix and urged the court to consider competitive compensation to retain seasoned prosecutors.

Commissioners pressed the office for clarity on classification criteria (whether backlog uses file date or offense date) and asked for additional data such as average time to disposition and number of outliers over 18 or 24 months. County staff said previous presentations had broken out the old and new definitions for comparison and agreed to continue sharing apples-to-apples numbers with commissioners.

What happens next: The DA offered to provide more granular metrics on intake/rejection rates and domestic-violence filings at commissioners' request; the court and DA agreed that longer-term solutions will include staffing and compensation considerations.