A presentation from a committee of attorneys tasked with reviewing the legislation that last year established the Kendall County Court at Law has led commissioners to consider reshaping the new court’s jurisdiction.
Stephan Rogers, the president of the Kendall County Bar Association, said a committee was formed to discuss the legislation which was made up of several members of the local justice system, including several local attorneys, County Counsel Bill Ballard, District Attorney Nicole Bishop, the district and county clerks and member of the local bar association.
Douglas Burford, a local attorney, chaired the committee of counsel and said there is universal support for the new county court with the exploding population growth that he said is overwhelming the district court caseload. Burford said the committee reviewed statutes creating county courts in dozens of other counties, but the committee ultimately decided it would be in the county’s best interest to revert to the 1999 legislation that created the county’s first county court at law.
While Kendall once had a county court at law, it was dissolved in 2015 during the creation of the 451st District Court despite disagreement between commissioners on the county court’s dissolution, placing all criminal cases in the newly formed district court. As the county has grown since the county court has dissolved, so has the number of criminal cases.
Burford said the discussion among the committee presented four reasons why the new county court shouldn’t have concurrent felony jurisdiction with the state district court. Of the four, he said concurrent jurisdiction could prevent state legislators from approving a second district court, which the state pays for, in the future if both courts could hear felony cases.
“I want to emphasize this,” Burford said. “If we have a district court and a county court at law that is both hearing felony matters … the state is likely to say, ‘Well, you’ve already got a county court at law that can hear felony matters. You just need to create another county court at law.’ Who pays for the county court at law? The county. Who pays for the district court? The state of Texas.”
Burford called up a local family law attroney, Douglas York, to speak on his experience creating a county court at law in Harris County. York said it’s no secret that it’s a “chore getting the state to open up another district court,” adding that from his experience in helping create the 507th District Court, legislators may question why the state should fund another district court if there are already two courts in the county doing the same things.
Burford also shared an opinion on the two courts sharing jurisdiction, which he said was more personal. He said he felt a single judge should hear cases from start to finish from arraignment to verdict to sentence, which he said could be jeopardized by a concurrent felony jurisdiction between the two courts.
“To me, the facts of the case, respectives of parties, backgrounds, a lot of facets of every criminal case are considered and examined throughout the entire process from arraignment to pretrial hearings to motions to suppress,” Burford said. “Every element is an educational opportunity for the judge to get a better understanding of the parties and the facts of a particular case. I’m afraid if we have concurrent jurisdiction where pretrial matters may be heard by one judge that’s tried by another judge that we’re going to lose a very important element of the criminal justice system.”
Further, because felony and criminal cases have priority over all other cases, both Burford and York said hearing felony cases in both courts could continue to “bottleneck” the local justice system, pushing civil and family cases – like divorce and custody hearings – further back. Burford said there has been concern that felony cases could be left idle should the 451st District Court judge be absent, but he said the state funds a visiting judge for every district court in Texas who could be available within a moment’s notice to fill in.
In the end, the commissioners were receptive to the suggestions made by the attorneys with Precinct 2 Commissioner Richard Elkins urging the commissioners to get the court up and running.
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