Call to ‘defund’ 2 judges in Tarrant County for holding so few juvenile court hearings

Tarrant County’s top elected leader has called for two appointed judges to lose their jobs after an audit of the juvenile justice system revealed they rarely hold hearings, which has contributed to dramatic overcrowding in the detention center.

Another county leader on Tuesday suggested publicly that some of the “systemic problems” in how young people are detained are rooted in racism.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported on the audit Friday after obtaining a copy. The 21-page audit uncovered wide-ranging problems at nearly every level, including violations of Texas law in how some youths are housed, and how two associate judges who handle juvenile cases cancel or postpone most of their scheduled hearings. One earned the nickname “ghost” court among employees.

Other Texas counties of similar size are not having the types of overcrowding problems that Tarrant has, even as the number of juvenile criminal cases has decreased over the last decade.

On Tuesday, Tarrant County commissioners formally reviewed the audit, prepared by Carey Cockerell, who served as Tarrant County’s director of juvenile services for 20 years.

The commissioners had strong words in reaction to the audit.

“I would like for us to talk about this at the Juvenile Board meeting tomorrow to get a feel for defunding those two courts,” said Glen Whitley, the top commissioner. “I want to talk to them about if we did away with the judges, we asked them to assign another district judge to help oversee (cases).”

The Tarrant County Juvenile Board, which meets Wednesday, is made up of judges across the county.

The 323rd District Court judge, Alex Kim, oversees the juvenile detention center and the two associate judges. The audit doesn’t name the two associate judges, but they are Cynthia Terry and Andy Porter. Porter is running for election this fall to be the Criminal District Court No. 4 judge. Terry is running this fall to be the 325th District Court judge.

Neither Porter nor Terry could be reached immediately Tuesday.

In an interview after Tuesday’s meeting, Whitley stressed the importance of getting young people out of detention and into programs.

“At this age, they’re very moldable,” he said. “When we’re keeping them in detention for 200 plus days, then we’re not doing our job. We’ve got to look at every part along that path that slows down them getting out of that detention center.”

‘Ghost court’

Cockerell’s review of dockets found that cases are not processed in an efficient manner.

He specifically reviewed cases that happened June 27 and found that 116 juveniles were being held in the detention center, which is staffed for 104.

Of those, 25 cases were awaiting review by the DA’s office. Another 25 juveniles had already been in the detention center for more than 100 days with no disposition.

One juvenile had been in detention for 515 days. He or she will be tried as an adult and was awaiting transfer.

Another juvenile had been held for 336 days and was pending a pretrial hearing. Multiple other youths had been in the center for more than 215 days.

One associate court had 744 hearings set, but 61% were canceled or delayed. Another judge’s court had 431 cases set, but 67% of those were similarly put off.

“I’m bothered by the fact that they refer to our associate courts as ‘ghost courts’ and talk about the infrequencies with which they’re moving cases along,” Whitley said in the interview. “We all have to do our job. And they’re not elected, so we can do something with them. With elected officials, we still have to do our job, but unfortunately only the citizens can fire them.”

Kim is an elected judge and assumed office in 2019. He’s up for re-election this fall. He did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

“There were no hearings from February to March except for detention, which just happened to be early voting,” Whitley said. “That is very disturbing to me. We have a job to do and they ought to be doing the job. We all run for office, but I don’t think that’s interfered with us doing our jobs. I’m not pleased with continuing those associate courts.”

Cockerell will likely be asked to return to Tarrant County for a more in-depth audit of the juvenile system.

Commissioner Devan Allen said she’d like for Cockerell to specifically investigate a few youths were held for so long.

“Each day represents a day in the life of a juvenile who might be somewhere they shouldn’t be,” she said. “There’s a person behind those numbers.”

“There is a child behind those numbers,” responded Commissioner Roy Brooks. “A child.”

A source who has knowledge of the juvenile justice system and asked not to be identified sent the Star-Telegram data that shows Kim has held 10 trials since he took office in 2019 — six were in 2021, and four in 2022. None were held in 2019 or 2020.

Whitley said Tuesday that the juvenile court has a caseload of about 625, of which about 350 are felony cases. In the adult system, the lowest caseload a judge has is just over 1,000.

‘Racism’ in the system

Brooks was particularly taken back by racial data that Cockerell included in his report.

Looking specifically at June 27, he found that 107 of the youth being held were people of color, and nine were white.

“It is difficult to imagine that it is accidental that over 90% of the long term incarcerations in our juvenile detention center are either African-American or Hispanic, and that only 7% of those incarcerated long term are white,” Brooks said. “There is something systematically wrong at our juvenile detention center … It’s hard to understand how it’s not racist, and I don’t use that term lightly.”

Brooks said the audit shed light on things that county leaders didn’t know were occurring, such as the increases in the detention center’s average daily population and lengths of stay.

“We were not aware of the tendency of the current court out there to stack up bodies of juveniles in the juvenile detention center rather than observing our previous policies of getting those kids on alternative offense referral plans so that they could be managed in a community-based setting,” he said.

‘It’s the judge’

Overcrowding at the juvenile detention center has been a problem for months, with youths reportedly sleeping on cots in common areas such as the library.

The Star-Telegram has reported on recent efforts by the Tarrant County Juvenile Board to combat overcrowding, including the formation of a triage committee. If the detention center’s population rises above 104 youths during the week, the committee meets to give suggestions Kim, who is the only authority who can implement changes in the courtroom.

It’s unclear if that group has had to meet yet this summer.

At the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Brooks said the issue isn’t with the system at-large.

“It’s the judge,” Brooks said. “The goal should be to get these kids out of detention and anything else is the games that grown people play and that’s a bunch of bull.”

Complaint against Kim

Whitley’s questioning of Kim’s workload during early voting season isn’t the first time someone has complained about the judge mixing work with his campaign.

As part of a complaint filed against Kim with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in April, local attorneys Greg Westfall and Stephanie Patten accused Kim of using his official office to promote his campaign, mainly through his controversial YouTube channel where he streams detention hearings. The complaint was later dismissed.

Kim began to livestream the hearings during the pandemic under the rules of an open court. The hearings normally lasted about an hour, and once they were over, the videos stayed up for anyone to watch anytime — generating ad revenue each time someone viewed them.

Kim wasn’t the only judge in Texas who used YouTube to stream hearings when the pandemic shut down in-person gatherings, and all still streams hearings today. The Supreme Court of Texas told judges they had to broadcast proceedings, including juvenile hearings, and recommended they use YouTube. The Texas Judicial Branch also sent instructions to judges about how to create a Zoom account and make the broadcast live using YouTube.

Westfall and Patten brought up several issues with how Kim has handled the streams. In some cases, Kim continued to stream the hearing of children under the age of 14, against state law. In others, he spoke the child’s full name and gave a summary of their alleged crimes, the attorneys complained.

They also said he treated the hearings as if they were being held in a live TV courtroom. Viewers have the ability to use a chat room that appears next to the livestream when cases are being heard. Commenters often encouraged stricter punishments and talked about the children and parents as if they were characters on a television show.

But the attorneys also alleged Kim used these hearings to further his campaign by promoting them on his Facebook page and spreading messages to viewers about how successful his court was before hearings took place. In a photo provided to the state as part of their complaint, a screenshot of one of Kim’s court hearings can be seen blown up and hung on the wall of a campaign event.

The hearings also earned ad revenue that the commissioners were not aware of. The county rejected a $9,000 payment from Google earlier this year.

The state ultimately dismissed the complaint and said that Kim’s conduct “while not necessarily appropriate, did not rise to the level of sanctionable misconduct.”