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Harris County Commissioners have requested that the State Legislature create 5 more civil district courts to help solve the backlog of cases in Harris County. But would that actually help?
Turns out, there’s likely more to this problem than just not having enough judges. Gary Polland, attorney and publisher of the Texas Conservative Review, told KTRH that it has more to do with the judges themselves than the number of them. He said, “I just don’t see those courts working as hard as the criminal courts do. Some of the judges work really hard, and some of them don’t.”
Polland says there are other issues with this plan as well. He said, “It’s got to pass both sides of the legislature, they have to appropriate the money to create these new courts, which costs money for both the state and the county, it may be too late in the game to do that. I just don’t see it as the answer yet.”
He says that the root issue here is that voters just don’t know enough about the judges they’re electing to sit on these benches. He pointed out that “There’s not a lot of information that’s provided to the voters about the judges, their experiences, their abilities, their backlogs. You don’t really hear much of anything.”
Polland doesn’t believe that just creating five new judicial positions is going to be enough to really solve that problem long term.