For the second time this year, the Chron endorses Sean Teare for District Attorney.
Sean Teare
What impressed us most about Teare is his ability to see the bigger picture of the justice system and how all the pieces fit together. His experience certainly helps: he was a Harris County prosecutor for 11 years, trying both misdemeanor and felony cases. He’s tried two capital murders to verdict and was assigned to lead 10 others. He also served on the DA’s Capital Committee for six years, a group of senior prosecutors who sign off on every capital plea bargain and decide whether to pursue the death penalty. He currently works as a defense attorney for the Cogdell Law Firm.
Teare said he’s also been meeting with the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council and Houston Area Women’s Center to “inform the policies I intend to implement” around domestic violence prosecutions. He’s sitting down with the head of Harris Health Systems to discuss improving diversion programs for defendants with mental health issues. And he’s studying programs in other jurisdictions that serve defendants with substance abuse problems, hoping to find ways to “stop criminalizing behavior that, frankly, the public doesn’t want criminalized anymore.” Teare’s own mother died of a heroin overdose when he was young.
One idea he knows he wants to implement immediately is reinstituting an intake process that Ogg had done away with: a division with a rotating shift of veteran prosecutors with felony or misdemeanor trial experience who can earn overtime pay by working night and weekend shifts. He believes having that institutional knowledge on the front lines evaluating cases will lead to a lower case backlog and fewer defendants in an already overcrowded and unsafe jail.
“Fixing the intake and fixing the morale and making it an easier, better place to work all the way around will reduce the backlog, which will get cases to court faster,” Teare said. “One of the main reasons that we talk about the backlog is because of the humanitarian crisis going on in the jail. We’re killing people there, and we’ve got to find a way to reduce the population of that jail through quicker disposition of the cases.”
Teare added that he wants to foster a culture of mentorship in the agency. Rather than silo the most talented trial lawyers in the homicide division, Teare said he would scatter some of them throughout the agency, so that each misdemeanor and felony division had experienced prosecutors showing younger staff the ropes.
As was the case with the primary endorsement, the bulk of the piece is a critique of the opponent, this time Dan Simons, the previous time Kim Ogg. They had plenty of nice things to say about Sean Teare in addition to all that. You can go back and listen to my interview with Teare if you haven’t already. I’m excited to vote for him.