A Twitter thread of interest:
Harris County hasn’t redrawn its civil court boundaries since 1973, leading to lopsided caseloads.
Here’s 1,000 new maps that would reduce lines at the courthouse, give judges more time in eviction & debt cases, and restore “one person one vote.”
— David McClendon (@DMcClendonPhD) 3:39 PM – 11 November 2022
And here’s the best one for eviction cases.
— David McClendon (@DMcClendonPhD) 3:39 PM – 11 November 2022
Note that he means the Justice of the Peace courts. Current maps for those precincts are here. Note that the Constable and Justice of the Peace precincts are the same. Note also how large geographically precincts 4 and 5 are. I’m sure they were quite empty in the 70s, but that was a long time ago. That’s one of the main theses in the accompanying article, which focuses on population growth and caseloads, and how they affect people facing evictions, which are handled by the JP courts.
Every Monday morning, Judge Israel Garcia, Jr., who serves as Harris County Justice of the Peace for Precinct 5, stares down a punishing docket of eviction, debt collection, and traffic cases for the week. His courtroom has a line out the door of parents and children, desperate to resolve a dispute with their landlord or settle a longstanding debt. But the law can be unfriendly to these defendants, and Judge Garcia must know that relief will never come.
All Justice of the Peace Courts in Harris County deal with large caseloads, but the number of cases in Precinct 5 is seemingly endless. If you visit our Harris County Evictions Dashboard, you’ll see how imbalanced the caseload really is – there are 10 times as many cases in Precinct 5 compared to Precinct 6.
What’s going on here? Do renters in Precinct 5 have a much higher risk of eviction than renters in other areas? Are its residents that much more likely to fall behind on their credit card payments or speed through a school zone? No. The reason why Precinct 5 has more cases is because it has more people – a lot more people. And it has more people because Harris County hasn’t redrawn the boundaries of JP courts since 1973.
For this blog post, I explore just how lopsided the caseloads in Harris County’s JP Courts have become due to a lack of redistricting over the past 50 years. I also show the results from a simulation I ran of 1,000 new maps for the courts that account for population change. Every single one is better than what we have today.
I discussed the political case for redistricting the Constables in an earlier post. That’s a separate matter from what David McClendon is advocating. The two goals, if they are indeed goals for Commissioners Court, would be in some tension here. My first thought is whether McClendon took the Voting Rights Act into account in this exercise, because Precinct 6 – one of two precinct with Hispanic Constables and (with the election of Dolores Lozano in Precinct 2) all Hispanic JPs – would be first in line to be made larger. Precinct 2, the other of those two precincts, is right next to it. Precincts 3 and 7 have Black Constables and JPs. Any potential redrawing of these precincts needs to ensure that Black and Hispanic voters aren’t losing representation.
The Constables are currently five Dems and three Republicans, with Precincts 4 and 8 being all-GOP, while Precinct 5 has one JP from each party following Israel Garcia’s win in 2020. As a practical political matter, Commissioners Court is not going to draw a new set of maps that will make it harder for Democrats to win. Again, as far as I can tell, McClendon didn’t take that into account.
And that’s fine. That wasn’t his idea, and his goal was to even out the caseloads to enable a better process and hopefully better outcomes for tenants facing eviction. The good news here is that McClendon ran a thousand maps, each of which were better than the existing one for his purposes. That strongly suggests to me that the political purpose of not making it harder for Dems to get elected – while also at the least not making it easier for a few specific Constables to get re-elected – can be achieved at the same time as making the courts function better for everyone. Maybe there’s not an optimal solution for each in the same map, but surely improvements can be made. I would absolutely advocate for Commissioners Court to take a long look at this.
15 days and counting…..
while the timing is suspect (this should have been done in the 90’s or even early 2000’s) there is another benefit that hasn’t been mentioned: the JURY WHEEL
The wheel has to be reset when you run low or out of eligible jurors. The most common reason for running out are the JP courts.
Jurors are pulled from the pct requesting first. For reasons we wont go into here, pct 7 and 6 run out first. The spill-over for when they run out are the nearest ADJACENT precincts–in most cases pct 1. When it goes out, it becomes harder and harder to justify calling a juror from cypress to serve on a jury needed off Harrisburg, Sunnyside, etc.–especially when the goal is a jury of your peers (never mind the burdensome hike for that juror).
When they redistrict, an unintended benefit will be pcts that have jury pools that last longer before they have to pull from their neighbors, making the wheel last longer and ensuring folks aren’t repeatedly called as often to serve.
Pingback: A few words from Judge Hidalgo – Off the Kuff