He definitely faces challenges. I believe he’s up to them.
Sean Teare
Sean Teare, Harris County’s district attorney-elect, is a longtime prosecutor who has tried armed robberies, visited the scenes of countless homicides and convicted a man of mass murder. But those aren’t the cases that keep him up at night.
“If you look at my early prosecutions, they were strong,” Teare told the Landing. “I was, and still am, a pretty talented trial lawyer and can utilize that for good and bad. So I have convictions and sentences that I’m not proud of now on possession of controlled substances.”
Teare, 45, said he “gravitated” toward drug cases as a young prosecutor, having spent his adolescence watching his mother struggle with a heroin addiction. Now married with four children, he says maturity taught him to take a less punitive approach to drug abuse and mental illness.
“We’re not going to prosecute our way out of this,” he said. “The mark of a good prosecutor is not waking up in the middle of the night thinking about the case you lost. It’s thinking about the case you won that you shouldn’t have.”
Naturally charismatic, with a quick grin and easygoing affect, Teare’s political skill carried him to victory in an election that was otherwise catastrophic for Democrats. When he takes office in January, he will become one of the most powerful elected officials in Harris County, the final decision-maker for criminal prosecutions in the county’s felony, misdemeanor and juvenile courts. As district attorney, he will oversee a budget of over $116 million and more than 350 prosecutors.
Yet he faces stiff headwinds. Teare has laid out ambitious plans for change, but his narrow margin of victory in the general election leaves him without a commanding mandate. He will also take office amid a political realignment, with President-elect Donald Trump promising to weaponize the Department of Justice against “radical left prosecutor’s offices” and Texas billionaire Elon Musk, who has already targeted Democratic district attorneys and judges, turning his attention to Harris County.
Teare, therefore, will have to perform a political high-wire act, balancing Democratic priorities like support for bail reform with the widespread anxiety about public safety that nearly propelled his opponent to victory.
“He’s got a very difficult path,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “There will be a lot of distrust early on. He’ll need to find a way to use relationships he’s got and establish additional relationships to be successful.”
Friends, former colleagues and supporters say Teare is equal to the task. In interviews with the Landing, they described an experienced prosecutor whose strengths are not confined to the courtroom.
“Leadership is difficult,” said Paul Fortenberry, formerly a senior Harris County prosecutor who supervised Teare during Teare’s second stint at the office. “Some people can learn it. Some people have it or they don’t. And he’s always had it.”
Fortenberry and others pointed to Teare’s steady hand at the helm of the Vehicular Crimes Division, which he led during his later years as a Harris County prosecutor. In that role, he appeared frequently at crash sites, earning the respect of stakeholders across the justice system — even those who did not support him.
“I’ve known him for many, many years,” said Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, which endorsed Teare’s opponent. “I think he’s going to be good for the DA’s office, to be honest.”
Those relationships and Teare’s depth of experience have left his supporters hopeful that the new district attorney will be able to steer his agency through choppy waters.
“My faith is that he is going to live up to the campaign promises that he made,” said Nia Hernandez, an organizer for the progressive organization Indivisible Houston who campaigned for Teare. “It is faith and it is hope, but I don’t believe that the person I’ve seen and spoken with is going to lead us down (the wrong) road.”
You can always go back and listen to the interview I did with Teare for the primary if you want a feel for what makes him tick. I don’t know what kind of interference he’ll get from the feds and the state, but I hope he has a plan and a communications strategy in mind for it. What strikes me is that every DA we’ve had since Johnny Holmes (with the exception of the late Mike Anderson, whose term was sadly cut short by his illness and death) has had a rough time in office. Some of that was circumstantial, but a lot of it was the result of their own actions and policies. If Teare can do better on that front, he’ll be way ahead of the pack regardless of what gets thrown at him. I’m very much wishing him the best.
(Side note: Holmes had a long career in the DA’s office and has always been spoken of reverentially by those who knew him. I was just here for his later years and wasn’t paying close attention to local politics then, so all I really know about the guy was that he had a legendary mustache and he put a crap-ton of people on Death Row. I’d be very interested in seeing a modern reckoning of his time in office, just for the context. It’s actually a little wild to me that he’s kind of vanished from view, given how larger than life he was at the time.)
I did either one or two internships at the DA’s office when I was in law school. The “we are doing God’s work” was too much for me. If they accepted a case a conviction was to occur.
Holmes was not universally loved.