The dysfunctional Maverick County, TX court system, a failure of American justice

 Read about the dysfunctional Maverick County court system, where basic tenets of American justice often do not apply, according to the Texas Tribune and The New York Times.

Officials here openly acknowledge that poor defendants accused of minor crimes are rarely provided lawyers. And people regularly spend months behind bars without charges filed against them, much longer than state law allows. Last year alone, at least a dozen people were held too long uncharged after arrests for minor nonviolent crimes, interviews and records reviewed by The New York Times show.

Some defendants seem to have been forgotten in jail. Two men were released after The Times asked about them, half a year after their sentences had been completed.

“The county is not at the level that it should have been for years,” conceded Maverick County Judge Ramsey English Cantú, who oversees misdemeanor court. He said he had been trying to “revamp” and “rebuild” the local justice system since he was elected in 2022.

“It’s been a challenge for me,” he added. “But at the end of the day it is unjust.”

Under the U.S. Constitution, people facing jail time are entitled to a lawyer — paid for by the government if they cannot afford their own — and a fair and efficient court process. But these protections are tenuous, especially in rural parts of America, studies have shown. In Texas, one of the states that spend the least on indigent defense, The Times found recent examples of people held beyond deadlines without charges or lawyers in six rural counties.

Maverick County stood out. It is in one of the state’s poorest regions, and many defendants cannot afford a lawyer; some spend months in jail because they cannot pay a bail bondsman $500 or less. Yet over the past two decades, state auditors have repeatedly noted the county was failing to adequately provide indigent counsel. In 2023, when more than 240 misdemeanor defendants requested representation, the county judge appointed lawyers in only a handful of cases, records show. Nonetheless, the state has imposed no consequences.

With no one to guide them, defendants enter a disjointed justice system where it can be perplexingly difficult to figure out why someone is in jail, if there even is a reason. Misdemeanor court files are almost always missing key documents. Felony court files are often not available until more than a year after a defendant’s arrest. The jail sometimes reported having no record of people despite recently holding them for months.

Defense lawyers and constitutional law scholars, responding to The Times’s reporting, called the county’s practices “atrocious,” “Kafkaesque” and “not a criminal system at all.”

“The lack of transparency and the lack of public defenders in this jurisdiction has allowed this completely inept system to persist,” said Rachel Kincaid, an associate law professor at Baylor University in Waco and former federal prosecutor. “There’s no pressure on them to do anything differently.”

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