Welcome to the Bell County Justice Center

The Bell County misdemeanor courts and associated departments are now fully moved into their new building at what the County is calling the Bell County Justice Center.  While it is too early to tell if adding the county departments to the building will mean that justice finally makes an appearance in the Justice Center, it will be welcome news for many now that both the felony and misdemeanor courts are in the same building for the first time in quite a few years.

Instead of the “temporary” courthouse annex on Second Avenue, all of the misdemeanor courts are now next to the district courts.  The physical address for all of the criminal courts is now 1201 Huey Road, Belton, Texas 76513. Here is a Google Map of the entrance from Loop 121 onto Huey Road.  You can click on the link labeled “Directions” to get detailed driving instructions from your location to the new complex:

Once you arrive at the intersection above, you can see the complex over to your left.  The turn onto Huey Road looks like this:

As you can see, the street sign indicates it is the 1200 block of Huey Road (even though Google thinks it is Huey Drive).  It intersects with the 2200 block of Loop 121.

Once you enter onto Huey Road, you’ll drive just a short bit to get to the entrance to the complex. 

The complex now consists of the county and district courts, the county and district prosecutors, the county and district clerks, the Indigent Defense department, the Pretrial Services department, the Bell County Jail, adult probation, and the Justice of the Peace for Precinct One.

There is only one public entrance for the entire building, and there are deputies on duty manning the metal detectors.  Therefore, please leave all of your guns, knives and bombs at home.

I cannot imagine what a nightmare the Justice Complex is going to be on Monday mornings when the parking lot is full of potential jurors, defendants, lawyers and the rest of the public trying to fit through the bottleneck that will undoubtedly occur.  I suppose the lesson is, “be early.”

If you are going to the Bell County Jail, you’ll turn to your right and just keep driving as far as you can.  Eventually you’ll run into the jail.  The entrance is in the corner, and you’ll have to walk a

bit across a little foot bridge to get there.  They have a beautiful round entrance area which you’ll see on your right as you walk by it with the summer sun beating down on you from above, but someone decided to put flag poles right in the middle of the driving surface and then on top of that someone roped off the entrance anyway.  A beautiful and convenient drop-off location blocked off with $3 worth of cheap rope.  That’s classy!

Regardless, the new courthouse complex is fantastic and it looks like a million dollars (though I suppose I should say it looks more like almost $100 million dollars)!  Even though the voters repeatedly voted it down, and even though the public may scream about the expense, I (for one) realize how badly the county needed this expansion.  Also, as a criminal defense attorney I previously spent a good chunk of my day driving back-and-forth between the district and county buildings.  At long last, I have one-stop shopping since the county’s “Justice Complex” is now open for business.  Let’s just hope that not all of that complex justice is out-of-stock.

See you at the new courthouse!

Bell County’s New Jail

I recently joined a group of attorneys and court personnel on a tour of the new Bell County Jail.  We were allowed to see an almost 100% completed jail facility, and we spoke with jail administrators and staff about the new facility.  My verdict?  I like it.  It is very, very impressive.  It is an amazingly large facility, and it’s only going to get larger when they add the new section (as the need arises several years down the road).

And, yes, I know a lot of the local defense attorneys are upset because there are only a small number of meeting rooms where a defense attorney and his client can have a private, unmonitored conversation.  I also think that the video conferencing idea is a bad one (it allows cell mates to hear what an inmate is saying to his attorney, thus destroying the attorney-client privilege and guaranteeing that the conversation will be repeated by the cell-mate at your client’s trial). 

However, all-in-all, it’s a great jail and a wise use of Bell County tax dollars.  Every Bell County resident should be proud, and ashamed that we put off this inevitable construction for so long.

In the end, I am sure that we will find solutions for the minor problems which we anticipate, and the ones we have not yet realized. 

I, for one, would like to see a return to the days when attorneys could drop off correspondence for their client at the front of the jail.  In the olden days, we could write our client a letter and the jail staff would deliver it along with the regular mail.  I don’t know why they quit doing this, but they should start it again.  It allows for quicker communication, and it saves taxpayers the cost of the postage for court-appointed clients.  Even better, take inmate letters to their attorneys and put the letters in our boxes at the district court building.  That would be even more convenient and cost-effective as far as saving postage.  They are doing it already with "inmate service request" forms.  Would an envelope be any harder to put in a box?

The precise nature of Bell County bail

An article which appeared today in the Temple Daily Telegram once again brings up the issue of artificially high Bell County bail amounts (“Setting bail not a precise procedure,” by Paul A. Romer, October 5, 2008). Yet again Judge Ted Duffield defends his practice of magistrating defendants with pre-set bail amounts without making any determination as to the ability of an individual defendant to make bail.

Not once in the article, though, did it mention that Judge Duffield inquired as to an accused’s financial situation and whether or not that defendant could make any particular bail amount. No, on the contrary, he apparently continues to set bail amounts according to the usual preset bail schedule without any regard to his legal duty to see that a bail is not oppressively high and without any regard to the ability of the accused to make bail.

County Commission Richard Cortese said the public does not care about bail amounts. He claims that “defense attorneys and family members of the person arrested are the people who usually get upset and complain about high bail amounts.” He then continues by stating that the victims of crime generally believe bail amounts are too low. “They want the person who broke into their house to stay behind bars,” he said. Wow! An elected official that has never heard of the presumption of innocence. Innocent until proven guilty? Not in Bell County! Are there any constitutional rights that can survive in Bell County?

Setting bail in Bell County is a precise procedure, the only problem is that it is precisely wrong.

Why high bail amounts cost taxpayers money

The Temple Daily Telegram ran a story today about the artificially high bail amounts in Bell County. The story (“Jail statistics show bail range, averages”, by Paul A. Romer, Sunday, September 28, 2008) quotes me as saying, “By setting high bond amounts, they are keeping bond companies fully employed but are making people need court-appointed attorneys because they can’t afford to hire an attorney after paying their bond… Then the taxpayers get to pay for it.”

That is absolute, 100%, correct.  However, the very next paragraph goes on to say “Attorney John Galligan said it is common for bail hearings to reduce bail amounts by 80 to 90 percent.”  That I don’t know about.

Sure, the typical felony defendant’s bail gets reduced from an ungodly number down to $1,000 once they plead guilty.  But, that’s usually the only way to get such a huge reduction.  Otherwise, the judges usually reduce the bail from an ungodly amount down to just an unholy amount.  What good does that do?

Here’s the problem, though: a good number of defendants post bond before they get a bail reduction.  Then, they are paying their bond companies huge sums of money to get out of jail.  That typically means that there is no money left to hire a criminal defense attorney.  So, since they are charged with felonies, what happens?  They get a court-appointed lawyer.  Who pays for that?  We, the taxpayers. 

So, by setting initial bail amounts so high, a defendant has to pay what little money they have saved up over time, or what little money their families can scrape together, to get that person out of the jail.

The situation is better if the defendant hires a criminal defense lawyer first, because then the lawyer can go to the judge assigned to the case and get the bail lowered to a more reasonable amount.  That only happens, though, when the defendant hires the lawyer first.  Meanwhile, though, that person sits in jail and waits until the defense attorney can go to a judge and get a lowered bail amount (unless they have so much money that they can afford to hire a lawyer and hire a bondsman — and not very many people do).

So, why are we forcing people to stay in jail longer than necessary with these artificially high bail bonds?  Why not just set a reasonable bail amount to begin with and save everyone (including the taxpayers) a lot of money?  Well, according to the article, Judge Ted Duffield was at a conference and unavailable for comment.  Where was “Million Dollar” Judge Ivey for comment?

Another look at who is in the Bell County Jail

I thought I’d take a look at the BCJ population data from the middle of the week, since I looked at it last on Sunday.  The numbers are just about the same all across the board.  Have a look: