In Harris County, Dozens of Drunk Drivers Arrested, Brought To Trial, And *Not* Convicted
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office has dismissed more than *thirty* drunk driving cases at trial in the past two months alone, according to a Houston Watch review of cases resolved in Harris County since June 2023.
These cases span a wide-range of fact patterns, including: arrests for driving drunk with a child in the car; prosecutions of people with multiple prior drunk driving convictions; and cases involving people arrested with blood alcohol levels twice the legal limit. But each of these cases has one crucial factor in common: Kim Ogg’s office could not secure a conviction.
As District Attorney Kim Ogg has acknowledged, drunk driving is a huge problem in Houston, one of the most serious crimes prosecutors prosecute. Indeed, Ogg recently told the Houston Chronicle that “Houston is ground zero for DWI fatalities” and “really couldn’t do worse.”
So, how does this happen? How does Ogg’s office dismiss so many drunk driving cases in such a short period of time?
Consistently winning trials takes an experienced, well trained, highly focused office. And that kind of mundane competence is just not the picture of the office that emerges as one reads through the dockets from this set of drunk driving dismissals.
Take, for example, a case that involved a man arrested for driving drunk who was previously convicted of drunk driving. The prosecution filed charges against the man in December 2020. The case was scheduled to finally go to trial over two and half years later in August 2023. That’s a lot of time to prepare a case.
On January 27, 2023, the trial court had to order the prosecution “and its agent, the forensic laboratory that analyzed the defendant’s blood in this case … to digitally copy and digitally produce [relevant] documentation [and turn it over to the] defense attorney [on or before 5 PM on the thirtieth day after the date of this order].” In other words, more than two years after filing charges, the prosecution still hadn’t obtained and turned over the analysis of the defendant’s blood.
Prosecutors finally got around to sending the results to the defense on July 26—six months after the court issued its order and barely a week before the trial was set to begin. The defense filed a motion to exclude the blood evidence and any related evidence given its late stage revelation. The trial docket doesn’t show a ruling on the motion, but these sorts of glaring violations of court orders tend not to make judges happy. In any event, three days later—and thirty-two months after the prosecution commenced— the prosecution filed a motion to dismiss the case.
In another case, prosecutors filed charges in November 2022 and a trial date was set for August 2023. That’s a long time to ensure that one’s star witnesses are ready and available for trial—or to ask the judge for a different trial date if it turns out that someone has, say, planned a vacation for six months from now that overlaps with the trial date.
Unfortunately, in this case, the prosecution had to file that motion asking for a continuance a week before trial because the police officer they needed to testify— “the primary officer on this case … [who] conducted all field sobriety tests, and established probable cause for the search warrant for the blood test, which is essential evidence for the state’s case”—had scheduled vacation and couldn’t make it. Self-beclowned yet again, the prosecution simply dismissed the case.
Or take three other cases, all unrelated to each other: one involving an arrest of a man for drunk driving who had two previous drunk driving convictions; another an arrest of a man for drunk driving who had one previous drunk driving conviction; and the third an arrest of a man driving drunk with a child in his vehicle. In each case, the prosecution requested—and received—devices that tested the defendant’s blood while they were in the community on bond awaiting trial.
In all three cases the defendant violated bond conditions by appearing to consume alcohol—“high brac [breath alcohol content] on interlock device [meaning they also tried to start their vehicles at the same time] and admitted to drinking alcohol beverage on day of high brac”; “the defendant shows to have blown [two] high bracs into the device without retesting”; “the defendant’s SCRAM [Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor] device had one tamper event. Alcohol was detected during the tamper; however, alcohol cannot be confirmed because…of the tamper”.
In other words, these are people arrested for drunk driving repeatedly or in extremely dangerous circumstances that go on to drink while waiting for trial. Yet, in each of these cases, the prosecution gets to the trial date—and dismisses the case.
This is a troubling trend; and, unfortunately, it's a recurring problem that Houston Watch has covered before. Next week, Houston Watch will reveal just how deep this problem goes, relying on new data turned over via public records request by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.