A Harris County justice of the peace has made the unusual move to formally recall, or withdraw, all 12,500 outstanding arrest warrants issued by his court — a decision condemned by critics as “inexplicable” but celebrated by advocates for reform as a step toward addressing a profound injustice. 

The recall, issued by Steve Duble, justice of the peace for Harris County Precinct 1, Place 2, exclusively impacts those charged with Class C misdemeanors — the lowest-level criminal offenses in Texas. Mostly traffic violations, these offenses are punishable only by fine, not jail time, and are deemed so minor that defendants are not entitled to a public defender. The recall cancels only the arrest warrants, not the cases themselves, which remain active. 

In an interview with the Landing, Duble said “big constitutional concerns” drove his decision to recall the arrest warrants, all issued by his predecessor, David Patronella, before Duble took office in 2023. 

“My decision to do this was controlled by my review of the law and my concerns about constitutional issues,” Duble said. “Due process and right to counsel are the concerning ones. Plus, we’ve got the statute and the criminal code that say anything involving jail time isn’t supposed to involve” justice courts.  

Recalled, not dismissed 

Duble says he did not decide to issue a recall lightly — nor quickly. 

He first took it under consideration, he said, in spring 2023, when he read an advisory from the Justice Department on the use of fines and fees as punishment. The document cited numerous constitutional pitfalls in administering fines and fees for low-level criminal offenses, a nationwide practice. 

Equally concerning, Duble said, was an alarmingly high statistic he discovered earlier this summer. In a report generated by the Texas Office of Court Administration for the month of June, he found that 106 people who owed money in his court for Class C misdemeanors had seen their fines satisfied by serving jail time. 

While some of the people affected might have been jailed for reasons unrelated to the Class C misdemeanor charges, Duble discovered that wasn’t always the case.

“I found one (case) where the person was brought into jail on nothing but an arrest warrant out of this court, and it was all parking tickets,” he said. He worried there could be more such cases. “Once I looked at things like that and reviewed all these constitutional issues in the DOJ letter, that just put red flags up for me. That really concerns me.” 

He recalled the 12,500 warrants shortly thereafter, on Aug. 22. 

Reactions to the recall

The move received a mixed reaction from legal experts and criminal justice stakeholders but was greeted with enthusiasm by criminal justice reformers, who echoed Duble’s reasoning. 

“We applaud Judge Duble,” said Jennifer Carreon, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed. “If you don’t have the right to counsel, then you shouldn’t be subject to arrest. You shouldn’t be subject to incarceration. It is a due process issue.” 

However, Duble has faced scathing pushback on the recall from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which accused him of undermining accountability and jeopardizing public safety. 

“We only recently were made aware of Judge Duble’s inexplicable decision to grant fugitives a free pass in his courtroom,” the office said in a statement. “This decision can endanger the lives of the public and of our law enforcement officers. Accountability is fundamental to justice, and without it, the public loses faith in our entire judicial system.”

Paul Bettencourt, a Republican Texas state senator whose district includes parts of Houston, echoed the district attorney’s office in an interview with Fox 26 Houston last week, describing the recall as “crazy.”

“This is nuts,” he said. “It’s exactly what shouldn’t happen by a judge in the 21st century.” 

Bettencourt’s district does not overlap with Duble’s precinct. 

“Most of (the warrants) are for traffic tickets,” said Chris Gore, a criminal defense lawyer and associate judge in a Harris County municipal court, where he handles cases similar to Duble’s. “If (low level traffic offenses) were truly a public safety issue, then the county and every municipality would be taking the issue seriously and committing more resources to the problem and not punting it onto the court.” 

Duble said he couldn’t be sure whether the defendants named in the warrants had been assessed for their ability to pay their fines. He viewed that as a violation of due process, the right to procedural protections as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

“I’m certainly not going to issue an arrest warrant until I know that all those things have been exhausted — that we’ve done our ability-to-pay analysis,” he said.

However, Duble also emphasized that recalling the warrants was not the same as dismissing the cases and said his court would continue to pursue collection of any fines owed through different methods. 

“I haven’t excused anything,” he said. “The tickets are still there. They need to be dealt with, and we’re pursuing our collection efforts.” 

Duble framed the recall as a matter of simple fairness. 

“I’m just trying to do something that I think is smarter and makes more sense and balances the need to protect public safety with the law,” he said. “Everything I’ve tried to do since I came into office has really been focusing on access to justice, and I think (the recall) falls under that pillar.” 

Other courts have expressed similar concerns about incarcerating defendants for failing to pay their fines. 

Constitutional and fiscal problems

Nathan Hecht, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, called the practice “unconstitutional” in a 2017 address. And in 2019, a federal district court ruled that Santa Fe, a city in Galveston County, had violated a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel by jailing him for unpaid fines, even though he was not represented by a lawyer at trial. 

Then, in 2021, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that the practice of issuing arrest warrants for failure to pay fines and fees violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution if the court has not first analyzed a defendant’s ability to pay.

The Idaho court did not recall the warrants but found that they were unconstitutional — and unenforceable. 

“The reason is pretty straightforward,” said Lisa Foster, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, which advocates for the elimination of discriminatory debt-based punishment. “The U.S. Supreme Court has said unequivocally (that) you cannot jail someone for non-payment of a fine unless you first determine that they have the ability to pay that fine. If the person isn’t able to afford the fine, you can’t put them in jail for that, because that’s incarcerating someone just because they’re poor.” 

Foster also emphasized that Class C misdemeanors, the only type of criminal offense handled in justice courts like Duble’s, aren’t eligible for jail time. These include charges for traffic violations, such as speeding, running a red light and failure to yield. 

“We’re not talking about things most people think of as a crime,” Foster said, citing traffic violations in particular. “These are not even classified as crimes in most states.” 

Duble, Foster and other legal experts also emphasized that warrants are an ineffective means of collecting the fines imposed for such violations.

“It’s not effective,” Duble said. “As a practical matter, all that happens if somebody gets arrested on one of these is (that) they get cleared for jail credit” without paying anything — even as the county spends money to execute the warrant.

“This is a matter of fiscal prudence,” Foster said. “Any time you use jail as a collection mechanism for fines and fees, you are costing the taxpayers money… Jail’s expensive. It’s a lose/lose proposition.” 

Duble said he would defer to the authority of a higher court if it disagreed with the recall, and added that he would likely not issue any arrest warrants in the future except on a case-by-case basis. 

That could make a big difference in the lives of defendants who live in his jurisdiction, said Carreon, of Texas Appleseed, who often hears from people unable to pay the fines assessed for their traffic tickets and frightened of the warrants issued for non-payment.

“What we have found is that the warrants do disproportionately impact people of color, Black Texans in particular, and they disproportionately impact lower-income communities,” she said, lauding Duble for the recall. “We hope that more (justices of the peace) will follow suit.”

The post Should unpaid traffic tickets lead to jail time? This justice of the peace doesn’t think so. appeared first on Houston Landing.