Ector County District Attorney Dusty Gallivan is predicting another busy year at the courthouse, but believes his office has made great strides in catching up on the backlog of cases created by the pandemic.
Last January, Gallivan’s office had 6,000 pending cases. That number hovers around 4,100 today, he said.
Gallivan gives at least partial credit to his creation of a unit that reviews all incoming cases, freeing up trial attorneys to do nothing but move cases through the system.
While it’s hard to say exactly how much time the new unit has sped up the process, Gallivan said the number of active felony cases has fallen from 3,400 when he took office on Jan. 1, 2021 to 1,900. The number of active misdemeanor cases fell from 4,400 to 2,200.
During the first four months of his term, Gallivan said his office couldn’t go to trial because of COVID-19. Since May 2021, however, his prosecutors have gone to trial in 83 cases. Last year, they tried eight murder, one attempted murder, three child sexual assault, three aggravated assault and two robbery cases, Gallivan said.
“We’ve been able to be more efficient and move cases quicker,” as a result of the new unit, Gallivan said.
His goal is to take all felony cases to a grand jury within three months, to resolve misdemeanor cases within 90 days and to resolve most felony cases, excluding murder cases and other more serious felony cases, within six months, Gallivan said.
Right now, there are still some defendants who were indicted prior to COVID-19 whose trials have been delayed, Gallivan said.
The fact there are probably less than a dozen court-appointed defense attorneys in Ector County and only four district court judges also slows things down, Gallivan said.
“There are still some cases that are going to be trials that are older, because you can only try so many cases. Those take a little longer to work through, but the ones that we thought we could plea, I think we’ve moved most of those,” Gallivan said.
Gallivan is also pleased because he now has 23 attorneys; last January he was down to 16.
Five or six of the attorneys, including himself, have more than 20 years’ experience, but the average attorney in his office has at least 10 years’ experience, Gallivan said. He said several of his attorneys have been given the privilege of speaking at conferences, including the one held annually by the Texas District & County Attorneys’ Association.
Two articles about his office have also appeared in the Texas Prosecutor, a bimonthly journal published by the TDCAA.
“That tells me they’re competent and recognized by others to be leaders in their field,” Gallivan said of the conferences. “I think (the journal) is a big deal because it goes out to basically all of the prosecutors in the state.”
The district attorney’s office has reviewed 12,000 cases since January 2021 and filed charges in 9,500 of them, Gallivan said.
The number of cases declined for prosecution is typical, Gallivan said. Police officers’ burden of proof is lower than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard followed by prosecutors and officers don’t have the benefit of lab results at the time they make the arrest, he said.
Gallivan also pointed out that while some counties may indict and then figure out if the case is viable, his office will not take it to a grand jury unless they believe they can get a conviction.
As a result, Gallivan estimated roughly 98 percent of his cases result in a conviction, either at trial or through the plea agreement process.
The cases taken to trial since May 2021 were taken to trial because the prosecutors and defense attorneys couldn’t agree on the terms of a plea agreement or because “it was such an egregious case, somebody died, we couldn’t just give him probation and walk away. It had to be tried to let a jury decide what to do,” Gallivan said.
Gallivan said he expects his office will take another 40 or so cases to trial in 2023.
