Certain criminal suspects would be denied bail under changes OK'd by Texas Senate panel

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A Texas Senate committee on Wednesday advanced a package of bills aimed at keeping more defendants behind bars while they await trial for violent criminal charges.

Senate Bill 9, authored by Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, builds on a recent GOP law that established a list of offenses for which defendants may not be released on low-cost or cashless personal bonds. The latest measure would add four new offenses to the list: unlawful possession of a firearm, violation of a family violence protective order, terroristic threat, and murder as a result of manufacturing or delivering fentanyl.

Huffman is also proposing for the third straight session to amend the Texas Constitution to give judges more discretion to deny bail outright. For now, defendants are largely guaranteed the right to pretrial release except in limited circumstances, like when charged with capital murder. Huffman’s proposal would let judges deny the option to post bail for defendants accused of murder, along with aggravated kidnapping, robbery or assault with a weapon.

The measure, Senate Joint Resolution 5, requires two-thirds approval in both chambers to be placed on the statewide ballot. Similar versions have passed the Senate several times in prior sessions, each time dying in the House.

Huffman is also pushing for the first time Senate Joint Resolution 1 that would prevent judges from giving bail to undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing a felony. According to the bill authors, the resolution would help Texas comply with the Laken Riley Act, the first bill President Donald Trump signed into law in his second term. Named after a Georgia nursing student killed by an undocumented immigrant, the law requires law enforcement officers to detain undocumented immigrants arrested for or charged with certain crimes.

Huffman named her resolution Jocelyn’s Law, referring to a 12-year old Houstonian, Jocelyn Nungaray, who was murdered last June in a case that drew national attention. The two men charged with Nungaray’s murder entered the country illegally from Venezuela, according to police.

Save for a technical bill that Huffman asked to leave pending in committee, the entire legislative package of two bills and two constitutional amendments passed unanimously with a 6-0 vote. The legislation now heads to the full Senate for consideration.

Jocelyn’s mother, Alexis Nungaray attended Wednesday’s committee hearing. She was met by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who hugged her and offered condolences before Nungaray testified before the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, moving Huffman to tears and eliciting sympathy from other lawmakers. Though Patrick presides over the Senate, it is highly unusual for him to attend a legislative hearing — making his presence a clear sign that he views Huffman’s legislation as must-pass items.

“I feel outraged that Texas judges are allowed to provide bail for people who do heinous things,” Nungaray said, adding that she felt compelled to attend the accused murderers’ bond hearings while also planning her daughter’s funeral. “They preyed on her innocence and they had no business even being here in the first place.”

After several additional invited guests testified in favor of the legislation, Patrick exited the hearing to hold his own press conference where he told reporters he had discussed the bail measures with House Speaker Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican, earlier that morning, and the speaker was on board.

“I believe we have a commitment from the Texas House and the speaker to pass this bail bond package," Patrick said, before adding an ultimatum: “As far as I'm concerned, if these bills do not pass the House, I see no reason for us not to go to a special session and another special session and another special session."

Gov. Greg Abbott, the only official empowered to call lawmakers back for overtime sessions, declared “bail reform” an emergency item during his State of the State address last week, allowing lawmakers to fast-track it earlier in the session.

“Activist judges have too much discretion to let repeat offenders out on bail, only to see them harm more Texans,” he said. “Lawmakers must choose – support the safety of the citizens they represent, or the criminals who kill them.”

If all 88 Republicans in the Texas House support Huffman’s bail amendments, the measures would still need support from 12 Democrats to reach the two-thirds threshold. Asked about the prospects of getting enough crossover votes, Patrick said he was “putting my faith in the speaker to get it done.”

“I believe he's sincere about it, and he has the power to do it,” Patrick said.

Crime victims push for more pretrial detention

Bail is a legal mechanism used across the country to ensure that defendants who have not been convicted and are awaiting trial show up to court hearings. Defendants can either pay the full bail amount, which is refundable if they go to all of their hearings. Or they can pay a nonrefundable deposit – usually 10% of the bail amount — to a bail bond company. Defendants who can’t afford to pay the deposit are often stuck in jail for weeks or months.

At the Senate committee hearing, a procession of speakers offered emotional testimony about the ways the state’s system of pretrial detention had failed their family or community. Guests included family members of individuals killed by offenders who had been out on bond and district attorneys who shared stories about judges allowing people with a history of crime to pay their way out of jail.

Repeatedly, advocates of Huffman’s proposed legislation said the state’s pretrial system places the interests of accused criminals above those of victims.

“Misaligned sympathies. That’s what this is,” Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, said after a Harris County father, Paul Castro, testified that the person who killed his son was released on a low bond amount.

“It’s an embarrassment to the state of Texas,” added Parker, vice chair of the Senate committee. “It’s disgusting.”

Harris County has come under scrutiny after a slew of homicides allegedly committed by individuals released on low or no bonds, according to data tracked by Texas Crime Stoppers. At least 162 homicide cases have been filed in the county against defendants released on one or more bonds, Huffman said.

“I truly believe there are hundreds of people dead today who would not be dead if we incorporated some of this legislation earlier on,” Huffman said. “We owe it to our constituents to right this wrong.”

Kim Ogg, former district attorney for Harris County, testified in favor of the package. A Democrat who frequently sparred with members of her party because she opposed bail reform in Harris County, Ogg highlighted a part of SB 9 that would require the presiding judge, instead of a criminal law hearing officer, to set the initial bond. Since 2019, Ogg said, “thousands of cases” have been dismissed by criminal law hearing officers for no probable cause.

SB 9 also requires magistrates who dismiss cases for no probable cause to submit within 24 hours a written statement explaining how they reached their conclusion.

Huffman also alleged that Harris County has used public funds to pay money to The Bail Project, a national organization that helps low-income defendants make bail. Since 2022, Huffman said, Harris County has issued at least 311 payments for a total of nearly $2.1 million to the group. Senate Bill 40, one of the bills the committee pushed through on Wednesday, would prohibit political subdivisions from using public funds to pay nonprofit organizations that help defendants cover bail costs.

Nicole Zayas Manzano, deputy director of policy for The Bail Project, said in advance of Wednesday’s hearing that any money received from Harris County was money they are owed. Bail is refunded to the payor, such as Manzano’s group, if a defendant makes their court hearings.

“The Bail Project has never accepted public funds in Texas, nor do we have any kind of government contract,” according to the project’s statement Wednesday, which added that the national nonprofit does not currently provide bail assistance in Texas.

Leslie Wilks Garcia, Harris County’s first assistant county auditor, confirmed in an email that the payments “were indeed refunds for cash bail.”

Charitable bail organizations are required to submit reports to the Office of Court Administration that detail who they have bonded out of jail. SB 9 would expand the reporting requirements to also ask them to include each charge for which the bond was paid and the amount of bond paid.

Critics raise civil rights concerns

Abbott made overhauling the bail system an emergency item in 2021 as well. That year, he signed into law Huffman’s Senate Bill 6, which bars judges from letting people accused of violent crimes out of jail unless they pay a cash bond or a portion of that amount to a bail bonds company.

Critics of the law say it perpetuates a wealth-based system of detention and does not meaningfully curtail violent crime because defendants who can afford to post bail are still allowed to do so. Huffman’s new proposal, SB 9, exacerbates those concerns, critics say.

“This blanket approach removes judges' ability to assess risk and ensure fair outcomes,” Nick Hudson, a lawyer with the ACLU of Texas said, adding that SB 9 would impose an “absolute bar” on releasing people who have no money while allowing identically situated people to pay their way out of detention.

The bill would also allow prosecutors to appeal if they consider the bail amount insufficient in felony cases. While the appeal moves through the court system, the defendant would remain in jail, the bill states. Critics say that requirement would place more burdens on Texas’ already overcrowded jails.

About 70% of the people in Texas county jails have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting the resolution of their cases, according to data kept by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. The population of Texas’ jails has steadily increased, pushing some counties to send their pretrial detainees out of state.

Critics of Huffman’s package of bills say that her proposal fails to address underlying public safety concerns. Pretrial detention is associated with an increase in new felony charges, researchers have found. A 2017 study of people charged with misdemeanors in Harris County found that people detained pretrial were more likely to commit future crimes.

Texas’ cash bail system “destabilizes the lives of individuals and then expects them to be whole after spending days, weeks and months in jail where people are committing suicide and the conditions are terrible,” said Kirsten Budwine, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Last year, 135 people died in Texas county jails, according to data presented by the Texas Jail Project, a nonprofit organization that testified against SB 9 and SJR 5.

Some immigrants rights advocates raised particular concerns with Joint Resolution 1, “Jocelyn’s Law,” saying the proposal violates the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment, is overly broad and goes against its stated purpose.

The resolution includes under the definition of “illegal alien” a person who was admitted to the country as a “nonimmigrant” and “failed to maintain” that status. Immigrants rights advocates and attorneys said the resolution encompasses people on military parole with pending visa applications, and who are federally protected under DACA after entering the country illegally as children.

The resolution would also put magistrates who don’t have expertise in immigration law in the difficult position of figuring out a person’s immigration status, critics said.

“Visas are not always easy to determine and the language of the bill says ‘failure to maintain status,’ which is very difficult to determine,” said Luis Figueroa, chief of legislative affairs for Every Texan, a left-leaning public policy nonprofit based in Austin. “Many experts are not even going to know what exact status a person has.”

Huffman’s office did not immediately respond to inquiries about who would be covered by her proposed legislation.

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