Tom Green County Judges, 2025 (Judge Gonzalo Rios not pictured)
In both Austin and San Angelo recent accusations have been thrown around that District Judges in general, and our local District Judges in particular, do not work very hard. But very little evidence has been offered to back up those claims. We decided to start a series looking at our local judicial branch which receives very little public scrutiny outside of gruesome murder trials. How hard do our local judges work, and how efficiently do they dispose of cases brought before them? As it turns out, during 2024 they performed remarkably well. We analyzed the Tom Green County data reported on the website of the Office of Court Administration (OCA). The OCA is the state agency that keeps data on all judicial activity across the state as reported by the District and County Clerks. You can do your own research on their website here.
Quite often, Judges have little control over how many cases they can try or dispose of in a given year. Our legal system is an adversarial system. Judges cannot initiate prosecutions and dictate how long a case will take to prepare or try. They depend on prosecutors to bring the cases and lawyers to defend them. They are restricted by state law and the Code of Criminal Procedure in how they handle them. Then there are pesky things like fairness, due process, and evidence that may slow a case down.
One problem our judge’s have is there are only four attorneys in the San Angelo area qualified to defend the most serious first degree felony cases. If each of them tried one case a month in each of our four district courts that would only amount to 192 cases tried in a year. That is not realistic considering these lawyers also handle criminal cases in numerous other counties like Irion, Reagan, Schleicher, Runnels, Pecos, Crockett, Sutton, Runnels, Concho, McCulloch, and Brown to name a few. They also handle hundreds of family law and civil cases that take time. In other words, looking at the numbers alone will not give you a complete picture of the challenges that face our judicial system.
But the data gives us a snapshot of how well our courts are functioning. We looked at the data for all cases on the docket on January 1, 2024 and October 31, 2024, as well as how many cases were disposed of in 2024. Unfortunately, the OCA’s website does not contain numbers for November and December yet, so we were not able to get a look at the total numbers for the year. We were limited to reporting on the data for ten months. We researched all four categories of data reported by the OCA: Criminal, Juvenile, Family Law and Civil. Even without November and December, the numbers are impressive.
| All Dockets January – October 2024 | Case Totals |
| Pending January 1, 2024 | 2999 |
| Pending October 31, 2024 | 2834 |
| Cases Added | 3627 |
| Total Disposed | 3627 |
As you can see, the total number of cases disposed of equaled the number of new cases filed. The largest docket is the criminal docket. Judges are required to give these cases priority. During the ten months we have data for the Judges disposed of more cases than there were new cases filed. That is a very good statistic.
| Criminal Docket January – October 2024 | Case Totals |
| Pending January 1, 2024 | 836 |
| Pending October 31, 2024 | 701 |
| Cases Added | 1393 |
| Total Disposed | 1526 |
Felony criminal cases were 65% of the cases disposed of in Tom Green County. If we add juvenile cases to the adult cases, criminal cases make up around 68% of the docket.
| Juvenile Docket January – October 2024 | Case Totals |
| Pending January 1, 2024 | 83 |
| Pending October 31, 2024 | 26 |
| Cases Added | 42 |
| Total Diposed | 55 |
Since many of the accused are detained in the County Jail or Juvenile Detention pending trial, and everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, it is important to watch the disposition rate of criminal cases.
| Age of Cases Disposed | 90 Days or Less | 91-180 Days | 181 – 365 Days | Over 365 Days | Total |
| Number of Cases Disposed | 527 | 412 | 384 | 203 | 1526 |
Roughly a third of felony cases were disposed of within three months. Sixty-five percent were disposed of within one year of indictment. The family law docket is the next largest docket making up 41% of the cases disposed of between January and October 2024.
| Family Law Docket January – October 2024 | Case Totals |
| Pending January 1, 2024 | 1248 |
| Pending October 31, 2024 | 1285 |
| Cases Added | 1632 |
| Total Disposed | 1501 |
Civil cases make up a paltry fifteen percent of cases disposed of in 2024.
| Civil Cases Docket January – October 2024 | Case Totals |
| Pending January 1, 2024 | 832 |
| Pending October 31, 2024 | 822 |
| Cases Added | 560 |
| Total Disposed | 545 |
If we compare the total cases filed to the total cases disposed of as our measure, our District Judges are doing very well in keeping up with the docket. On average our four district courts have disposed of over 906 cases each in the ten months. Once the numbers from November and December are available, the number of disposed cases is likely to average over 1,000 each. These numbers do not include cases disposed of in the other counties that make up the 51st District (Tom Green, Irion, Sterling, Schleicher) and the 119th District (Tom Green, Concho, Runnels). The 51st and 119th Judges’ numbers would be higher if we looked at their overall dockets including counties other than Tom Green.
By comparison, a federal judge will dispose of around 250-260 cases on average a year depending on their location and the size of the docket. State Courts work harder, longer, with less support and for less pay than federal judges. There is still room to improve especially addressing the backlog of cases. Part of the reason for the backlog is the impact of the pandemic. No jury trials took place for two years starting in 2020. In part this is because of the shutdown. But a month or two after the courts reopened the courthouse suffered a catastrophic water leak. The damages exposed a serious mold problem in the century old building. This required lengthy remediation and renovation of significant parts of the courthouse. No jury trials were held during this time. The number of serious criminal cases including murders and capital murders we have been reading about in the news lately is a reflection of the hard work our courts, attorneys and jurors have been putting in to address this backlog. Next week we will take a look at the backlog and what our courts are doing to chip away at it.
