Travis County district attorney: José Garza ahead of Martin Harry by wide margin
Early voting results put José Garza, Democratic candidate for Travis County district attorney, about 40 points ahead of his Republican opponent, Martin Harry, early Tuesday evening.
Garza has so far received 367,784 votes, or 70.98% of the early voting total. Early voters cast 150,354 votes for Harry, or 29.02% of early voting results.
The district attorney’s office has a $27 million budget and about 240 employees and is tasked with prosecuting the most serious crimes in Travis County.
The two candidates have drastically different views about what the county’s top prosecutor should make a priority.
Garza, who defeated Moore in July in the Democratic primary, ran a reform-minded campaign, promising to seek fewer drug prosecutions and scrutinize police officer misconduct. Harry has criticized Garza’s platform, calling Garza’s ideology too extreme.
The prosecutorial experience of both candidates is thin. Garza, the co-executive director of the local activist group Workers Defense Project and a former public defender in Del Rio, has never prosecuted a criminal defendant. Harry, who runs his own firm primarily representing clients’ Social Security claims, spent roughly a year as a prosecutor in the U.S. Navy about 30 years ago.
Both men point to their experience as defense attorneys as evidence that they can do the job. Garza takes it a step farther, painting his lack of prosecution experience as a positive.
“For at least 100 years in this country, we’ve been hiring and electing career prosecutors to run district attorneys’ offices,” Garza said. “We’ve seen the result of that practice, which is gross disparities in our criminal justice system.”
Harry called that framing “ridiculous.”
“If you had a prospective employee coming in for a job and they said, ‘You should hire me because I don't have any experience,’ I think they'd be shown the door,” Harry said.
Garza said he has plenty of experience managing a large team at the Workers Defense Project, which has, among other goals, urged cities to direct police to ticket people instead of arresting them for crimes that allow that choice under Texas law.
If elected, Garza said he will advocate to end cash bail in Travis County. Judges ultimately set the bail amounts for defendants, however. Garza said he and the prosecutors who work for him would advocate to release those who are charged with crimes, but have not yet been convicted, if they don’t pose a threat.
“When we take office in January, it will be the position of the district attorney's office that anyone who poses a threat to our community should be in custody,” Garza said. “Anyone who does not pose a threat to our community should be released on a personal recognizance bond, so that they can continue to work and create more stable communities.”
Travis County judges already release many defendants charged with low-level offenses on personal recognizance bonds, and Garza said that needs to be the case for more nonviolent defendants. A new report examining the effect of recent changes to bail practices in Harris County found that releasing more misdemeanor defendants from jail without requiring cash bail did not lead to an increase in arrests for repeat offenses.
If elected, Harry’s main proposed change to the district attorney’s office would be to add an animal protection team to the office’s Special Victims Unit. Studies have shown that animal abuse can be a predictor of domestic violence.
“I think if I put an animal protection team in the Special Victims Unit, people will know we're serious about it and that we've developed a certain expertise about the law and about those signs of abuse,” Harry said.
That proposal won’t lead to meaningful change in the criminal justice system, Garza said.
Harry “talks so little about what his plans are for the most powerful position in our criminal justice system in Travis County,” Garza said. “We, on the other hand, have been incredibly transparent and clear about the changes we think our community needs.”