Judge Candidate implies some courts are napping
December 22, 2015
In a move bound to be seen as confrontational by county courts officials 9th District Court Judge candidate Eric Yollick has requested sets of “Judicial Records” for seven district courts. The “Rule 12″request dated December 22 is directed to Judge Olen Underwood’s office. While court records are exempted from the Texas Public Information Act certain records can be accessed by the public via a procedure established under Rule 12 of the Texas Rules of Judicial Administration.
Yollick has requested “monthly and annual statistical analyses, calculations and presentations” for seven district courts in the county. Yollick is requesting data on cases pending, filed, activated or revoked and more for the last four years.
More controversial is the request for hardrive based “certified stenographic recorder data” also for four years.
Attorney Yollick publically announced his initiative in public comment at Montgomery County Commissioners Court today where he explained the logic and motivation of his request for the court data.
Judge goofing off?
Yollick ties jail overcrowding to sluggish case disposition in district courts. He asserts :We need to find out precisely how long each district court operates in our Courthouse” which explains the need for meaningful hard data the can be gleaned from a detailed analysis of data on the court reporters’ recorders “because those hard drives will show the amount of time that each machine is in actual use by day, month, and year”
A transcript of Yollick’s comments at Commissioners Court and a copy of the letter to the District Court Administrative Judges office have been made available below.
Judge Doyal took a heroic stand to try to alleviate jail overcrowding and met a stone wall from the local Office of Court Administration. We need the data on case disposition in detail by court. We need to find out precisely how long each district court operates in our Courthouse to determine how to alleviate the affect of court dockets on the overcrowding problem.There are many afternoons when you could chop a tree down in the hall of our Courthouse and no one would hear it fall. While there are some hard working people in the Courthouse, there are also areas of the Courthouse where you could plant a tree right in the hall outside a courtroom and no one would notice the tree while it grows. We need to ensure that our courts are working fully and efficiently.Therefore, I have made a formal request to the Office of Court Administration of the detailed data which I know exists. I have also requested the appropriate electronic data off of the hard drives of each of the stenographic recording machines in each of the courts because those hard drives will show the amount of time that each machine is in actual use by day, month, and year. That way we’ll know precisely how long our courts are moving, or not moving, their dockets.
Rule 12 request from Eric Yollick to Office of Court Administration by CountyCitizen
