After spending nearly three months in the Dallas County jail, Darius Richardson was supposed to be released for a probation violation. Instead, he faced an agonizing delay that left him incarcerated for an additional three weeks beyond his assigned release date.
Despite repeated pleas to jailers and daily inquiries from his family to county officials, Richardson remained behind bars until June 4, three weeks past his designated exit date of May 14. The excessive 21-day incarceration cost him not just his freedom, but also his job at a restaurant and his apartment, and triggered a resurgence of asthma symptoms that he had not experienced since childhood.
Seeing her boyfriend again, Tamryn Burks described Richardson as “a shell” of his former self, worn down by the stress and uncertainty surrounding his prolonged detention.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, to be honest,” Richardson recounted. At one point, he admitted feeling a deep sense of hopelessness.
Richardson’s story is not an isolated incident, raising pressing concerns about the efficacy of the Dallas County criminal justice system. Reports indicate that Richardson’s experience is part of a broader pattern of illegal detentions in the county, exacerbating overcrowding in jails.
Following a problematic transition to new case management software called Odyssey in May 2023, Dallas County has struggled to effectively manage the movement of defendants’ paperwork between the courts and the sheriff’s office. Consequently, this hampers the processing of release orders to the state, which has resulted in incidents like Richardson’s.
Along with Richardson, Adrian James Noriega has also filed a lawsuit against Dallas County for illegal detention, citing negligence that deprived them of their freedom and violated their constitutional rights. Attorney Jim Spangler, who represents both plaintiffs, is seeking class-action status for potentially hundreds of others who have faced unlawful detentions in the past two years.
At least three other federal lawsuits are currently pending against the county regarding similar illegal detention claims from just this year. Last year, the Dallas County Commissioners Court settled two prior cases linked to illegal detentions for $100,000 and $60,000 respectively. Spangler is also negotiating a settlement for another case involving a woman who was detained 46 days beyond her release date earlier this year.
“This situation reveals deep, systemic problems,” Spangler remarked. “The commissioners acknowledge there is a problem, but Dallas County appears unable to rectify it.”
The sheriff’s office bears the responsibility for sending judgment packets to the state to facilitate releases. Sheriff Marian Brown noted that her team cannot send these documents until they first receive them from the district clerk’s office.
This process is riddled with inefficiencies, lacking any method for public oversight or for attorneys to track where delays are occurring. Despite the courts moving to the Odyssey software system in 2023, the jail continues to utilize a different network, Adult Information Systems. The inability of these two systems to communicate means that officials in the district clerk’s office must hand-deliver paperwork to the sheriff’s office for release processing, which Brown confirmed.
“There’s a disconnect,” Brown stated regarding the system’s design.
When queried about immediate solutions to these persistent problems, officials were less forthcoming. County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins opted to decline an interview but acknowledged the ongoing challenges regarding the transfer of judgment packets.
“Every department involved in this process is reevaluating its role and working on improvements to ensure justice is served efficiently,” he stated in an emailed response.
In Richardson’s specific case, his lawsuit draws attention to delays specifically within the sheriff’s office in transmitting necessary paperwork to the state for timely release.
Richardson had been arrested for violating his probation from a conviction dating back ten years for credit card abuse. At the age of 18, he used a credit card he found on the ground to purchase about $60 of food and socks. After accepting a plea deal for a year in state jail—against the backdrop of nearly a decade of probation restrictions—Richardson received credit for 322 days served. This meant he had 42 days left to complete his sentence after his plea deal on April 2.
Court records indicate that the district clerk’s office filed Richardson’s judgment on the same day he entered his plea—a critical step that should have initiated his release process. However, the sheriff’s office did not transmit this paperwork to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice until May 27, nearly two months after the district clerk’s submission and 13 days after his legal release date.
The state agency finally informed Dallas County on June 2 that Richardson’s sentence had expired on May 14. He was released two days later, compounded by a lack of clarity on when the sheriff’s office had actually received the relevant documentation.
Brown acknowledged the challenges in the system, stating that although online records indicated the district clerk filed Richardson’s judgment on April 2, this does not confirm that the jail received it promptly due to the outdated nature of current processes.
The widespread issue of illegal detention not only brought suffering to individuals like Richardson but also raised concerns about the waste of taxpayer dollars and the subsequent aggravation of overcrowding in the jail. According to assistant director of jail population management LaShonda Jefferson, it costs $88 per day to house a prisoner in the county jail, which was at 97% capacity with over 6,921 inmates as of a recent Wednesday.
“We certainly don’t want to keep people incarcerated if they are entitled to be released,” Brown concluded regarding the county’s objectives.
Noriega, who was also a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit alongside Richardson, faced a similarly grim situation. He was arrested for a probation violation stemming from a four-year-old conviction involving a bulletproof vest, landing him in jail in April. When he accepted a plea deal on May 14 for six months in state jail and received credit for 386 days served, he anticipated immediate release. Instead, Noriega was not released until June 13—one full month later.
Sitting in detention, Noriega found himself grappling with intense feelings of hopelessness, questioning if he would ever gain his freedom. “I want people to understand—we’re being held hostage,” he expressed.
His girlfriend, Keyasha Fisher, began making daily calls to county officials to understand the situation when Noriega was not released on time.
“I was calling every day and not getting any answers,” Fisher recalled, emphasizing how she began to lose hope until she reached out to The Dallas Morning News for assistance.
On June 10, while Noriega was still in jail, the news outlet started inquiring into his detention and the sheriff’s office responded by stating that the judgment had been sent to the state for processing but was returned due to an error regarding the detail of the offense.
It was corrected by the court and resubmitted to the state for processing on June 10, the day media inquiries began—a mere three days before Noriega’s eventual release.
Although documentation is supposed to confirm when and how the sheriff’s office submitted Noriega’s judgment, it remains unclear exactly when that was done. Spangler, Noriega’s attorney, reported that he did not see any errors when checking the judgment filed in the online system on the day of Noriega’s plea.
“Dallas County has an obligation to implement systems designed to avoid permitting people to languish in jail after their release dates,” Spangler said, echoing sentiments shared by defense attorney Alison Grinter, who also noted that similar patterns of illegal detentions were not common in other counties.
Just a few days before Noriega’s release, Grinter had a client who was sentenced to two years with over 800 days of back time, yet was still in jail weeks after being eligible for release due to the sheriff’s office failing to submit the necessary paperwork to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“This is like identifying a leak in a boat and thinking that bailing out the water is a suitable long-term fix,” Grinter pointedly remarked regarding the oversight in addressing the ongoing systemic failures.
This narrative of systemic failure resulting in illegal detentions raises serious questions about the robustness and efficacy of Dallas County’s criminal justice system, prompting calls for immediate reforms to rectify the inadequacies that have left so many behind bars unfairly.
image source from：dallasnews
