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. . . the five most populous counties—Harris, Dallas, Travis, Tarrant, and Bexar—have announced that they’re dismissing hundreds of charges and will decline to prosecute minor marijuana possession in the future. While the reactions of prosecutors in the big cities have garnered most of the headlines, Texas Monthly reached out to prosecutors for every county in Texas seeking to find out how they plan to cope with this new legal landscape.
Officials with 93 of Texas’s 254 counties responded to inquiries. (Officials from the remaining 161 counties either did not respond or declined to comment.) There was a patchwork of responses to the new law from prosecutors across the state. One clear pattern: Urban counties seem to be more eager to drop misdemeanor pot prosecutions than their rural and suburban counterparts. Nine of the state’s twelve most populous counties—representing nearly 15 million people, or more than half of Texas’s total population—will no longer prosecute low-level marijuana cases, and some have pledged to dismiss pending cases.
Perhaps reluctant to shed a tough-on-crime approach popular among Texas conservatives, some officials in smaller counties were critical of their urban peers dismissing cases. Bill Helwig, DA of Yoakum County, a square patch of West Texas with population 8,500, said the new law likely won’t affect how marijuana cases are prosecuted there. “We’re a very conservative county, and I believe that rural counties may view the situation from a slightly different set of glasses,” he said.
Kendall County DA Nicole Bishop, whose county just north of San Antonio has a population of about 45,000, likewise intends to continue misdemeanor marijuana prosecutions. Her office also will request restitution from any defendants who insist on lab testing, including seeking more severe punishment in plea deals. “I will not act as an unelected legislator by unilaterally deciding what laws I deem worth it to enforce,” she said. “I will not abandon my sworn duty to follow the law.”
Yet the new law could disproportionately strain the resources of these smaller counties, which are more likely to lack the equipment and the funds to outsource testing. In Beaumont’s Jefferson County, for example, the crime lab recently requested nearly $500,000 for new equipment, employees, and training for distinguishing marijuana from hemp, according to the Beaumont Enterprise. Steve Houston, the DA in Brewster County in far West Texas, said the Legislature created another unfunded mandate for local governments. “It requires testing, and they didn’t provide funding for testing,” Houston told Texas Monthly. “I’m not paying for a bunch of testing.”
