Promise Not to Kill Anyone? After Losing Election, TX Judge Wholesale Releases Juvenile Defendants
After losing his bench in a Democratic sweep, Harris County Juvenile Court Judge Glenn Devlin released nearly all of the youthful defendants that appeared in front him on Wednesday morning, simply asking the kids whether they planned to kill anyone before letting them go, the Houston Chronicle reports.
“He was releasing everybody,” said public defender Steven Halpert. “Apparently he was saying that’s what the voters wanted.”
“The longtime Republican jurist — whose seat was among 59 swept by Democrats in Tuesday’s election — is one of two juvenile court judges in Harris County whose track records favoring incarceration contributed heavily to doubling the number of kids Harris County sent to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department in recent years, even as those figures fell in the rest of the state,” writes Chronicle reporter Keri Blakinger.
Four of the juveniles released were facing aggravated robbery charges.
Read the Houston Chronicle article.
