Bungled rollout of Dallas County software has clouded court activity

We’ve long had concerns about the work ethic of Dallas County’s felony court judges.

Their slow progress at chipping away at the huge backlog of cases amassed during the pandemic has been the topic of several editorials in the last two years. Dallas County commissioners also publicly criticized the judges, saying some weren’t working hard enough to clear cases while victims and defendants waited for justice.

The judges appeared last spring to be making progress; data from the Office of Court Administration, an arm of the Texas judicial branch, showed the backlog was leveling off.

But has that progress continued? Who knows. For nearly a year Dallas County has not been reporting this important court data to the Office of Court Administration every month as required.

That’s because the county has bungled the rollout of a new criminal case management software program, and it hasn’t been able to send reliable court data to the state since April.

The problem, rooted in the migration of case files from the county’s 40-year-old Forvus database to Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey system, has caused many other problems, too, including rising jail costs as inmates linger behind bars waiting for their release or transfer paperwork.

Dallas County District Clerk Felicia Pitre provided us some hope last week, however. She told us in an email that her office, Tyler and the county IT department have been “meeting daily” and have corrected “thousands of errors” discovered in the conversion between the two systems.

That conversion was completed Thursday, she said, and she expects to begin sending felony court data to the Office of Court Administration this week. Even better, she said the county will also soon be able to comply with a new state law requiring her to provide detailed information on the activities of each court specifically, including the number of jury trials held, continuances granted, plea agreements approved and use of visiting judges.

That’s good news to Alejandra Pena, the Office of Court Administration’s director of data and research, who told us her office is eager to receive this information and incorporate it into its 2023 annual statistical report of the Texas judiciary. That report has been held up in part because of the lack of data from Dallas County, the second largest court system in the state, she said.

It’s also good news for all of us, whether we realize it or not. The safety of our communities relies in part on a well-functioning criminal court system.

Transparency is paramount to holding elected judges accountable for delivering justice, not only by looking at how the courts are functioning as a whole, but also by reviewing how hard and efficiently each judge in particular is working.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com