The county had switched to this system previously for its civil district courts, family courts and truancy courts without much issue. The current problems arose when the county tried to implement the software in its jail management system and misdemeanor and felony courts.
Now, some say they have trouble accessing criminal case files in the county, and it’s led to some inmates staying in jail longer than they should. This software trouble is not to be confused with the recent problems the county has experienced with an update to its payroll software, which resulted in hundreds of employees not getting paid properly or at all, in some cases, since the middle of May.
A couple of weeks after the software, called Odyssey, was implemented, The Dallas Morning News reported that prosecutors, public defenders and the county probation office had only limited access to county criminal case files, and the problem was bringing the county’s criminal justice system to a near standstill. This was in large part due to the migration from the old software, Forvus, to the new one. The migration involved cases as far back as the 1970s, according to the News.
“What’s really been a nightmare for two months now is this new Odyssey software system,” David Finn, a local criminal defense attorney, told the Observer. “It’s a complete meltdown train wreck. It’s a disaster.”
The News reported in early June that lawyers couldn’t check on the times and locations of their trials because they couldn’t access electronic files. The old system included court settings, bond forfeitures, case dispositions, judgments and sentences. It stopped being updated after May 16, but the new system wasn’t up and running until May 22, according to the News.
John Warren, the Dallas County clerk, said in an emailed statement to the Observer that Odyssey is the first case management system Dallas County has implemented for the criminal courts. The courts, like all departments across the county, had been using Forvus, a data repository. He said implementing the Odyssey software involved extracting court records and data from this countywide database, encompassing over 22 million records from a 40-year period.
“In short, our case management system works as designed,” Warren said of the new system.
He said the struggle has been providing access to the new system to staff at the District Attorney’s Office, attorneys, public defenders and other county departments. Warren said the software implementation involves granting access to some 8,000 people.
The county has also had difficulty integrating the software with the sheriff’s jail management system and the state's eFiling system. That integration should be finished in the next few weeks, according to Warren.“It’s a complete meltdown train wreck." – David Finn, attorney
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He also noted the jail has not become overcrowded because of the new software implementation. The jail is provided with information on physical paper every day about defendant releases, which should ensure that people get out of jail on time.
“What happens once we provide that information is solely within the sheriff’s purview, and the sheriff’s responsibility to provide that information to the Texas Department of Corrections,” Warren said.
According to the News, the jail population is up 7% since the software was implemented. Additionally, attorneys and a judge told the Observer that the troubles involved with the transition to the new software were causing some inmates to overstay their time in the jail by at least a couple of days. Finn said some overstayed their time by two or three weeks. The transition to the new software has also delayed assigning attorneys to cases.
Finn said in all the confusion with the transition, some people could get lost inside the jail. That happened to one of his clients, he said. On two separate occasions, he and his client's family showed up to court, along with the bailiffs, but no client. “We know he’s in jail. We can’t find him,” Finn said he was told.
Finn said this can be especially bad for people in jail with mental health issues possibly not getting the medication they need.
One of his clients, who is facing a serious felony charge, spent 20 years in a psychiatric hospital before regaining competency for court. He just recently returned to the Dallas jail. For a period, Finn didn’t know whether the client was getting his medication because he wasn’t sure where he was in the jail. “The guy’s going to get unmedicated,” Finn said. “And by the time they figure out where he is, he’s going to be incompetent again and it’s going to cost the taxpayers another $200,000 to get him competent again.”
Robert Simmons, a local attorney, said when the new software was first implemented in May, he was having trouble getting dispositions on cases.
In two instances, it took an extra two or three days to get someone out of jail. “It was just a bad time to get arrested in Dallas County,” Simmons said. He believes that the new Odyssey system is not communicating well with the system the jail uses to inform jailers to release a person.
Douglas Huff, president of the Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, said one thing everyone should understand and what’s troubling about this is that Odyssey is not new. He said many counties around North Texas use it.
But it’s not effective right now in Dallas County, he explained, and that’s leading to delays in justice. “We’re talking about human beings,” Huff said. “We’re messing with people’s lives.”
He added: “It is clear that the processes involved for justice to be served in Dallas County are severely hurt right now. … We’re talking about people’s liberty. There’s nothing more important.”
The system has certainly caused some trouble for some, but hasn’t created too many problems, said J.J. Koch, a Dallas County criminal district court judge. “There’s definitely some user problems that have been popping up. Some folks haven’t quite learned it yet,” he said.
The judge said the most significant problem he’s heard about is the delay in releasing people from jail. He doesn't think the process is as broken as it was a couple weeks ago, but he is disturbed by it still. “I had a couple of my defendants who had pleaded out and were ready to get out of jail and get back to work,” Koch said. “I believe one lost employment as a result of having a near-five-day delay.”"We’re talking about people’s liberty." – Douglas Huff, Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association
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There’s also a serious shortage of district clerks and a retention problem, and this could be a contributing factor, according to Koch. “I think that some of the management issues that already existed have been exacerbated by the frustrations and stress that the Odyssey transition has presented to specifically management in the district clerk’s office,” he explained.
He said many frontline people in the District Clerk’s office don’t want to remain there because of some of these issues.
Koch acknowledges that problems have popped up — some with significant constitutional ramifications — but he believes they’re being tackled. “I think that as long as management in many places is supportive and doing the right things regarding getting people trained, there will be that continual growth process,” he said.
Koch says the fact that other counties in Texas and other parts of Dallas Country use the software is a positive sign.
“I think the bulk of the problems have really nothing to do with the software itself,” Koch said. “It’s an institutional muscle that gets built. It’s not uncommon to switch a process like that.” But when it comes to Dallas County, he added, “They’re not used to switching softwares. They’re not used to switching processes.”
However, in January, the News reported that other counties have had similar issues when transitioning to the Odyssey software. After Alameda County, California, switched to the software, a deputy public defender told news outlets that dozens of people had been wrongly arrested or jailed, while others mistakenly had to register as sex offenders. There were reports of people being wrongfully jailed in Lubbock County, Texas, after implementing the Odyssey software. Similar reports came out of Shelby County, Tennessee.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said employees in his office weren’t trained in the software before it was rolled out. His staff is in the process of being trained, but they’re still having trouble and are unable to see all the information they need to carry out cases.
The trouble with the transition reminded him of when the county switched to a new system in the early 2000s. “Once again, they turned one system off and turned another one on and when the new system didn’t work, there were people in jail unaccounted for,” Creuzot told the Observer.
This time around, the DA wasn’t too optimistic about how changing software would go, and it appears that he had good reason to feel that way. “I don’t know what to say. If you asked me did I expect it to go smooth, no,” he said. “If you asked me why, because it never has.”
