The Case for Sean Teare
Will a New DA Bring Accountability to Harris County?
Over the past five months, the many issues with Kim Ogg have been a consistent topic among Harris County Democratic Primary voters. Between potentially letting Jared Woodfill walk, Hoopergate, an influx of cash from big insurance, bail bondsmen, and anti-abortion billionaires who have given more than $1 million to Greg Abbott, the massive mismanagement failures that have ruined intake at the jails and so many other causes for concern, voters are becoming more and more informed each day of the moral necessity to defeat Kim Ogg.
What we have not had as much time to discuss is the case for Ogg’s challenger, Sean Teare. The Houston Chronicle editorial board did an honorable job of endorsing Teare, which was good to see.
I want to offer a different perspective on the case for Sean Teare: that of a Democratic precinct chair and organizer here in Harris County.
Meeting Teare
First, some background: I met Mr. Teare in December. I did not meet him until several days after I authored and organized with others to pass a resolution admonishing the District Attorney, a process that took several months.
A week before Christmas we finally sat down in a coffee shop in my precinct to trade stories.
The news has not fully unpacked Sean’s background, which is understandable. There has been a lot of other news related to the race.
So here’s his story.
Sean has been a prosecutor, and has experience with crime victims and defendants both personally and professionally. He has seen how the system operates, and was encouraged to pursue the career that he has because of his experiences growing up.
Sean’s mother Debbie was a Beaumont native and Neches River Festival Queen. She toured Vietnam with Bob Hope, performed on The Dean Martin Show, and was Mary Martin’s understudy for Sound of Music.
Debbie was on her way to Broadway until she met his father, Barry. Debbie and Barry fell in love, and so instead of Debbie going to Broadway, they had three kids: Sean, Nel, and Hannah.
Debbie did not leave the theater entirely, but stuck to more local productions. She was the first star of many of the early Theater Under The Stars shows in Houston, such as South Pacific, Sound of Music, and Peter Pan.
Then in ‘86, when oil crashed, and things just weren’t working out for the family, they moved out to a farm in Huntsville.
Shortly thereafter, Debbie started drinking heavily. She would scream a lot at home, and forget to pick Sean up from school.
When Sean’s grandfather started dying a couple years later, the family moved in with him and Sean’s grandmother to help out. Barry took a job that made him commute three days a week to Houston, so, on top of taking care of helping out her parents, the task of taking care of the whole family fell to Debbie for the majority of the week.
She struggled. She drank a lot. Sean, now 16, ended up running with a rougher crowd. His grades plummeted. His mom ended up hooking up with one member of that new rougher crowd who was the same age as Sean, and Barry took the kids out of the house and put Sean in St. Thomas High School halfway through the school year. They made Debbie go to in-patient care.
She came out 60 days later. A month after that, she divorced her husband and went to marry a heroin addict she met in in-patient care. A short while later, she was picked up for drugs. The family went to bail her out of jail.
For the rest of his mom’s life, Sean’s experience with her was little to no contact periodically interrupted by a sudden crisis. She once called Sean from a trap house where a guy held her hostage, sexually abused her, and beat her with a hammer. Sean, 17, showed up, beat the guy up, and took his Mom to a different place (“wherever she asked to be dropped off”).
She ended up back with the heroin addict she met in treatment, who abused her as well, then spent the rest of her life addicted to drugs, constantly changing housing. She died in 2010, shortly after meeting Sean’s first child.
“When my mom went on a two-year probation in 1995, there was no meeting with an addiction specialist or any other support,” he pointed out. “We were lucky to have resources, but we could have used help, and so many folks out there could use help. We can create a different outcome. Maybe two years clean, with more accountability steps and support, she gets to see rock bottom for what it is.”
“We’re the richest country in the world and we fight over whether people die of hunger or addiction. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
On the Issues
In the months after our first meeting, much of what Sean critiqued was slowly but surely covered by the media, demonstrating his point on the campaign trail. Some of it was predictive, especially on the issue of intake.
Issue #1: Fixing Intake
Intake is something I’ve been learning about more recently thanks to the tutelage of families who have been victimized by the legal system and advocates in the space. Sean spoke about it with great clarity when we met.
Intake is staffed around the clock by prosecutors. Their job is to determine whether or not someone needs to stay in jail or be charged, or if the issue needs to be dropped so the person can get out. They do eight hour shifts. The graveyard shift is midnight to 8AM. It used to get paid overtime, and was overseen by experienced prosecutors.
Ogg changed the intake process in several important ways. Per the Houston Chronicle article endorsing Sean Teare for DA:
“That issue may stem in part from oft-criticized changes Ogg made early on to the intake division, a team of prosecutors who take calls from police in the field to assess whether evidence is strong enough to accept criminal charges. It’s an extra level of screening that doesn’t exist in many counties, where law enforcement officers can file charges without consulting with a DA gatekeeper. Before Ogg, intake was a rotating shift open only to experienced prosecutors with felony or misdemeanor trial experience. They earned overtime pay by working nights and weekend shifts. Ogg got rid of overtime pay, citing budget constraints, and assigned more than two dozen prosecutors on a permanent basis. Ogg has also asked senior prosecutors to oversee intake shifts on weekends without overtime pay.
Ogg said she made the change to “bring consistency” to the process but more than a dozen people we spoke to in the legal and law enforcement communities argue it’s done the opposite, weakening a critical safeguard against dubious prosecutions that waste time and resources and alter the lives of those wrongly accused. Ogg showed us a list of intake prosecutors, indicating some have decades of experience, but critics say longevity doesn’t always mean relevant experience or quality. An outside consulting firm hired by county commissioners seemed to agree, concluding in 2022 that intake was staffed by too many unseasoned or unqualified attorneys, many lacking trial experience.”
Again, this was all something Sean had been talking about in detail on the campaign trail. Then, on February 1st, the Houston Chronicle picked up the story: judges argued that Ogg’s changes to the intake process had caused 4,500 people to be held without probable cause in Harris County’s jails. The piece provides one example of a mother being separated from her 1-year-old during circumstances that could easily have spurred domestic violence.
Ogg tried to spin the blame for intake at the ACLU forum on February 8th, saying:
“Our intake division operates 24/7, 365 days a year. That is a huge benefit to the public safety of the community because it means when they arrest somebody, they can clear them and take them to jail, but they get a review of the charge first.
Now the Chronicle said we give them bad charges. Let me tell you who reviews charges ultimately: judges. So the judges always were the ones who made the decision about whether this was sufficient probable cause or not.
Ours is simply an extra review so that the person can be taken into custody, then, if it benefits public safety.
So the improvements to intake would be that we made it a full time job. My opponent wants to send it back to his old friends who no longer work in the office and want to come back and work these jobs part time. I don't see a benefit for you and the community of a bunch of people working part time giving different opinions, when what we did is professionalize the division by making it full-time jobs of lawyers who do nothing but review the cases. So it's an extra layer of protection for the accused, which the Chronicle didn't tell you about, and it's an extra layer of protection for you and the community because it allows them to arrest right then.”
This answer was very bad for a few reasons. The first is that Ogg’s argument mainly describes the basic, bare bones of how intake operates. Intake has been around for decades.
Her review of the theoretical advantages of intake are not a feather in the cap of the office. Who cares if someone is full time or part time? The public only cares that justice is done, which means looking at the result of the policy. To “professionalize a job” doesn’t mean much; to the extent that it means what the DA is defining it as, it doesn’t serve us well. The old approach to intake was better.
She then basically claims that Democratic judges have been dropping the ball on charges, echoing an accusation made by her spokesperson to the Chronicle when they ran their story on her mismanagement of the intake process. Even the Harris County Democratic Party pushed back on the spokesperson’s accusation. It is extremely on brand of Ogg to blame the judges; she has not had a good relationship with judges from the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
Teare has made a clear promise to change intake and decrease the jail population so that we don’t have to spend $11 million to ship residents of our jail to private prisons in other states within six months of taking office. That means thousands less people incarcerated for no reason. That means less deaths in the jail. That means less desperation and a safer Harris County.
Issue #2: Fixing the Culture
Former prosecutors at the DA’s office often discuss how bad the culture is under her rule. Ogg is known for a toxic and tyrannical culture. She has run off major Lieutenants in the past, such as Tom Berg, who were able to reign in some of her worst plans. And again, the word on the street in Houston from criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors and some judicial staff is that there are a lot of good people in the DA’s office.
Per the Chronicle:
“There's a lot of different things going around — they're overworked because of the hurricane or they're not going to trial — but really it's that there's no leadership," said Josh Phanco, a longtime felony prosecutor who left the office earlier this year. "There's no one you look at and say, 'Oh, I want to be that guy.' They all got fired."
The culture has only gotten worse since then. Throughout my time on the campaign trail, I have seen Kim Ogg’s staff in meetings and events. I have seen the rightwing activists who support her. I have read the stories about the Hoopers, and in the home stretch we are starting to see that these relationships are all part of an extension of a larger issue:
The DA keeps a toxic circle, and cuts out voices of reason.
The top brass, and the cultural influences of dirty players such as bigwig Republicans, bail bondsmen, racist police union flacks, private prison corporations, and big insurance have made Ogg’s office a place where you go to look the worst parts of the legal system in the face. It permeates everything inside and outside of her office.
Ogg can’t keep staff. She has historic turnover, even for a DA’s office (40-70 unfilled paid positions). The people who stick around and gain influence include some of the most skullduggerous Republicans in the State of Texas, such as Rachel Hooper and Jared Woodfill. Ogg shut down an investigation into Woodfill, who brought young men to a law partner, Paul Pressler, who had been accused of abusing men of similar age as part of their business arrangement. Those young men worked out of Pressler’s house. Woodfill admits all this under oath.
Later, a former Woodfill client would allege fraud against Woodfill. Ogg backed off the case. Watch her answer as to why. It’s alarming, particularly in just how much it diverges from reality.
Ogg’s donors and political allies follow a similar trend: bail bondsmen, million-dollar Trump donors, police union hacks that take barely veiled prejudiced shots at people’s names, a nonprofit that has gone full-on alternative reality on public safety issues and quite a few everyday Houstonia Republicans that are well off the deep end of the political spectrum.
Sean has the respect of a broad range of former prosecutors and attorneys around the county. He is known for being a good manager, a sharp prosecutor who is popular inside and outside the court. He will also have a fantastic team, that has stepped up regularly throughout the campaign, to guide him.
Issue #3: Misdemeanor Bail Reform and the Real Quest for Public Safety
Sean, like the overwhelming majority of the Democratic Party here locally, supports misdemeanor cash bail reform, known locally as the O’Donnell Consent Decree.
The O’Donnell Consent Decree is the key legal system reform in our county in generations. It basically ensures that no one can be held for the overwhelming majority of nonviolent misdemeanors just because they can’t afford to pay bail. In other words, it means a lot less people are locked up simply for being poor.
This has obviously been a good policy. A study from the University of Pennsylvania Law School showed that in Harris County during the period following the consent decree, people were in jail for less days pretrial, there were more acquittals and diversions, less people were sentenced to jail, the length of average jail sentence was shorter, likelihood of reoffending decreased, and public safety was not impacted. The study is wonderful news. Everyone should celebrate it.
Kim Ogg doesn’t. She is infamously wrong on misdemeanor cash bail reform. Her spin on the issue is that she supports what she calls “misdemeanor cash bail reform,” but opposes the O'Donnell Consent Decree because it has contributed to spikes in crime.
She’s lying, and history shows it.
Ogg was a vocal advocate for bail reform when she first ran, one of several policies that encouraged progressive activists to back her run and help win the general election even after a bruising primary runoff against a candidate to her left. She had a page on her website in which she supported bail reform and criticized Devon Anderson for being buddy-buddy with bail bondsmen.
That web page no longer exists. It would embarrass her if it did; it criticized the DA at the time for “taking thousands of dollars from bail bondsmen.” Of course, Ogg now takes thousands of dollars from bail bondsmen and the Big Insurance companies that back them.
Promptly after her first election, Ogg 180ed on bail reform. She asked judges for high bail for certain misdemeanor offenders, filed last minute objections to Harris County's historic misdemeanor bail reform settlement, and gathered 100 police chiefs to oppose O'Donnell.
In March 2021 at the beginning of her second term, Kim Ogg publicly testified in support of SB6, which was sponsored by Republican Senator Joan Huffman and later signed into law by Governor Abbott in Houston. The law undermined the discretion of Democratic judges in Harris County to determine bail, making it harder for offenders to attain their constitutionally protected right to bail. The legislation is in direct contradiction to the bail reform settlement reached by Harris County.
Just recently, Ogg’s top brass David Mitcham fed a quote to a Republican rag, The Texan, misrepresenting the impact of a court decision to claim that the circumstances around O’Donnell make the precedent “unconstitutional” (they don’t).
In a bid to finagle more funding for prosecutors, the DA has accused Lina Hidalgo and other Democratic commissioners of “defunding law enforcement.” For the record, Harris County law enforcement funding is higher than it has ever been.
Sean supports misdemeanor bail reform, and has a curiosity for how other municipalities and counties manage their legal systems. Instead of fighting the majority of the people in his own party over the basics, he will side with the majority of Harris County Democrats in favor of reform measures that actually respect crime victims, defendants, and people who have been both as well as the entire general public. The DA’s office needs a 360° lens. Sean can offer one.
Issue #4: Supporting Community Violence Interruption Program
The DA loves to tout her credentials on mental health by pointing to her diversion program. But aside from the fact that her mental health diversion program is open to several sharp criticisms, the DA has completely failed the community by undermining the Community Violence Interruption Program.
Based on national models, the program has thus far been a great success. 130 violent crime victims have been assisted, and according to a trauma surgeon who oversees the program, there has been a “drastic increase in the offering of mental health services to patients.” In other words, people are getting the help they need without having to go through police channels, which frees up resources and keeps everyone involved safer by ending the cycle of violence. The HART program keeps people from retaliating in cases of gun violence by catching people when they are most vulnerable to committing a crime, and instead help them work through their trauma.
Ogg demanded information about the program under the guise of concerns that outreach specialists with the program were interfering with criminal investigations.
Per Jen Rice at the Chronicle:
“The District Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment about whether any such incidents of interference have been reported or provide an update on the status of its inquiry into the program.”
Judge Hidalgo has been clear where she stands on the issue:
“I know there are people up and down the bureaucracy who are scared or don’t want to start, or will end their tenure with the county sooner because they’re facing this pattern of behavior,” Hidalgo said. “That’s very real. It costs people a lot of emotional anxiety. It costs money.”
Sean Teare supports the program. He has been inside the DA’s office, so has seen how mental health issues affect incarceration and vice versa. Having a DA who simply favors the program will create a more collaborative environment at the county to make the most of their work.
And when other programs come up that could have positive benefits in the community, people will speak up and suggest them to be debated on the merits instead of spiking them out of fear that the DA will launch yet another politically charged investigation.
An Accountable DA
Much of the voting public is sold on Kim Ogg’s failure to do her job well. But some advocates are asking: will Sean Teare do a good job?
No DA is perfect. And more than likely, I am going to disagree with Teare on things along the way. I have friends who are elected and we disagree all the time. I am an advocate for marijuana legalization. That puts me out of step on that issue with many district attorneys.
What we do have with Sean is someone who has consistently been considered a good listener by people who are directly affected by the policies of Ogg and other elected officials. That’s why so many women who have lost children at the jail are with Teare. That’s why the community of Dr. Gokal, who was prosecuted for nothing more than doing his job and trying to save lives, is for Teare. That’s why Sean is respected on both sides of the bench, and by both the prosecution and the defense as well as survivors of violent crime.
So, I believe Sean Teare will be a good DA.
But I understand the paranoia. The last time a progressive prosecutor came whispering sweet nothings in our ear about progressive policies, we got Kim Ogg. And even generously weighing Ogg’s accomplishments, it was not worth it to deal with the massive damage she has done.
We are all working hard to get her out, and so far, it’s working. The DA has had five months of terrible news cycles.
This is a new model of accountability. The precinct chairs are more aware and energized than ever before. Community activists of all different types are putting their chips down on this race. This is not a flash in the pan; it is the new way of handling Harris County elections and long term electoral organizing. The precincts of Harris County will continue to fill, and we will provide feedback and accountability as needed. If we have to, we’ll deliver blowout election victories. We can do it.
But my hope, and my goal, and the outcome I believe WILL happen, is that Sean Teare is a good DA, that we have great dialogues in our community about forward progress, and that he and those around him challenge themselves to cocreate with all of us the best possible outlook for justice in Harris County and across the country.
Vote for Sean in the Harris County elections, now and in November. Early voting for the primary runs through March 1st. Vote early! If you cannot, then go to the polls on March 5th.
To get involved in canvassing campaigns supporting Sean Teare and other great candidates with Indivisible Houston, visit defeatkimogg.com.