Harris County Criminal Justice
Jocelyn Nungaray: Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
Jocelyn Nungaray was 12 years old. On or about June 17, 2024, she was strangled to death in Harris County, Texas — pressure applied to her neck and throat, impeding her normal breathing. The grand jury indictment further alleges the killing occurred in the course of committing or attempting to commit kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault of Jocelyn Nungaray
Franklin Peña and Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel are each charged with Capital Murder in the 232nd District Court (Court 232), presided over by Judge Joshua Hill. Cause numbers:
- 1873327 – The State of Texas vs. Peña, Franklin
- 1873328 – The State of Texas vs. Martinez-Rangel, Johan Jose
Defense counsel of record: for Peña — Natalie Lynn Schultz, Ana Paula Funes-Baker, Cary Lynn Higginbotham, Daniel Joseph Werlinger Jr., and Lisa Kay Andrews, with Eric Daniel Kraus as public defender at the PC docket. For Martinez-Rangel — Mandy Ann Goldman, John P. Keirnan, Spence Douglas Graham, and Mario Rojas Madrid, with Eric Daniel Kraus as public defender at the PC docket.
Both men remain in custody. Their cases continue to be reset on the Master Docket — mostly upon defense request — with the next non-trial settings currently set for:
- Peña: September 21, 2026 at 9:30 a.m.
- Martinez-Rangel: September 29, 2026 at 9:30 a.m.
What the Warrant Says
According to the arrest affidavit, both defendants are Venezuelan nationals. Peña was encountered by U.S. Border Patrol on May 29, 2024, and released by ICE with an ankle monitor on May 31, 2024, briefly staying at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in El Paso before making his way to Houston.
Investigators identified the two men through surveillance video from a 7-Eleven and the Metro Park & Ride near where Jocelyn was last seen, a photo from Ojos Locos bar shared by a roommate who recognized the men, and a separate witness who came forward after Peña admitted his involvement to her.
In a recorded statement, Peña described Martinez Rangel restraining, assaulting, tying up and moving Jocelyn, while denying that he touched her himself. Martinez Rangel later admitted to detectives that he tied her legs and directed how her body was disposed of.
The affidavit also documents gang-affiliation evidence against both men — TikTok accounts, tattoos, and hand signs tied to the transnational criminal gang Tren de Aragua.
More than two years later, still no trial date. Jocelyn deserved better.
President Trump formally renames the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge the Jocelyn Nungaray National Wildlife Refuge
Jocelyn's mother, Alexis Nungaray, joins President Trump at the Joint Session of Congress
Alexis Nungaray: "It was truly an honor, a very surreal feeling"
Read the official presidential action honoring Jocelyn Nungaray →
Maria Elena Gonzalez: 11 Year Old Murdered in Pasadena Apartment
Maria Elena Gonzalez, 11, was found dead inside her family's Pasadena apartment on August 12, 2023. Her father, Carmelo Gonzalez, discovered her body after returning home from work — she had been placed inside a trash bag and hidden in a clothes basket under his bed.
Maria had been home alone that morning. Shortly after her father left for work, she sent him a WhatsApp voice message around 10 a.m. saying someone was knocking at the door. He told her not to open it, and she replied that she was still in bed. She never responded again. Relatives living in the complex checked on her later that day but couldn't find her, and her father made the discovery when he returned home in the early afternoon. His employer confirmed he had been at work the entire time.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences ruled the death a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to the head and neck and asphyxia due to strangulation, and found evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.
Pasadena police traced the crime to a neighbor, Juan Carlos Garcia Rodriguez, who lived next door with two roommates. A key found at the scene that didn't belong to the Gonzalez family unlocked the neighboring apartment's original lock; Garcia Rodriguez moved out days later and refused to return the key, prompting his roommates to change the locks. He also matched the description of a long-haired neighbor Maria had pointed out to her father in the stairwell that same morning, and investigators found inconsistencies in his account of his whereabouts.
Garcia Rodriguez was charged with capital murder days after the killing and fled the area; he was arrested in Louisiana and extradited to Harris County, where he has been held without bond. A Harris County grand jury indicted him in 2025 (Cause No. 1932963) on capital murder committed in the course of an aggravated sexual assault, and the case remains pending in the 184th District Court, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. At the September 2, 2026 setting, the case was reset to a pre-trial conference on Monday, November 9, 2026 at 9:00 a.m. Garcia Rodriguez remains in custody.
Garcia Rodriguez is a Guatemalan national who was smuggled across the border near El Paso in January 2023, at age 17, and was processed by Border Patrol as an unaccompanied alien child. He was transferred from Department of Homeland Security custody to the Department of Health and Human Services and, in February 2023, released to an unrelated adult sponsor in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana area — a sponsor who reportedly had taken in other unaccompanied minors before and was himself in the country illegally. HHS caseworkers lost contact with him within months and closed his case that summer; he had run away from the sponsor and relocated to the Pasadena apartment complex only three to four weeks before the murder. He turned 18 on July 31, 2023 — twelve days before Maria was killed. After his arrest, ICE's New Orleans field office lodged an immigration detainer against him.
Two years later, the case is still pending. Maria deserved better.
News Coverage — Maria Elena Gonzalez
- Police looking for suspect who killed 11-year-old girl inside her Pasadena apartment
- Mother of 11-year-old Pasadena girl killed says she's in immense pain
- Man accused of killing, sexually assaulting 11-year-old in Pasadena captured in Louisiana
- New details revealed in death of 11-year-old Maria Gonzalez
- Pasadena girl killed inside her home while her dad was at work, police say
Caitlin Stup: 25-Year-Old Killed in Crossfire on Houston METRO Bus
On January 7, 2026, Caitlin Stup, 25, was riding a METRO bus near the intersection of Richmond Avenue and Walnut Bend Lane in West Houston when an argument between two teenagers erupted into gunfire. Stup, an innocent passenger, was killed. A 16-year-old boy on the bus was also injured.
Two teens were arrested: Brayden Smith, 17, was charged with murder in Harris County for his alleged role in Stup’s death. Patrick Scott, 18, was initially charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon in Harris County; that charge was later dropped in favor of a state aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charge, and Scott now also faces federal charges for illegal possession of a machine gun and unlawful receipt of a firearm and ammunition, carrying up to 15 years in prison.
Scott’s record raises serious bail-reform questions. On January 1, 2025, he was charged with unlawfully carrying a handgun and released on a personal bond by an unelected hearing officer. On June 16, 2025, he allegedly committed aggravated robbery — pointing a gun at an online seller, shoving her to the ground, and stealing her phone — a first-degree felony. He was not arrested until November 4, 2025, when a hearing officer set bond at $50,000; elected Judge Kelli Johnson then lowered it to $15,000, and Scott made bond on November 10, 2025. He was still out on that bond when the fatal METRO bus shooting occurred less than two months later.
FBI Houston Special Agent in Charge Douglas Williams said Scott "was the last person who should have allegedly been in possession of a machine gun conversion device."
News Coverage — Caitlin Stup
Representative Mitch Little on Judicial Reform
Representative Mitch Little on SJR 87
Representative Mitch Little on Martha Medina
Representative Mitch Little for SJR 5
Senator Joan Huffman on Criminal Justice Reform
Senator Joan Huffman on Bail Reform
Senator Joan Huffman on SJR 5
Senator Joan Huffman on Sean Teare Opposing Bail Reform
Representative AJ Louderback on Judicial Reform
Representative AJ Louderback on SJR 87
So-Called Bail Reform Makes Harris County Unsafe
How an activist lawsuit and a compliant Commissioners Court locked Harris County into the O'Donnell Consent Decree — and why the judges who inherited it are finally fighting back.
The O'Donnell Consent Decree is Harris County's clearest example of activist litigation rewriting local criminal justice policy from the outside — pushed by progressive lawyers, waved through by Harris County democrats, and kept in place for years through federal court supervision, even as it collides with state law and the elected local judges who have to enforce it.
It began with the 2016 class-action lawsuit ODonnell v. Harris County, filed by Civil Rights Corps founder Alec Karakatsanis alongside Susman Godfrey attorneys Neal Manne and Lexie White. The suit accused the county of running an unconstitutional "wealth-based detention system" through its misdemeanor cash-bail practices. The same legal network soon filed a parallel case, Russell v. Harris County, targeting felony bail. Both landed before U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal.
In his Yale Law Journal essay The Punishment Bureaucracy, he argues that incremental measures like data dashboards, monitoring regimes and expanded federal oversight can leave the underlying punishment system intact while adding new layers of bureaucratic control — a description that fits the O'Donnell decree closely.
Commissioner Rodney Ellis encouraged the original suit and championed it publicly on the grounds of racial disparity. Once democrats controlled the county's key offices, the Commissioners Court approved the consent decree on November 21, 2019 — and Harris County paid nearly $4 million in plaintiffs' attorneys' fees for the privilege. The decree's centerpiece, Local Rule 9, eliminated secured money bail for most misdemeanors, requiring prompt release on no-cash General Order Bonds without judicial review for most arrestees. It also imposed years of data dashboards, public meetings, mandatory training and external academic monitoring — reporting that has since been used to claim the reforms saved money and reduced the jail population without raising recidivism, figures produced by the very apparatus the decree created.
The decree is now facing its most serious challenges yet. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton intervened in August 2025, seeking to have it vacated based on the state's new Senate Bills 6 and 9 and the Fifth Circuit's en banc ruling in Daves. Judge Rosenthal granted Paxton limited intervention on state-law grounds in October 2025, with discovery and a hearing scheduled into August 2026.
Republican judges are finally pushing back. Four Republican Harris County Criminal Court at Law judges have pressed the fight: Paula Goodhart (Court No. 2), Jessica Padilla (Court No. 14) and Leslie Johnson (Court No. 3) were each elected in November 2022 and have served since January 2023, while Linda Garcia (Court No. 16) was elected in November 2024 and took office in January 2025. In May 2025, the group notified the court-appointed monitor that key provisions of the decree conflict with state law. After years of operating under a settlement negotiated before most of them ever took the bench, the judges have now escalated the fight to the Fifth Circuit through a mandamus petition, asking to restore their own discretion over release decisions and end automatic cash-free releases.
As of August 2026, the Consent Decree and Rule 9 remain in effect while those challenges play out, and the parallel Russell felony case faces the same legal headwinds. Nearly a decade later, the O'Donnell episode is a case study in how a single activist lawsuit — encouraged by local progressive politicians and enforced through ongoing federal oversight — can outlast the elections that are supposed to hold criminal justice policy accountable.
Where Things Stand — September 10, 2026
Latest: on September 9, 2026, Justice Samuel Alito denied the application for a stay in No. 26A296. The Fifth Circuit’s writ of mandamus remains in force, and Judge Rosenthal must consider the four judges’ Younger abstention argument on an expedited basis, well in advance of the November 3 election — the entire relief the judges sought, and the entire relief two judges of the Fifth Circuit found they had a “clear and indisputable” right to obtain. The consent decree is not vacated and no bail practice changes as a result. The only thing that changed is the calendar. The county government that went to the Supreme Court to argue against its own elected judges did not get the delay it asked for.
Background: the Fifth Circuit has now weighed in — and sided with the four Republican judges. In a 2-1 opinion issued August 26, 2026, a panel of Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod and Judge Edith Jones granted the judges' petition for a writ of mandamus, ordering U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal to rule on their Younger abstention argument — whether the case should never have been in federal court at all — on an expedited basis and well in advance of the November 3, 2026 Texas judicial election. Judge Stephen Higginson dissented.
The panel majority leaned heavily on the Fifth Circuit's 2023 en banc decision in Daves v. Dallas County, which held that a nearly identical bail lawsuit — brought by the same legal team using the same theory — should not have been adjudicated in federal court in the first place. Because Daves II already resolved the legal question, the majority reasoned, Judge Rosenthal doesn't need to wait for the full evidentiary hearing she had scheduled for November 16, 2026 to decide abstention — she can and must decide it now. The court also denied as moot the four judges' pending motion to stay enforcement of the consent decree.
Judge Higginson's dissent argued mandamus — a drastic and extraordinary remedy reserved for really extraordinary causes — was the wrong tool for ordinary docket management, that Judge Rosenthal had been thoughtful and prompt, and that neither side's briefing before the district court ever mentioned the election as a reason for urgency. He warned the majority's reliance on the election date was unprecedented and unexplained.
What this means practically: Judge Rosenthal must now decide, before Election Day, whether Younger abstention requires her to send this case out of federal court entirely — a threshold question that could end the litigation, and the consent decree along with it, without ever reaching the merits of Senate Bills 6 and 9 or the four judges' broader motion to vacate. The original November 16 evidentiary hearing schedule is now effectively superseded; a new schedule for the expedited Younger ruling has not yet been set. Until Judge Rosenthal rules, the O'Donnell Consent Decree and Rule 9 remain in force.
For the full backstory — how a 2016 class action became a decree that four judges who never signed it are still bound by, and why the timing here is no accident — see Rachel Ann Palmer Hooper's analysis below.
Seven Years Is Long Enough: The Fight Over Harris County's Bail Consent Decree
By Rachel Ann Palmer Hooper (@RAPHOOPTX)
A divided Fifth Circuit panel ordered U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal to decide before Election Day whether to vacate Harris County's 2019 bail consent decree, two years after the full court held a nearly identical Dallas County case never belonged in federal court. This piece traces the decree's 2019 origins, the abstention doctrine now at its center, and why an agreement four sitting Republican judges never signed continues to bind them.
Read the full article →The Fifth Circuit Said This Case Never Belonged in Federal Court. Here We Are, Years Later.
By Rachel Ann Palmer Hooper (@RAPHOOPTX)
In 2023, sitting en banc in Daves v. Dallas County, the Fifth Circuit held that the Harris County misdemeanor bail litigation — “ODonnell I, this very case,” by name — should not have been adjudicated in federal court. Three years later the consent decree still governs how bail is set in the Criminal Courts at Law, and no court has answered the jurisdictional question the en banc court raised. A close read of In re Goodhart: the four judges who never signed the decree and inherited it anyway, six years of monitor reports documenting recurring violations with no way to detect them, the county-run bonding operation the decree built, and why Harris County’s own government went to the Supreme Court to argue against its own elected judges.
Read the full article →Breaking Bond — Fox 26 Houston
Reporting by Randy Wallace on bond decisions, repeat offenders, and cases that fell through the cracks.