Whipped Cream Difficulties

Jurors in the state of Texas are paid $20 for their first day of service, and $58 for every subsequent day. This is mandated by state law.

Travis County is going to pay 14 jurors (including two alternates) $26,700 each, or $373,800 total.

Why?

The answer seems to be that they served 460 days on a jury, from August 12, 2024 to July 13, 2026. (Weekends and holidays don’t count.)

But that, by itself, is an unsatisfying answer. The deeper answer goes into a case that I have been covering in the past, but I missed some recent developments.

When last we heard about former Williamson County sheriff Robert Chody and his trial for evidence tampering, the case had been placed “on hold” while the prosecution appealed an unfavorable ruling by the judge that completely borked their case.

Garza’s office appealed the trial court’s ruling. The case then went through multiple court reviews. Ultimately, the Court of Criminal Appeals declined to review the issue on May 14, 2026, which prompted Garza’s office to move to dismiss the cases.

DA Garza’s office filed to dismiss the charges on July 6th, and apparently the case was dismissed on July 13th.

Court records show jurors physically attended five days of court: Jury selection (Aug. 12, 2024), three trial days (Aug. 13-15, 2024) and the July 13 dismissal hearing.

But: even though the trial was “on hold” while the appeals made their way through the system, the jurors were still considered to be sworn jurors.

Beyond the five court days, the jurors’ “public service” appears to have been checking for a call or text, and “maintain[ing] their impartiality” on non-trial days. They were prohibited from discussing the case, learning about those involved, and reading or watching news reports about it; such an instruction doesn’t vanish on weekends and holidays.

So they were “free” to go on with their lives, subject to the usual general restrictions on jurors. But since they were sworn as jurors, and continued to have that obligation, the judge (rightly, I think) ruled that they deserve their daily pay.

By the way…

According to page 61 of Travis County’s fiscal year 2026 budget, the county set aside $698,605 for legally mandated trial jury fees for the fiscal year. It also budgeted $156,749 for grand jury fees.
The jurors’ payout in this case will exhaust more than half of the county’s trial jury budget and exceed prior years’ expenses. The county reported it expended $253,700 for jury fees in FY25 and $246,627 in FY24 for jury fees.

The county can request reimbursement for a substantial portion (but not all) of that money, but it doesn’t sound like that reimbursement is automatic.

I can’t blame the jurors here, or the judge (though KXAN suggests “A plain language reading of the statute suggests jurors are only compensated for going to the courthouse.”) The only person I can see blaming here is DA Garza, who brought a case that was so unsupportable, he got blown out of the water on the third day of trial, and then dragged the case out for close to two years, leaving the defendants in legal limbo.

Edited to add 7/23: DA Garza is moving to have the compensation order set aside. His motion makes two arguments:

1) When the court dismissed the cases, the court’s jurisdiction ended, and thus the court didn’t have the authority to set jury compensation.

2) The second prong of the argument is the one I would have expected: compensation is only paid for days the jurors “report to and attend court in person”.

Fox 7 Austin quotes a response by the attorney for Jason Nassour, the other defendant.

Edited to add 7/24: The judge has reascended the payment order. It looks like that decision was based on the whole “in court” question:

“We thank the jurors for being on call for the two years that they were waiting for this matter to be resolved,” Price, the district clerk, told the Statesman. “The law says we have to pay them for being in attendance, in court, and we are following the law.”

So instead of $26,700 each, the jurors will get…about $175.