SAN ANTONIO – Two San Antonio criminal defense attorneys are seeking intervention from the Fourth Court of Appeals over the change in the way the magistrate system operates in Bexar County.
The new system allows city judges to take over magistrate duties completely, rather than have separate city and county systems as has been the case for nearly a dozen years.
Attorneys Joel Hoelscher and Robert Gebbia claim that the system is unfair to their clients.
“The person who is caught in the middle because he doesn’t get to have – he or she doesn’t get to have — (his or her) rights asserted until indictment,” Gebbia said Tuesday.
He called the new system “bureaucracy at its worst.”
“It seems to me to be rather petty, where the county and the city are fighting,” Gebbia said.
Administrative District Judge Ron Rangel questions Judge Nelson Wolff’s claim that the new system will save money.
“It has not been a circumstance where any money has been saved," Rangel said. “On the contrary, just in new hires alone, the county has expended way beyond what they claimed was going to be saved.”
“The system is going to fail,” Rangel said. “So allow it to fail. We’ll get it back, and then we’ll make it work right.”
“The system wasn’t broken before," he said.