The reason the Texas House didn’t subpoena José Garza had nothing to do with reluctance.
The Travis County district attorney had been invited to testify before the House Select Committee on Governmental Oversight, and he didn’t come. Members discussed compelling him. Rep. Carl Tepper, a Lubbock Republican on the committee, explains why they stopped short.
“If he is subpoenaed, then he would have immunity from prosecution for what he testified on in that committee,” Tepper says. “So if there’s something going on in that office, they did not want him exempt from immunity in that instance.”
Then he adds the part that will interest anyone following this: “So there might be something afoot to look at his office a little closer.”
That calculation — a legislature declining to compel testimony because compelling it might foreclose something else — is the sharpest detail to come out of a twelve-hour hearing that otherwise played out as expected.
What happened in the room
Garza did not appear. Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Gharakhanian came in his place and read a five-page statement arguing the office prosecutes cases when it has the evidence to do so. Tepper’s account of the sequence matches the record: no one from the office initially, then a representative, then a 1 p.m. deadline and open talk of a subpoena.
Rep. Mitch Little, a Lewisville Republican, said the Legislature should investigate and impeach Garza, and signaled he would move for a subpoena vote. Chairman Cody Vasut noted that a subpoena would require two-thirds of the committee and raised the transactional immunity problem Tepper describes.
The criticism was not confined to Republicans. Rep. Richard Peña Raymond, a Laredo Democrat, was among the sharpest voices, telling the panel that a death threat against him had gone uninvestigated by Travis County prosecutors.
Afterward, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Dustin Burrows issued a joint statement pledging more accountability for what they termed rogue prosecutors. Burrows said the hearing “laid important groundwork for the Texas House to act next session.”
Which makes Tepper’s own position worth reading closely, because he supports holding prosecutors accountable and wants to be sure the tool matches the problem.
The member
Tepper represents House District 84, entirely contained within Lubbock County, and is in his second term after winning a 2022 runoff to succeed the retiring John Frullo. He is an Air Force veteran who flew combat-support missions and received the Air Medal during the Persian Gulf War, a Texas Tech graduate, a commercial real estate broker, and a former chairman of the Lubbock County Republican Party.
He sits on Appropriations, Calendars, Redistricting and Intergovernmental Affairs, chairs the Subcommittee on State-Federal Relations, and serves on the oversight select committee. He describes himself, without prompting, as “a rock-ribbed conservative.”
The charge, and the record
Tepper’s summary of the case against Garza is blunt: “They’ve been really tough on police officers, and they’ve been really easy on violent offenders.” He adds missed deadlines — “missing indictment deadlines and letting murderers go free.”
Both halves have a documented record behind them, and both are more complicated than the summary.
On police, a Travis County grand jury indicted 21 Austin police officers on aggravated assault charges over injuries to demonstrators during the 2020 protests following George Floyd’s killing — the single most-cited episode of Garza’s tenure. His office subsequently dismissed 17 of those cases. The police union CLEAT has said roughly 30 of its members were indicted during Garza’s tenure without a final conviction, at more than $1 million in defense costs; that figure comes from the union.
On deadlines, Abbott and other critics have said Garza’s office missed the 90-day indictment deadline in more than 200 cases in 2024, resulting in defendants’ release. News reports in September indicated the office had begun meeting those deadlines.
There is more in the file. A Travis County resident petitioned in 2024 to remove Garza under the 2023 law that made a categorical refusal to prosecute certain offenses “official misconduct.” A judge sanctioned his office that same year for failing to produce a document during the trial arising from the 2019 death of Javier Ambler II. A congressional committee has separately opened an inquiry into his office’s immigration-related policies.
Garza’s defense is that voters endorsed his approach, that overall reported crime in Travis County has fallen, and that his office has increased sexual assault convictions. He has called the legislative effort a political stunt, and he has a pointed reply on the impeachment question: Abbott already pushed a proposal to make removing locally elected district attorneys easier, and “that proposal became law.”
The part that gives Tepper trouble
Tepper’s difficulty isn’t the indictment. It’s the ballot.
“One of the problems is that Travis County keeps electing this guy,” he says. And then, with something close to grudging admiration: “The more we criticize them and don’t like them, the more they love them, and they keep electing them by record numbers.”
That turns out to be literally accurate. Garza won roughly 67 percent of the 2024 Democratic primary and then took about 68 percent of the general election vote — some 355,000 votes to his Republican opponent’s 170,000, a margin near 185,000.
Tepper does not pretend this is easy to legislate around.
“It kind of puts us between a rock and a hard place,” he says, “not wanting to interfere with elections or the democratic process of Travis County. But on the other hand, the job has to get done.”
Sizing the statewide prosecutor
Abbott laid out his public safety agenda in May, aimed at the 2027 session. It would create a statewide prosecutor — appointed by the governor, confirmed by the Senate, a professional rather than an elected official, housed separately from the governor’s office — able to assist overworked district attorneys and to step in when they don’t act. In the Travis County example, such an office would track cases awaiting indictment and could move on the 90th day. Abbott also wants district attorneys made eligible for impeachment.
Tepper’s caution about the first piece is structural, and it is a conservative one.
“One of the things we do in Texas, and I think it just goes with government, is we tend to legislate to the lowest common denominator,” he says. “So I would hate to see that we have the state fund a big giant office because we have one problem with one county and one DA.”
He is open to something smaller — “there might be several, by region” — and says he’d want to look closely before committing. He also notes what the hearing itself was partly for: establishing whether the suspicions are “correct or maybe incorrect” before anyone writes a bill.
It is a question of scale rather than direction, and it sits alongside a premise worth stating plainly: the Legislature has already acted once on this subject, in 2023, by redefining official misconduct and creating a removal path. Whether that tool failed, or simply hasn’t been used successfully, is a different question from how large a new statewide office would need to be.
What he’d rather spend the session on
Tepper’s own priority has almost nothing to do with Garza, and he says the hearing’s focus on Travis County wasn’t his.
“I have a little bit of a different take,” he says. “We’ve been having too much of a revolving door on what we would call low-level offenders” — people repeatedly arrested for vandalism and trespassing, much of it tied to street homelessness, with property managers and the public “fed up with the revolving door.”
He is careful with the terminology: “I hate to call it low-level crime.”
His concern is escalation. Over the summer, he says, he watched cases where repeat misdemeanor offenders moved up to violent crime — “murder, lots of violent crime, rape, burglaries.” His proposed response is a three-strikes rule for misdemeanors: three such convictions inside five years, and “should they have to do some serious time.”
Texas already escalates repeat misdemeanors, which is useful context for what would actually be new. Under the Penal Code, a Class A misdemeanor with a prior Class A or any felony conviction carries a minimum of 90 days, and a Class B with a qualifying prior carries a minimum of 30. Some offenses have their own ladders — in theft cases, two prior theft convictions of any grade can elevate a new theft to a state jail felony. Tepper’s proposal would push past those existing enhancements rather than create repeat-offender sentencing from scratch.
The same instinct, applied to contracts
The committee’s other charge that day concerned local government spending, and Tepper’s reaction to it runs on the same logic he applies to prosecutors: measure the output, then decide.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson and the city’s chief finance officer testified about purchasing policies, which Tepper said “seemed okay.” What stuck with him was a number he put at roughly $35 million a year in city spending on homelessness, against outcomes he considers worse than ever.
“At what point, if a program isn’t meeting the metrics of what was set out in the contracts, do you just restructure the program?” he asks. “Or at what point do we just get rid of the program and surrender that one and say it’s not working?”
He also raised the question the committee is actually positioned to legislate: whether people rotate off city boards and commissions and into the organizations holding the contracts, carrying insider relationships with them. “At what point do we put some safeguards around just awarding these contracts and not getting anything back for them?”
He is candid that his instinct runs further than the evidence requires. “I’m a rock-ribbed conservative. My theory would be let’s just not have the program to begin with,” he says. “There might be injustices in the world. There might be things that are not being done right, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the government can fix them.”
Where it lands
Burrows has said the House will act. Abbott has named a statewide prosecutor and DA impeachment as priorities. The hearing produced an immunity problem the committee hasn’t solved and a witness who didn’t appear.
And one of the Republicans in the room came out agreeing there’s a problem and asking a practical question about scale — whether a permanent state apparatus is the right instrument for a single county, and how to square any of it with a large majority of Travis County voters who keep saying otherwise.
“The job has to get done,” he says. Whose job, and at what level of government, is what January is for.