The Hidalgo County Board of Judges on Monday morning postponed jury trials as virus cases climbed above 800 over the weekend with nearly 350 people were hospitalized.
In a unanimous vote, the judges postponed the proceedings until Oct. 18 with a plan to re-evaluate the decision in mid-September.
This is the second time such a decision has been made in Hidalgo County.
The Board of Judges first voted to suspend jury trials in March 2020 as the pandemic first made its way into the Rio Grande Valley, ushering in more than a year of hardship in which more than 100,000 fell ill with the virus that has killed or contributed to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the county.
However, in June, as cases and deaths in the community began to decline to some of the lowest levels seen since the beginning of the pandemic, the Board of Judges authorized summoning jurors in order to have four jury trials in July.
Only one of those cases actually went to trial and resulted in a jury finding a 34-year-old man guilty of stabbing a 16-year-old to death in late September 2020, before sentencing him to 85 years in prison.
Even as that trial got underway, Hidalgo County began reporting an uptick in cases of the delta variant, with the vast majority of those being people under 40 who were not vaccinated.
During Monday’s meeting, Eddie Olivarez, chief administrative officer of the county’s Health and Human Services Department, said that one out of three beds in the county’s hospitals are occupied by people sick with the virus and 80% to 85% of the 370 hospitalizations are people who are not vaccinated.
Noe Gonzalez, the 370th state District Court judge who serves as the administrative judge, said it’s clear the virus is again beginning to spread.
“They may not appear to be as high as they were at one point in the county but it is a beginning of an upswing and it’s not slowing down,” Gonzalez said.
Based on conversations with Olivarez and Dr. Ivan Melendez, the county’s Health Authority, Gonzalez believes the numbers will continue to get worse.
“We can’t predict anything other than they’ll go up,” Gonzalez said.
The administrative judge also said he knows a chief nurse who works in the ICU at a local hospital who told him that all the ICUs are full right now.
“They are bringing in extra nurses,” Gonzalez said. “The hospitals are not doing well when it comes to the numbers themselves.”
A portion of the discussion also centered on concerns about the impact of the virus’ spread through local school districts, which are not allowed to impose mask mandates on campuses and because children 12 and under still can’t receive a vaccine.
Gonzalez said some children are asymptomatic but the concern is the spread to adults.
And while children may be asymptomatic and have a strong chance at fighting the virus, Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez said there are children sick in the hospital.
Cortez said Monday there were 21 children in local hospitals with the virus, and three of them were seriously ill.
By re-evaluating in mid-September, the judges are hoping to have a better understanding of whether children going back to school will result in positive cases continuing to climb.
However, while jury trials are postponed, individual judges still have discretion to hold other in-person proceedings, like suppression hearings, as long as judges follow previously issued safety protocols that include masking and social distancing.
