For 183 days at the beginning of 2024, Ian Smith sat in a locked jail cell in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, sure that he should by then be freed.
According to a lawsuit filed earlier this month by Smith, a combination of clerical errors and failures by Dallas County officials in charge of the jail processing system led to Smith’s overincarceration by half a year, a violation of his constitutional rights under the Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The filing states that the overserved time was due to a district clerk’s miscalculation of time already served, resulting in a “320-day error” that took months to correct.
Smith’s attorneys claim that “even the most cursory review” of the records would have shown the “glaring discrepancy” between the clerk’s calculation and the time Smith had already served, but no such review process exists within Dallas County. The Dallas County District Attorney’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit…