$1.5 Million Class-Action Settlement Reached in Texas Jail Over-Detention Case
by Chuck Sharman
When Ladarion Hughes struck a plea deal and was sentenced to time served in December 2021, he had been held over two years since his July 2019 arrest, mostly in Texas’ Smith County Jail, except for a brief stay in a state psychiatric hospital. Yet jailers refused to release him. Even his court-appointed attorney didn’t believe he was being wrongfully over-detained.
The following month, the 24-year-old Hughes contacted Dalila Reynoso, lead mental health advocate for the nonprofit Texas Jail Project (TJP). She had helped him with commissary funds at the jail in December 2020, while he was awaiting transfer to the psych hospital for competency restoration. Though he had been confined for 911 days on a two-year sentence, she discovered, jailers refused to release him on the mistaken belief that he first had to be transferred to the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). In reality, jailers are required only to create a “pen packet” of key information that is sent to TDCJ, which generally signs off the same day on a prisoner’s release.
Reynoso called the county’s representative in the state legislature, who expedited Hughes’ release the same day in January 2022. But his case got the advocate wondering: How many others were there like him who had been held past their release dates? The answer, obtained via open records requests, was shocking: Smith County had held at least 102 people too long during the period that Hughes waited for his overdue release.
The problem was neglect. The jail was understaffed, and creating pen packets was one of the duties that fell through the cracks. But the entire system was a mess. “Because Smith County employs an inadequate, disjointed, paper-based system, it routinely takes the County days or even weeks to create and send pen packets to TDCJ, which forces people who have already completed their sentences, or who will imminently complete their sentences, to remain incarcerated in the Jail after they should have been released,” explained the complaint that was ultimately filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in 2023.
The suit was brought on behalf of Hughes and two other named plaintiffs by attorneys with Loevy & Loevy in Chicago and the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University Law School in Dallas, along with Los Angeles attorney Akeeb Dami Animashaun. Proceeding under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, they accused the County of violating Hughes’ civil rights with his 27-day over-detention, as well as co-Plaintiff Angela Alonzo’s rights with the extra 33 days that she was held, and the rights of the third Plaintiff, Demarcus Lively, who remained in the jail eight days too long.
The district court certified a broader Class of Plaintiffs on November 18, 2025, consisting of “[a]ll individuals who were detained at the Smith County Jail between July 11, 2021, and December 31, 2024, and who (1) were convicted of a felony offense; (2) completed their custodial felony sentence at the Smith County Jail; and (3) … were not released within two days following the completion of their custodial felony sentence.”
By that point, the parties had reached a settlement agreement, and the district court incorporated its preliminary approval into its order. It included $1 million for Class Members and $500,000 in costs and fees for Class Counsel. The fund for the Class Members was to be apportioned based on the length of each over-detention. See: Hughes v. Smith Cty., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 226257 (E.D. Tex.). The district court then granted final approval of the Class Action settlement on February 18, 2026. See: Hughes v. Smith Cty., USDC (E.D. Tex.), Case No. 6:23-cv-00344.
The over-detention problem is not limited to one Texas county but is “a systemic issue across many criminal systems,” as Loevy & Loevy attorney Meg Gould told CBS News, one that “violate[s] the constitutional right of countless individuals by denying them their freedom.”
Additional source: CBS News
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Related legal case
Hughes v. Smith Cty.
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (E.D. Tex.), Case No. 6:23-cv-00344 |
| Level | District Court |