§ 140B.002.Special Docketing Procedures

The same docketing device the trafficking racketeering chapter carries, with one change that matters.

Here the certificate may be filed by the attorney general or a local prosecutor, where in the older chapter only the attorney general may file it.

That follows from who may sue. This chapter puts enforcement in many hands, so the priority docket has to be available to all of them.

The mechanics are unchanged. The certificate is filed with the clerk of the district court in which the action is brought, stating that the case is of special public importance. The clerk must immediately furnish a copy to the administrative judge of the district court of the county where the action is pending. That judge shall immediately designate a judge, who shall promptly assign the action for hearing, participate in hearings, make determinations, and cause the action to be expedited.

Nothing in the sequence is discretionary once the certificate is filed, and no judge reviews whether the description fits.

The consequence of dispersing that power is worth seeing plainly. More than 150 elected prosecutors in Texas may each place a case ahead of the ordinary docket on their own certificate.

The justification is the same as elsewhere in the chapter: these cases concern property that can be moved, sold or spent, and they run alongside felony prosecutions whose timing they must not disturb.