GRACIA'S "STRATEGY" RESULTS IN INMATE DYING IN JAIL

By Juan Montoya
The man who died of a heart attack after failing to post a $10,000 bond ($1,000 in cash from commercial bail bondsman, $300 from the county's Pre-Trial Release department, or $0 on his lawyer's surety) instead spent seven months at $40 a day compliments of the taxpayers instead of being released pending his trial.
Jose Miguel Pecina was booked into the Cameron County jail on charges of continuous family violence and interfering with an emergency call. His bond was set at $10,000.
He was jailed March 26, 2014. He died seven months later on Oct. 28.

According to District Attorney Luis Saenz, he should have never been incarcerated.
Pecina could have requested a personal recognizance bond if no case had been filed against him within 15 days of his incarceration, according to the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. However, since his attorney never requested it or asked the court or the Pre-Trial Release Dept. (PTRD) for assistance, he languished behind bars until his death.
"We were never contacted by his lawyer or any member of his family," said PTRD director Kevin Saenz. "We were never notified about it."
“At some point it falls on their lawyer to keep up with the case and to do what they can for the client,” Saenz said. Saenz said Pecina should have requested the personal recognizance bond. He would have been released from jail on April 26.

As it turns out, it was all part of a grand defense strategy by Pecina's attorney – and new Justice of the Peace 2-2 – Jonathan Garcia. Gracia told a local broadcaster that keeping Pecina in jail was actually a good thing.

“When you're part of the system, everyday that you're incarcerated actually counts towards credit for time served if you're later found guilty on that particular charge. Sometimes you'd like to be able to gain credit as opposed to posting a bond and getting out of jail and finding out later that you're going to have to go back into jail,” Garcia said.

Garcia said he has used that strategy before. He said he was waiting for the case to be filed by the police and district attorney's office so he could use those facts.
The code states that if an inmate is charged with a class-B misdemeanor and no case is filed within 15 days that person is entitled to a personal-recognizance bond. For a class-A misdemeanor, inmates are eligible after 30 days. For a felony charge the inmate must wait 90 days.
But as far as the district attorney is concerned, it is a dead issue and he simply reviewed the case and will not be taking any action.
So that elicits a few questions such as:
If Gracia was allowing his client to serve time on the charges so that he could claim credit for them afterward, did he assume his client was guilty? Does this mean that he (as defense attorneys are supposed to) didn't have a presumption of his client's innocence? If so, isn't Gracia acting, not as a defense attorney, but rather as a judge and a jury and accepting punishment from the system before even going to court?
Either way, Pecina died a lonely death behind bars when he could have died among his own. No one, of course, knew he was going to die of a heart attack while incarcerated. But how many other grand defense strategies count on the taxpayers of the county to not only pay for an inmate's defense, but also ask that the taxpayer provide their clients' board and keep while they remain in the custody of the county?
At seven months (7x30= 210) time $40 @ day, that equals to $8,400 that the county taxpayer shelled out for Pecina's keep plus whatever Gracia got as a court-appointed attorney.