What has been the recent experience of your office in requesting and receiving pen packets from TDCJ.

We are now frequently running into delays of 4-6 months in obtaining the records. When called--TDCJ will only say the are backlogged and its running about 6 months behind. Is anything being done to help alleviate the backlog?

In many cases we are reaching the trial docket before the TDCJ records are received and the original judgments from the counties do not contain adequate identifiers or fingerprints to match to the Defendant at trial.

We have had pen packs come back in weeks, we have had some that have never reached us. They have been pretty responsive when we've told them that it's getting ready for trial and need them expedited.

One other avenue you might try is to get a time (in / out / parole) affidavit from Charley Valdez at classification. Then if you can link ONE of the trips to your defendant with a good judgement you can use the affidavit to link the defendant to the others. We've had good luck with using that to then get the defendant to stiuplate that yes, those are all him.

Hope that helps.

You might have 3 other options for proving up identity with the certified judgments and sentences from district clerk's offices.

You can get certified jail cards with fingerprints from the county jail where they were booked in for the crime they were ultimately convicted of.

You can ask the district clerk to certify any document in the file that has any identifiers, such as fingerprints, address, D/L number, SSN, DOB. Bond papers often have such identifiers.

I have not tried this one, but it might work: you can ask DPS to send you a certified copy of his rap including fingerprints. That's how you can prove up a Louisiana prior, and I don't see why you couldn't do it here.