Courts Remain Closed Monday

Sick computers in the City of Houston's Municipal Court system are forcing the city to keep courts closed through Monday.

Details of the closure were released late Friday after it was determined a bug in the court's computers would bring the justice process to a stand still.

The city says Houston police can't check for outstanding warrants when they pull over someone, and no one can be bailed out of jail. Officers are also being instructed to hand write tickets for non violent offenders instead of taking them downtown.

Gwendolyn Goins, a spokes person for the Houston Municipal Courts, says 20 computers started behaving erratically Wednesday. Despite efforts to repair them, by Thursday there were at least 20 more computers malfunctioning.

Goins says the city's downtown Municipal Courthouse and all five of the municipal court's satellite locations are affected. The wait times have increased but Goins says they have increased staff to serve everyone as quickly as possible.

On Friday morning, the departments involved-- including the Information Technology department and the Mayor's office-- were on a long conference call assessing the severity of the problem.

The city is taking into consideration the security of public files, and the importance of keeping current files from being corrupted.

So far the city has not indicated whether the problem is a computer virus or worm, or if they believe it's the work of a computer hacker.

The city says all courts will be closed on Monday, and all dockets will be reset.

Court employees are to report to work as scheduled, but those scheduled to serve on a jury will not be required to show up. Anyone whose court case is reset will be notified by mail of the new date.