Sean Teare, Harris County’s district attorney-elect, will ‘do what I think is right’

Sean Teare, Harris County's district attorney-elect, is a longtime prosecutor who has tried armed robberies, visited the scenes of countless homicides and convicted a man of mass murder. But those aren't the cases that keep him up at night.

"If you look at my early prosecutions, they were strong," Teare told the Landing. "I was, and still am, a pretty talented trial lawyer and can utilize that for good and bad. So I have convictions and sentences that I'm not proud of now on possession of controlled substances."

Teare, 45, said he "gravitated" toward drug cases as a young prosecutor, having spent his adolescence watching his mother struggle with a heroin addiction. Now married with four children, he says maturity taught him to take a less punitive approach to drug abuse and mental illness.

"We're not going to prosecute our way out of this," he said. "The mark of a good prosecutor is not waking up in the middle of the night thinking about the case you lost. It's thinking about the case you won that you shouldn't have."

Naturally charismatic, with a quick grin and easygoing affect, Teare's political skill carried him to victory in an election that was otherwise catastrophic for Democrats. When he takes office in January, he will become one of the most powerful elected officials in Harris County, the final decision-maker for criminal prosecutions in the county's felony, misdemeanor and juvenile courts. As district attorney, he will oversee a budget of over $116 million and more than 350 prosecutors.

Yet he faces stiff headwinds. Teare has laid out ambitious plans for change, but his narrow margin of victory in the general election leaves him without a commanding mandate. He will also take office amid a political realignment, with President-elect Donald Trump promising to weaponize the Department of Justice against "radical left prosecutor's offices" and Texas billionaire Elon Musk, who has already targeted Democratic district attorneys and judges, turning his attention to Harris County .

Teare, therefore, will have to perform a political high-wire act, balancing Democratic priorities like support for bail reform with the widespread anxiety about public safety that nearly propelled his opponent to victory.

"He's got a very difficult path," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. "There will be a lot of distrust early on. He'll need to find a way to use relationships he's got and establish additional relationships to be successful."

Friends, former colleagues and supporters say Teare is equal to the task. In interviews with the Landing, they described an experienced prosecutor whose strengths are not confined to the courtroom.

"Leadership is difficult," said Paul Fortenberry, formerly a senior Harris County prosecutor who supervised Teare during Teare's second stint at the office. "Some people can learn it. Some people have it or they don't. And he's always had it."

Fortenberry and others pointed to Teare's steady hand at the helm of the Vehicular Crimes Division, which he led during his later years as a Harris County prosecutor. In that role, he appeared frequently at crash sites, earning the respect of stakeholders across the justice system — even those who did not support him.

"I've known him for many, many years," said Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers' Union, which endorsed Teare's opponent. "I think he's going to be good for the DA's office, to be honest."

Those relationships and Teare's depth of experience have left his supporters hopeful that the new district attorney will be able to steer his agency through choppy waters.

"My faith is that he is going to live up to the campaign promises that he made," said Nia Hernandez, an organizer for the progressive organization Indivisible Houston who campaigned for Teare. "It is faith and it is hope, but I don't believe that the person I've seen and spoken with is going to lead us down (the wrong) road."

Making tough calls

Watching Teare put voters at ease on the campaign trail, it's easy to see how he coaxes juries to his preferred verdict in the courtroom. A native Houstonian, he was born into a family of actors and calls trial advocacy "to a large extent a performance."

Teare's childhood, however, was far from glamorous. His first visit to the Harris County Jail was not as a prosecutor, but as a civilian: at just 15, he was there to bail out his mother.

"She'd been strung out for a few months at least, and she got picked up for possession of a controlled substance," he said. "That was my first entrée into the criminal justice system."

It was an encounter that would prove fateful. Even as he sought out the drug possession cases that consumed him in his early years at the district attorney's office, Teare developed a reputation as a talented prosecutor with a particular gift for trial work.

"He's very confident," said Kevin Petroff, who supervised Teare in 2010. "He can tell a compelling story – all the things that you need to be a good trial attorney."

Later in 2010, Teare departed the district attorney's office for a stint in civil law, bringing suit against drug or medical device manufacturers across the country. He returned to prosecution in 2017 to work for Kim Ogg, where he took over the Vehicular Crimes Division and oversaw assistant district attorneys in several felony courts. He also served on the district attorney's Capital Committee, where he helped decide whether to pursue the death penalty in eligible cases — and says he grappled with difficult questions of right and wrong.

"The death penalty in no way is a deterrent" to future crime," said Teare, who told the Landing he has only twice recommended the punishment. "The death penalty is, in my mind, reserved for people who, no matter what population you put them in, are going to continue to be life-threatening (and) dangerous... If there was another option out there, I'm all for it."

Former colleagues who worked with Teare during this period described him as affable and collegial, a "people-pleaser" — albeit one capable of making tough calls.

Dan Cogdell, a defense lawyer, said he saw Teare do just that in a case involving a defendant who faced felony assault charges for shooting at police. Cogdell, who represented the defendant, believed the case was unjust because the defendant was experiencing a mental health crisis at the time of the shooting. Teare, who supervised the prosecution, came to the same conclusion and dismissed all charges.

"When you have a shot cop, it's a very difficult thing to convince a prosecutor that that case should be dismissed," Cogdell said. Teare later worked at Cogdell's criminal defense practice, beginning about a year after dismissing the charges. He departed the firm in April to run for office full time. "To me, that personified his ability to make a hard decision."

It was also during this second stint at the office that Teare's decision to run for Harris County District Attorney — an ambition he had long harbored "in the abstract" — finally took shape. He knew he would "definitely" run, he said, around 2018 or 2019 as he "started to watch, from the inside, the office disintegrate" under Ogg.

Teare resigned from the district attorney's office in February 2023 to challenge Ogg, who had drawn the ire of local Democrats following an about-face on key issues like bail reform and accusations that she had weaponized her office against political opponents. Teare subsequently won the Democratic primary in March 2024 by more than 50 percentage points — a victory based as much on his political skill, Democrats said, as frustration with Ogg.

Intake, domestic violence are top priorities

Teare's plans for the district attorney's office are detailed and ambitious, though the self-described "policy wonk" admitted he will not be able to enact all of them in his first year in charge. Instead, on day one, Teare said he has two priorities: reforming the office's heavily criticized intake division and turbocharging domestic violence prosecutions.

The intake division at the district attorney's office is responsible for deciding whether to accept or reject criminal charges after police have made an arrest. Previously staffed by experienced prosecutors through a mandatory overtime program, Ogg replaced that model with a full-time team of lawyers who bring varying levels of experience.

That change, critics said , has led to an influx of weak cases, high dismissal rates and a lethally overcrowded jail . Teare agreed and said he would restore the previous model abandoned under Ogg.

"January 1, we are back to having experienced prosecutors in those roles," he said. That, he said, will help "strengthen the cases on the scene... and strengthen relationships with law enforcement in that we are working together."

Teare's second priority for Jan. 1 is similarly structural: he plans to create a "domestic violence bureau" in the office, a "silo" that will take only domestic violence cases.

Currently, the district attorney's office operates a dedicated domestic violence division — a team of specialized prosecutors who handle the most difficult cases. However, Teare said, their workload only amounts to about 30 percent of Harris County's domestic charges overall, with the remainder routed into the felony trial bureau. There, most are handled by overwhelmed junior prosecutors who rotate courts frequently, according to Teare.

"It is not uncommon in a six-month period for a survivor to have five different voices that they're hearing from," Teare said. "What we're seeing is, quite frankly, exhaustion on the part of survivors who then don't want to participate (in prosecutions) — and a lot of those cases where these victims just say 'I'm out' turn into either high risk (cases) or intimate partner murders."

Teare says he developed this initiative in consultation with domestic violence experts and advocates across Harris County.

"All of the survivors in these cases will be handled in a better fashion, in a more consistent fashion, with trauma-informed prosecutors, with social workers that are all saying the same thing, with victim advocates that are all marching in the same step toward whatever the resolution is," Teare said.

Teare will staff the new bureau by reallocating open positions already funded by Commissioners Court.

"If it saves one person," he said, "it's worth it."

'Do what I think is right'

Among Teare's other campaign promises are his pledges to "lobby hard" against anti-abortion laws, support misdemeanor bail reform and lean into diversion programs for non-violent drug offenders.

However, many of these issues emerged as conservative talking points during the 2024 election season, with Trump vowing to target the "radical Marxist prosecutors who are abolishing cash bail." Meanwhile, Musk recently announced he would use his political action committee, America PAC, to attack prosecutors who accepted campaign funding from the liberal philanthropist George Soros — a group that includes Teare .

Rottinghaus, the political scientist, said the prospect of a "political hit job... should definitely be on Teare's mind."

"It's clear he'll have a target on him because of Harris County's size and its role in the criminal justice system," Rottinghaus said. "He'll need to be conscious of it, but he can't let that prospect define his term in office."

For his part, Teare said he does not think of himself as "a radical." A career prosecutor, his approach to the role of district attorney is that of a pragmatist, not an idealogue.

"My mission and my promise to the community are not going to change," Teare said. "We're going to see that justice is done. We're going to follow the law, and we're going to use prosecutorial discretion... I'm going to do what I think is right."