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Hays County jury summons error comes days before murder trial for killing of San Marcos police officer

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Published  January 7, 2024 10:12pm CST
Hays County
FOX 7 Austin

Hays Co. jury summons error days before trial

The capital murder trial for the deadly shooting of San Marcos police officer Kenneth Copeland is set to start Monday. This comes just days after thousands of jury summons had to be hand-delivered because of an error by a vendor.

HAYS COUNTY, Texas - The capital murder trial for the deadly shooting of San Marcos police officer Kenneth Copeland is set to begin on Monday. This comes just days after thousands of jury summons had to be hand-delivered because of an error by a vendor.

According to Hays County, the constable's office hand-delivered thousands of jury notices to residents earlier this month. That error is now drawing concern in the turnout of the trial on Monday.

"We are not the only office that was affected by it, apparently also the County Clerk’s Office was affected," said Hays County District Clerk Avrey Anderson. "They weren't able to summon their juries and the justices of the peace. If they had any juries, they wouldn't have been able to summon them either. It's a back-end error on Tyler’s part."

Hays Co. hand-delivers 6K jury notices

Hays County constables will need to hand-deliver thousands of jury summons. The county clerk says this is due to an error by a vendor.

According to the Hays County District Clerk, Tyler Technology's failure to mail out the documents was identified this week, when most of the jury did not show up to court.

"They were supposed to appear for court, the jury pools were supposed to appear and, like, eight people showed up," Anderson said.

The district clerk says this impacted nearly 6,000 jury notices in multiple counties. The constable’s office was forced to hand-deliver the documents.

"The hand-delivering is a temporary solution, not to last for long," Anderson said. "I’m not going to say that it is going to go away immediately, Tyler did fix their problem."

HAYS COUNTY NEWS

The error happened just days before the start of the trial for the murder of 58-year-old San Marcos police officer Kenneth Copeland.

According to investigators, Officer Copeland was serving a warrant at 51-year-old Stewart Mettz' home in December 2017 when he was shot by Mettz. 

Mettz is set to face a judge on Monday.

"We made measures to convert juries that actually did get summoned to be able to go towards the capital murder trial," Anderson said.

The district clerk says the jury summons from the dates of Jan. 3 through Feb 13 were impacted, and operations are back to normal. 

"We need to speak closely to Tyler for the coming days to make sure that we can know for sure when they get sent and have some sort of way that this happens, and it will be a while before we trust them to the degree we did," Anderson said.