Former Harris County Justice of the Peace Mark Fury is asking west Harris County voters to return him to the bench, bringing two terms of judicial experience and a record of managing one of the county’s busiest courts to the Precinct 5, Place 2 race.

Fury secured the Republican nomination in March, defeating incumbent Judge Bob Wolfe with 53.8% of the vote, according to the official Harris County primary results. He will face Democratic nominee Lisa Jefferson in the Nov. 3 general election.

“I’m connected to the community, and I love people,” Fury told Katy Christian Magazine. “The reason I love being a JP is because I get to serve my community and serve people.”

Justice courts handle many of the legal matters residents are most likely to encounter personally. Their responsibilities include traffic and other Class C misdemeanor cases, evictions, truancy matters and civil disputes involving up to $20,000. Justices of the peace also perform marriages.

Fury sees the office as an opportunity to restore order when neighbors, businesses, consumers, landlords and tenants find themselves in conflict.

“There’s so much discord in our society,” he said. “The JP can bring a lot of peace to people by assisting them to peacefully solve their problems.”

Fury previously served two terms as justice of the peace for Precinct 5, Place 1 at the Chimney Rock courthouse. His record there forms the centerpiece of his campaign for the Place 2 court on Clay Road, west of Highway 6.

“I have a unique skill set that takes care of both sides of the job, which makes me very well-qualified,” Fury said.

The first side, he explained, is judicial temperament: listening carefully, understanding the law, applying it consistently and treating the people before the court fairly. The second is administration, including the ability to organize a large staff and move thousands of pending cases through the system efficiently.

Fury said his court inherited a backlog of approximately 70,000 cases when he previously took office. During his first five years on the bench, he and his staff eliminated that backlog while remaining current on tens of thousands of new filings each year.

“I’m proud of having overcome a 70,000-case backlog in the first five years in office,” Fury said. “I’m proud of the fact that people universally say I ran an efficient court, where people got in and out in a reasonable time frame.”

He also pointed to the appeal rate from his small-claims decisions. According to Fury, fewer than one-half of 1% were appealed.

“That means only one in 200 small-claims litigants felt strongly enough that I didn’t rule in their favor that they took the time to appeal,” he said. “One in 200. That’s pretty good.”

Reducing the backlog required more than moving quickly through a crowded docket. Fury said his staff examined where cases were becoming stalled and developed practical ways to clear them. In one instance, the court reviewed old traffic cases involving officers who had died or no longer worked for the agencies that issued the citations, allowing cases that could no longer proceed to be set for dismissal.

The court also expanded the time devoted to hearings.

“We expanded the hours I was sitting on the bench,” Fury said. “I worked 10- and 12-hour days.”

Fury’s administrative experience continued after he left the bench. According to his campaign biography, he worked in the parks department under former Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, helping attract public and private grant funding for county park improvements.

He later managed operations at Ben Taub Hospital and served as operations project manager during the three-year reconstruction of its emergency center. The seven-stage project continued through the COVID-19 pandemic while the emergency center remained fully operational.

Fury said that project-management background taught him how to examine a large problem, divide it into manageable parts and establish goals that employees can work toward together. He plans to apply those lessons to the Precinct 5, Place 2 court.

“Building confidence and rapport with the staff, setting goals together, making them part of the process of overcoming the backlog and making them proud of giving good, friendly customer service,” Fury said. “It’s building a spirit of good service to the taxpayers.”

That service includes making court proceedings understandable to the people whose homes, finances or families may be affected by a ruling. Fury said litigants should leave the courtroom knowing that the judge listened to them, considered the facts and explained how the law applied.

His ability to conduct proceedings in Spanish can also help residents follow cases in which both parties are Spanish-speaking, particularly in a precinct with a substantial Spanish-speaking population.

“If both sides speak Spanish, I can conduct a trial in Spanish so that the person understands everything that’s going on,” Fury said. “I want them to understand and have confidence in the institutions in our country.”

That approach also guides Fury’s views on truancy. Texas now treats truancy as a civil matter, and school districts must take certain steps before referring a case to justice court. Once a family enters the courtroom, Fury wants to identify the circumstances keeping a student out of school and connect the family with useful resources.

“It’s approaching the family problem with compassion,” he said, “trying to find what resources could be brought to bear to overcome the problem, rather than trying to punish either the child or the parent for the nonattendance.”

Small-business owners are another important part of Fury’s campaign. The Harris County Justice Courts can hear civil disputes involving up to $20,000, offering individuals and businesses a local avenue for resolving unpaid bills, contract disputes and other financial disagreements.

“The economic backbone of west Harris County is small-business people,” Fury said. “Sadly, in today’s world, most small-business people occasionally run into a bump in the road.”

Fury said a business owner with a dispute under the jurisdictional limit can bring the matter before a neighborhood justice court without the expense and delay commonly associated with larger civil cases.

“They can come over to the JP court, pay less than $150 to file their case and have it served, come in and see the neighborhood justice of the peace within two months, have a fair and attentive hearing, and have justice served,” he said.

Fury enters the general election with endorsements from former Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap and former Precinct 5, Place 2 Justice of the Peace Jeff Williams. He believes his two previous terms on the bench give him the preparation needed to begin addressing the court’s workload immediately.

“I am the most experienced candidate in the race,” Fury said. “I have the decisive advantage of having had judicial experience, of having proven that I can manage a court with a huge docket, and I can hit the ground running and start to make this institution better for the people of Harris County Precinct 5 from day one.”

For Fury, returning to the bench would continue a career built around local public service.

“I love to serve the people of our community,” he said, “and I look forward to serving the people of our community by returning to the bench as a justice of the peace.”