In Harris County, Texas — the county that contains Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States — prosecutors dismissed 713 domestic violence charges last year under deals in which the defendant agreed to take a class, and in at least one case simply to donate to the Houston Food Bank, according to an investigation by ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK) published on October 31, 2026. The station's analysis of resolved cases found that 69 percent of all resolved domestic violence cases in the county last year were dismissed, and that some defendants were arrested again and again, took the class again and again, and still had each new charge dropped the same way. Every charge described in the investigation was an allegation that ended without a conviction; the defendants named in the reporting are entitled to the presumption of innocence on any case that remains pending.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

The mechanism is called an alternative resolution agreement. In 2025, six percent of all resolved domestic violence cases in Harris County ended that way, ABC13 found: prosecutors dismiss the charge in exchange for the defendant completing a course, most often an anger management class. Of the wider pool of dismissals last year, prosecutors said 26 percent were cases they could not prove, and another 14 percent were dropped at the request of the complaining witness. The remaining question the investigation puts to the Harris County District Attorney's Office is not whether cases get dismissed — they do, in large numbers, in every large county — but why the class deal is offered repeatedly to the same people after the previous class plainly did not stop the alleged behaviour.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

The case ABC13 put at the centre: four arrests, three classes, no convictions

The investigation's central example is Atamvir Singh, whose record ABC13 pieced together from court records. In 2012, records show, he was arrested for injury to a child; the charge was dismissed in exchange for Singh taking a parenting class. In 2017 he was charged with assaulting a family member, and in 2025 he was charged with continuous violence against his family; both of those cases were dismissed when he agreed to take anger management classes, ABC13 reported. Just months after the last class, he was charged with continuous family violence again. In May, ABC13 cameras watched Harris County sheriff's deputies lead Singh away in handcuffs after a lengthy standoff, when they came to serve a warrant for continuous family violence. That final charge was dismissed when Singh passed away this summer, the station reported. Across thirteen years and four cases, there were no convictions.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

Singh was not the only repeat name the station found. Shane Garrett had a family violence charge dismissed after he donated to the Houston Food Bank — a condition recorded in the court documents ABC13 reviewed — and was charged with assaulting a family member again just months later; the outcome of that newer case was not reported, and Garrett is presumed innocent of it. Another defendant, Cyera Hardeman, got her family violence charge dismissed after agreeing to take two classes: one for anger management and one for decision-making. The pattern the investigation documents is a system in which the same remedy — a short course — is prescribed a second and third time to people accused of returning to the same conduct.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

"It depends": the district attorney's answer

ABC13 put the question directly to District Attorney Sean Teare, the county's elected prosecutor. Asked whether a class is an appropriate punishment for someone who beats a spouse, Teare replied: "It, quite frankly, all depends. Each case is different." Asked how effective the classes are when his office keeps seeing repeat offences after the class was taken, he said: "It depends. Tragically, there are no crystal balls when it comes to prosecution at all, but especially in these complex cases like domestic violence and intimate partner violence." Teare said domestic violence cases are the most difficult his office prosecutes, and he pointed to the reason so many collapse: "We simply cannot make the prosecution, you know, if the complainant doesn't want to participate, if there's not a 911 call that could be admissible, if there aren't photographs of the injuries." His office's position, in other words, is that the alternative is often not a conviction but an outright dismissal with nothing at all.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

"It's the wrong class to take"

The sharpest criticism in the investigation comes from the people who work with victims. "It's the wrong class to take," said Amy Smith of the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council. Smith said the course prosecutors should require — and did require in some of the cases ABC13 reviewed — is a batterer's intervention program, which is built specifically around violence against an intimate partner. "Anger management is for your road rages; it's for your bar fights," Smith said. "It's how to manage your anger. But battering intervention is how to manage the violence against your intimate partner, which is a huge difference from how to manage your anger." She added: "Anger management's not the answer for domestic violence because it's not about anger. You skate through class like you did when you were in school, and if you're not learning anything, you're not learning anything."

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

What is actually taught in the classes is itself hard to inspect. ABC13 tried to obtain copies of the courses the district attorney's office says it gets through a company called National Online Training; both the office and the company declined to provide them. The station did obtain materials for an anger management class designed for substance abusers, in which course takers are told to monitor their anger with an "anger meter" and to form an anger control plan that includes taking a timeout and talking to a friend. The course also included a muscle relaxation exercise in which students were urged to "take a deep breath" and "release and exhale slowly." Whether materials like those can change the behaviour of a person accused of repeatedly assaulting a partner is the unanswered centre of the debate the investigation has opened.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

The other side: "Better to get something than nothing"

Longtime criminal defence attorney Jed Silverman gave ABC13 the counter-argument prosecutors themselves make informally: many of the cases being dismissed under these agreements would likely have been dropped either way, because the evidence or the complaining witness was not there. "It's better to get something, to get a person to take a class even if they're taking it over and over again, versus nothing at all," Silverman said. The history in the investigation supports the point that this is not one prosecutor's invention: even before Teare took office, from 2021 to 2023, two-thirds of all resolved domestic violence cases in Harris County were dismissed, and 14 percent of those dismissals were at the victim's request. The class deals sit inside a much larger, older pattern in which most family violence accusations in the county never reach a verdict at all.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK)

Why this matters beyond one county — and what happens next

Harris County is home to one of the largest South Asian and Punjabi communities in Texas, concentrated in and around Houston and Sugar Land, and family violence cases move through this same system for those families too — as complainants deciding whether to participate in a prosecution, and as defendants offered the class deal. The investigation's findings therefore describe the practical reality behind the law in the county where those cases are heard: a charge is most likely to end in dismissal, a repeat accusation is not by itself enough to close the class option, and everything turns on whether the complaining witness participates and whether evidence such as an admissible 911 call or photographs of injuries exists. ABC13 did not report any announced change of policy by the district attorney's office in response to its findings, and Teare defended the case-by-case approach on camera. The questions the investigation leaves open — whether repeat defendants should remain eligible for alternative resolution, and whether batterer's intervention should replace anger management as the standard course — now sit with the DA's office and, ultimately, with Harris County voters, to whom the elected district attorney answers.

Source: ABC13 Eyewitness News (KTRK); summary also reported by Park Telegraph