The Powder Keg

Prior to the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey, each court in the Harris County Criminal Justice Center held a docket every day of the work week.  These dockets were (obviously) held in normal courtrooms, where there were holdover cells for the incarcerated defendants.  Attorneys who were speaking with their "in custody" clients, did so through glass partitions.  If a defendant was brought out of the holdover into the courtroom, they were handcuffed.  If a defendant had acted with particular aggressiveness, they might find themselves in leg restraints before being allowed outside of the holdover.

After Hurricane Harvey rendered the CJC unusable (yet again), one of the biggest challenges facing the Harris County Criminal Justice System was determining how to get incarcerated inmates their day in court.  There were rules and regulations that had to be followed.  Locations had to be secure and there had to be adequate personnel to guard the inmates.  The Civil Courthouse was fine for defendants who were out on bond, but it was not equipped to handle inmates.  There are no holdover cells attached to a civil courtroom.

Ultimately, it was decided that the vast majority of the "in custody" cases would have to be held at the actual jail.  The female felony jail docket is held daily on the 4th floor of the Harris County Jail located at 1200 Baker Street.  The misdemeanor jail docket is held across the street in "Little Baker."  The felony dockets for incarcerated males are held in the basement of the Harris County Jail located at 701 N. San Jacinto.  While the female and misdemeanor dockets are generally pretty safe occasions, the felony male dockets are a completely different story.

The felony male dockets are a disaster waiting to happen, and lawyers who practice there got a small taste of that danger this morning.

To understand what happened today, one must understand the layout of the basement of 701 N. San Jacinto, as well as the procedures followed for each docket.  Each weekday, the 22 District Courts, as well as the Reintegration Court, take turns having a jail docket for male inmates with charges pending out of the respective courts.  Two courts will hold a docket in the morning and two will hold a docket in the afternoon.  Based on the normal cycle, this allows each court to have a jail docket every six business days.

In the basement, there are essentially four rooms used by the lawyers and court personnel.  Two of those rooms function as actual courtrooms, where lawyers can approach the judge, and defendants can be brought for pleas (or any other matter requiring judicial attention).  The third room, held in 701's infamous law library,  is where prosecutors bring their files and meet with the defense attorneys.  This place can look like Grand Central Station during a busy docket.

Attorney Vic Wisner, exercising in the Law Library.

The fourth room is where attorneys and their clients meet to discuss cases, and that's where things get dangerous.

The attorney-client meeting room holds roughly around thirty male inmates.  It is actually a converted "pod" with two tables placed inside of it so that inmates can do paperwork, if need be.  Around the perimeter of the room are plastic chairs for the inmates to sit in while they wait to talk to their attorneys.  The room is extremely overcrowded.

None of the inmates in the room are secured by handcuffs or leg restraints.  Although they are all told to sit down and wait for their attorneys to come speak with them, there are no physical restraints on them.  There is nothing there that would prevent them from getting up and walking across the room.

There is nothing there to prevent them from fighting with each other.

There is nothing there to prevent them from attacking one of the lawyers who enters the room.

The deputies who are in charge of securing the inmates, sit in chairs outside of the meeting room.  In short, it is a windowless room with one door for an entryway.  It is filled to capacity with inmates charged with felonies ranging from theft to drugs to sexual assault to murder.  And every day, civilian attorneys wade into this room, filled with inmates, with the hope that none of the inmates feel like attacking anyone.

The potential for something terrible happening is tremendous.  It only continues to operate under the optimistic belief that each and every one of the inmates will follow all of the rules and not lose their temper.

But, here's one thing you quickly realize when you become a defense attorney -- you often find yourself being the messenger of very bad news.  Whether it is telling the client what the evidence is against him or just conveying the plea bargain offer from the prosecutor, defense attorneys have the unpleasant duty of upsetting their clients on a daily basis.  The vast majority of those clients take the news in stride and understand that is how the System works.  

Others don't.  Some will become quite angry over the news they receive.  Some will lose their minds simply over the length of a reset.

Oh, and did I mention that a decent amount of the inmate population in the meeting room has some level of mental illness?

Today, a mentally ill inmate attacked Public Defender Danny Lacayo in the holdover.  Danny had just told his client that his case was going to be reset and placed a pen on the table for the client to sign his paperwork.  The client became very agitated and Danny quickly picked up the pen, moving it from his client's reach.  The client then punched Danny in the face.

Danilo "Danny" Lacayo

Fortunately, Danny is a pretty stout guy.  He stood up and walked out of the room before the situation escalated further.  He said the punch hurt, but mostly he was relieved that he had the wherewithal to move the pen. Ultimately, someone told the deputies outside the room what had happened and they removed the defendant from the meeting room.

The situation could have been far more tragic.

To my knowledge, this is the first physical assault on an attorney in the meeting room, but there have been several close calls.  Earlier this week, a male inmate began losing his temper with his female attorney.  She was able to escape the room before it turned physical.  Every lawyer that works a jail docket worries about what would happen if the situation truly got out of control.  

It will get out of control one day.  It isn't a matter of "if."  It's a matter of "when." The quarters are too close.  There are no safety protocols.  The jail is understaffed.  The inmates are angry.

The whole situation is a powder keg, waiting to explode.

Rethinking Indigent Defense

Tomorrow, the Indigent Defense Committee of the Board of Criminal District Court Judges are having an open meeting to discuss potential changes for "reforming appointed attorney fees."  This is huge news.  Mainly, because I had no idea that there was an Indigent Defense Committee of the Board of Criminal District Court Judges.

The meeting is at 2 p.m. in the Ceremonial Courtroom of the Civil Courthouse on the 17th floor.  Sadly, I will not be able to attend due to a prior commitment, but I did want to share a few thoughts that I had about the way things are currently running in a post-Harvey world.

First, a little background.

The way payment works for attorneys who represent indigent defendants depends on what degree of crime the indigent client is charged with.  Those attorneys representing defendants charged with State Jail and 3rd Degree Felonies get paid $125 for every court setting they appear for, and $40 an hour for all out of court work.  Second degree felony cases merit a $175 fee for court settings with a $60 an hour payment for out of court hours.  First degree felonies get $225 for a court setting and $85 for out of court hours.

The scuttlebutt is the the Indigent Defense Committee (IDC) is strongly leaning toward increasing the pay schedule for out of court hours, but eliminating the flat fee for court appearances.  That is not an unheard of proposition.  It is my understanding that Ft. Bend and Galveston counties do things this way, although I don't know if that is accurate because I don't handle appointed cases outside of Harris County.

My guess is that if this truly is the plan the IDC is looking at, it will meet with some resistance from those who take indigent appointments.  Appointed attorneys tend to like having those court settings because they obviously give larger payouts for less work.  For instance, an attorney can walk into a courtroom on a 3rd degree case, talk briefly with the prosecutor, sign a reset and leave in 20 minutes or less.  Under the current schedule, he or she would make $125.  If he or she was being paid on the hourly scale (at the current rate), he's get paid less than $20.

Just because the appointed attorneys won't be fans of the hourly basis, however, doesn't mean that it is necessarily a bad idea -- especially when it comes to "in custody" cases under the flood conditions.

Right now, things are getting relatively back to normal when it comes those Defendants who are out on bond.  Courts are rescheduling them at intervals similar to those before the flood.  Unfortunately, things are far from normal when it comes to the in custody cases.  Due to safety concerns, all court appearances for "in custody" defendants must be held at the jails.  The males have their appearances at the 701 N. San Jacinto facility while the females are at 1200 Baker Street.

To describe these "jail dockets" as chaotic is a massive understatement.  Due to jail personnel and space constraints, only two courts at a time may operate a jail docket.  Two have a morning shift and two have an afternoon shift.  To make matters utterly confusing, these dockets rotate every several days, so there is no set day of the week when an attorneys knows a certain court will be holding docket. 

The dockets are crowded.  The attorneys typically pool in the infamous Law Liberrry Library, down the hall from the rooms being used as "courtrooms.  In the Library, defense attorneys discuss the cases with prosecutors before stepping out and asking one of the bailiffs to bring an inmate to the courtroom for discussion.  Understandably, there is a backlog.  Only a handful of defendants can be brought out of the holding cells at a time, and the attorneys are not allowed to speak to them anywhere other than the makeshift "courtroom."   Some attorneys wait for hours to talk to their clients.

Attorney Vic Wisner works his triceps in the Law Library while waiting to 

talk to his client.  NOTE:  This was taken before the bookshelves were all 

covered with tarps due to a mold outbreak.

In my opinion, the idea of having regular dockets for in custody defendants at the jail is a foolish waste of time, unless there is a strong indication that a case is going to plead out.  Standing around, waiting to talk to a client, only to reset him is not a productive use of time, nor space.  Unfortunately, due to the bigger payout of a setting fee, attorneys who represent indigent defendants have no financial incentive to reschedule these settings.  Regardless of whether or not anything is accomplished, a setting fee is a setting fee -- even if you are just signing a reset.

If the IDC does change to the hourly fee structure, attorneys representing indigent defendants are more likely to reschedule these non-productive settings, because they will make the same amount of money by working on the case outside of the courtroom.  They can do a jail visit, some legal research, witness interviews, or something that might actually help resolve the case.  Unless a defendant needs to see a judge, there is almost no reason to have them at these jail dockets.

One suggestion, that I do have is that the District Courts have actual settings for these in custody defendants in the courtrooms without the Defendants being there.  Judge Velasquez recently scheduled one of my in custody cases on her docket in the 183rd District Court without having my client present and it was extremely productive.  It was not a hectic pace.  I actually had a chance to speak to the prosecutor on my case and go over some evidence that I wanted him to look at.  He had the time to make note of what I showed him and write down some specific discovery requests I had.  

I relayed everything that happened in court to my client later that day, and he was happy to hear about it.  That meeting with the prosecutor never could have happened in one of the jail dockets.  I wish more courts would do this.  If the meeting results in an agreement that resolves the case, it can be set on the next available plea docket.

Back to the fee schedule topic, I do believe that the hourly system will encourage attorneys to do more work out of court to resolve their cases.  It will also discourage attorneys from taking on too many cases for the sole purpose of increasing the number of their appearance fees.

But that may also be a double-edged sword.  

Attorneys who no longer have a financial incentive to increase their court appearances will spend more time in the office, working on the cases that they already have.  As a result, I predict that attorneys will put their names in for new appointments less frequently.  If the money paid for working from the comfort of my office is the same as going to that God-forsaken jail docket, I know which one I would choose.

So, basically, I see pros and cons to changing the payment system.

But, I do hope that the powers that be will consider doing more cases like the 183rd.

Jury Assembly Room, We Hardly Knew Ye

I was kind of surprised to read that the powers that be in Harris County have already decided that the (relatively new) Harris County Jury Assembly Room cannot be salvaged.

Don't get me wrong, I had no doubt that the building got severely damaged in the flooding from Hurricane Harvey.  The geniuses that decided to put a major facility underground in an area that flooded during Tropical Storm Allison basically drew up the plans for the State's largest in-ground jacuzzi. 

I'm not surprised at all to learn that the building is a total loss.  I'm just surprised that Harris County is acknowledging the building's lack of salvageability so quickly -- throwing away a 6-year-old structure that cost $13 million is a bitter pill to swallow. 

My hope is that while the County is in such an "admitting-we-screwed-up" mood, they might turn their attention to the embattled Harris County Criminal Justice Center.   Under optimal conditions, the building is terrible -- narrow hallways leading to elevators that sporadically work.  No escalators or public stairwells.  It was shut down for a year after Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 after only being occupied since November 1999.  

But the damage to the building from Allison appears to be nothing compared to what happened in the CJC during Harvey.  Not only did it flood, apparently there was some mechanism in place that caused pipes to supercool quickly and subsequently burst, leaving raw sewage throughout the building across multiple floors.  

Now, I'm not an architect or builder.  Maybe there is some reason why buildings need mechanisms to supercool things.  I don't know what that reason might be, unless it is to freeze Rebel Scum in carbonite before having Boba Fett transport them to Jabba the Hutt.

Whatever the reason, the CJC is now, literally, a shit show.  And it's been a shit show since the day it was opened.

It's time to start over.  Harris County should take some notes from the Ft. Bend Criminal Justice Center and create a shorter and wider courthouse that is more conducive to having escalators and stairways for people to reach the courts.  The elevator system at Harris County CJC is grossly inefficient and dangerous.  Angry (and sometimes violent) people are scrambling into small places to make it to court on time.  It is truly astounding to me that no one has ever been beaten to death one morning.  

The CJC needs to be completely scrapped and started over.  Demolish the damn thing and spread the new construction across the site of 1201 Franklin and 1301 Franklin (the old jail).  Hell, if you hold a $100-a-ticket raffle for attorneys to see who gets to press the demolition button on the CJC, you might be able to pay for the whole thing outright.  There is nobody that comes into that building, from prosecutor to judge to defendant, that doesn't hate it.  

If Harris County can justify scrapping the Jury Assembly Room after six years, then there is no excuse for not razing that 18-year-old hell hole of the CJC.

Pandemonium

I have to admit that when the judges said in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey that they would have the courts up and running by September 11th, I was skeptical.  With the CJC wiped out (yet again) by Mother Nature, confusion reigned.  Prosecutors had no idea where their offices were going to be, nor did the Public Defenders.  Additionally, thirty-eight different courts, a Grand Jury meeting place, Pre-Trial services, and a portion of the District Clerk's Office needed to be relocated as well.  My skepticism at getting everything up and going in under two weeks wasn't an insult towards the Powers That Be -- it was just an honest assessment of the task ahead of them.

Lo and behold, I was wrong and the Courts did actually start back up again by September 11th. 

Sort of.

Although dockets are running, things are far from normal.  Instead of all the courts being held in one central location, dockets are spread across five different buildings.  The sixteen County (misdemeanor) Courts are now at the old Family Law Center.  There are two courts assigned to each available courtroom -- one runs a morning docket starting at 8:30 and the other begins an afternoon docket at 12:30.  

I had my first post-Harvey misdemeanor case scheduled this afternoon, only to find that my client's case had been reset until late October unbeknownst to me.  The coordinator (who is awesome and I am by no means complaining about) said that they had strict numbers that they were allowed to have on each docket and they were doing the best they could.  They were having to reset so many cases that they weren't able to notify everyone involved.  We discussed the difficulty of notifying Defendants out on the unsecured bonds.

Fortunately, the prosecutor assigned to the court was still willing to talk to me about the case (even though it wasn't on the docket) and we worked out a tentative agreement.  It actually ended up being a pretty productive non-setting.

Other than the reset mix-up, the visit to Misdemeanor Land was pretty pleasant, all things considered.  The building wasn't terribly congested and several people utilized the stairs rather than wait on elevators.  The courtrooms weren't crowded, and everybody seemed to be in fairly good spirits.

The felony side of things wasn't quite as cheery.

The twenty-two Felony District Courts are spread across four buildings.  Twenty of the District Courts are housed in the Civil Court Building at 201 Caroline, where they are assigned two courts to a courtroom.  The two remaining District Courts (the 182nd and the 351st) are going to be housed in the Juvenile Justice Center beginning next week.  It seems there is a little bit of a mold issue to be cleaned up before they can begin.

The situation at the Civil Courts building is, um, not ideal.  My friend and fellow defense attorney, Brian Roberts, wrote his observations on it yesterday.  Coincidentally, Brian and I arrived for court this morning at the same time.  Taking the elevator in the county garage to the basement, we ran into a group of people waiting to go inside.  It seems that somebody had pulled the fire alarm and the Constables weren't allowing anyone into the building until everything was clear.

It was just like being back in the CJC!

In front of the Civil Building, several of the Civil Judges were handing out guides to which courtrooms were on certain floors.  It was a nice gesture, not to mention a decent way to get out and meet some future voters!

Inside the Civil Building, there are two sets of elevators.  One runs to the 8th Floor from the Basement and 1st Floor.  The other set runs to the 9th floor and above.  Apparently, the latter set only has two functioning elevators, which has led to a tremendous amount of congestion.

The felony dockets at the Civil Building are only for Defendants who are out on bond, because those courtrooms don't have jail holdovers for inmates.  With each courtroom housing two courts, the rooms are crowded and the hallways are packed with people who couldn't find seating inside.  Tension are high.   Places to sit down and talk with your client are hard to find.  Lengthy resets are being made to alleviate congestion, which can royally tick off some clients.  Yesterday, even two judges reportedly got into a confrontation with each other over the limited space available.

The vast majority of cases are just being reset down the road to hopefully calmer times.

If things at the Civil Building weren't bad enough for Defendants on bond, the situation for incarcerated Defendants is much worse.  Inmates in the Harris County Jail are having their court appearances in jail facilities -- one for female prisoners and a separate one for males.   The dockets are overcrowded. The chance of having a private conversation between attorney and client is non-existent.

Under normal circumstances, a Criminal District Court has somewhere around twenty to thirty inmates per docket, five days a week.  Now, due to the overcrowding, each of the 22 District Courts has been allotted one day of the week to hold a "jail docket."  Attorneys are being strongly encouraged to meet with their clients outside of court proceedings and to move the cases off the docket unless the case is likely to be resolved in court.  Given the overcrowding situation, that's a more than reasonable request.  Bringing a Defendant to court just to have him or her sign a reset and leave isn't going to help anything.

Today, the City of Houston shut off water to the jail, which, in return, caused the jail to cancel morning dockets for two of the courts.  I suppose they will just have to wait until next week.

So, at the moment, life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center is pandemonium.  We've all been cast into multiple other buildings in the surrounding area and there is confusion and chaos across the board.  Prosecutors are commuting in from all over the county.  Defense attorneys are running from building to building, waiting on elevator after elevator, trying to make sure all of their clients are taken care of.

Despite all of this, the general attitude of regulars at the courthouse seems to be frustrated bemusement.  I think everyone involved has some level of understanding of the problems we are all facing.  Judge, Prosecutor, Defense Attorney, Coordinator or otherwise, people are doing their best to be patient with each other.   As we see people that we haven't seen since before Harvey made landfall, our first question to each other is to ask how one another fared in the flood.

All in all, I would describe the State of the Harris County Criminal Justice System like an emergency room.  Everyone is working to triage the cases.  Defendants out on bond are important, but they currently have their freedom.  Those in custody are taking the highest priority at the moment.  As Mark Bennett pointed out in this post, not even a natural disaster gets to infringe upon the Rights of the Accused.

That's the view as of Day Two.  Right now, things are disorganized, aggravating and sloppy.

But the Justice System is up and running.  It will get better in the days and weeks to come.

Justice Displaced

As most of the regulars strongly suspected, we are getting word that the Harris County Criminal Justice Building may be shut down for up to a year due to damage sustained from Hurricane Harvey.  As I wrote in my last post, this was almost exactly what happened in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

As this is being written, prosecutors are packing up their personal effects from their offices, as we did during Allison.  This will likely be followed with trustees from the Harris County Jail and D.A. personnel boxing up and moving the files, computers, and other government property from the Office.  The same will have to be done for the PD's Office, the Courts and the Clerk's offices.  In 2001, I found myself loading and unloading boxes out of big panel vans, side by side with inmates.  In all actuality, it was kind of fun.

But things are much different than sixteen years ago. In May of 2001, the D.A.'s Office moved back to 201 Fannin (where we had all moved from in November of 1999).   I'm not sure what the status of that building is, so I don't know if it is a possible temporary shelter for the displaced prosecutors or not.  It is my understanding that the District Attorney's Office is currently operating out of the Harris County Law Library on the upper floors of the old jury assembly building.

In 2001, the Courts all relocated back to 301 San Jacinto.  All things considered, it was a fairly smooth move.  Some courts were doubled up into the same room, but it wasn't bad.  The atmosphere was relaxed and there was a camaraderie between prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, and sometimes, even the Defendants.

But now, 301 San Jacinto holds the Juvenile Justice Center -- the heavily damaged Juvenile Justice Center.  As of this writing, it doesn't look like that particular structure provides a feasible solution for housing 22 District Courts and 16 County Courts.  There have been rumblings of potentially having some trials in the nice and shiny Civil Courts building, but that is said to be meeting heavy resistance from the Civil Court Judges.  If true, I can't say that I blame them.

Holding criminal dockets (and trials) in buildings not designed for criminal cases causes problems with security.  There are no jail holdovers for in-custody Defendants, which creates issues of how to keep everyone safe and secure.  Problems abound.  Despite that, there is an urgent need to get the Courts back to some semblance of normal as soon as possible -- especially for cases where there are people incarcerated and awaiting trial.  Many have already been in custody for months (if not over a year), awaiting their trials.  Last Monday (during the storm), I had originally been scheduled for trial on a case from April of 2016.  That case (and many more like it) isn't getting any younger.

As of this writing, we have been told that dockets are tentatively scheduled to resume on Monday, September 11th.  I'll believe that when I see it.

As I see it, there are two potential positives that can come out of the days to come.

The first is an opportunity to make some meaningful improvements to the structure of the CJC.  We bypassed this opportunity in the aftermath of Allison, and I hope we don't do so again.  There are things that can be done that are short of a full-blown do-over.  Courts can be moved to lower floors.  Accessible stairwells can be made between floors.  I don't know that anything could have been done to stop the damage to the CJC done by Hurricane Harvey, but I do think things can be done to help the day-to-day disasters that we deal with in that building under even the best of circumstances.

The second positive is the bonding experience that we are all about to have (whether we like it or not).  Things are about to get more casual, and thus more real around whatever place ends up holding our courts.  That's a good thing.  I can promise that every prosecutor, judge, defense attorney, clerk, coordinator, court reporter, and bailiff who was around during Allison can tell a host of stories of the year during "flood conditions."  They weren't always pleasant experiences, but they created the memories that each of us will have when we finally wrap up our careers.

Now those stories that began with "During Allison . . ." are going to start with "During Harvey . . ."  The days, weeks, and months ahead are not going to always be pleasant.  We'll get through them, because (as my Dad always told me) "you've just got to."

When it is all said and done (and you're back in your regular office and court), you'll be proud to be a survivor of the experience.

Shades of Disasters Past

If you are reading this, I'm hoping that means that you rode out Hurricane Harvey okay.  I've lived in Houston since 1996 and I'm speechless at the sadness, devastation, heroism, and sense of community that I've seen unfolding over the past several days.  This city and county never cease to amaze me.

My family and I made it through (thus far) with no flooding and minimal damage.  I hope the same is true for you and your families.  My heart and prayers go out to those who have lost so much.

Having gone through both Tropical Storm Allison and Hurricane Ike during my years as a prosecutor, I've been seeing very similar reports coming out of the CJC over the past several days.  As many of you may remember, during Allison, the brand new CJC proved to be absolutely useless during a flood.  Water filled the basement and elevator shafts, rendering the building unusable for almost a year.   Some modifications were made, and the building did substantially better during Ike.  There was an issue of sewage backup that shut it down for a week or so, but nothing like during Allison.  Flood gates had been installed, and they did their job.

But neither Allison nor Ike brought the water that Hurricane Harvey has.

Chief prosecutors Pat Stayton and Hans "Seersucker" Nielsen have been two of the staff manning Intake for the Harris County District Attorney's Office since Friday morning and both have been posting updates about the condition of the building.  They've been there for going on well past 72 hours, as of this writing.  They've given me permission to use their photos in this post.

The front doors of the CJC.

According to reports from the CJC, the floodgates at the doorways worked at first, but then the sewage started coming up from toilets, just like they did during Ike.  Once that happened, the building had to be evacuated across the street to the Juvenile Justice Center.  They did this by creating a rope line that everyone had to use to guide them and hold onto.

Intake staff evacuating the building.

Back during Allison, the Juvenile Justice Center was the (more or less abandoned) old Criminal Courthouse.  During the yearlong displacement, the Courts moved back there, while the D.A.'s Office moved into its old building at 201 Fannin.  Things have changed since then.  Now, the building is completely occupied by the Juvenile Justice System and courts.  There is no room to move over 22 District Courts and 16 County Courts.  

To make matters worse, the roof apparently just collapsed at the Juvenile Justice Building, flooding courtrooms and making them unusable.

A Juvenile Justice Courtroom

District Clerk Chris Daniel has announced that there will be no jury panels or court settings this week, which is a good thing.  As it currently stands, there does not appear to be any courtrooms to hold court in.  

The cleanup at both buildings will most likely take months.  I've heard that power is still on at the CJC and that may be the only positive news I've heard.  If the electricity is still running, perhaps that will make cleanup faster. But I've also heard that the elevator shafts are filled with water on the lower floors, and there is no telling what the tunnel system and jury assembly looks like.  

I have a strong feeling that it is going to take quite some time to get the Criminal Justice System back to normal in Harris County.   New court dates will have to be figured out for clients on bond.  If you are a person currently out on bond, call your lawyer for information about when you need to come to court again.  For the time being, everything is up in the air.

Stay safe, everyone.