A federal judge in the Southern District of Texas has hit the City of Houston with discovery sanctions in a lawsuit accusing it of failure to provide timely probable cause hearings for warrantless arrestees.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt found that the city intentionally destroyed evidence and made deliberate mischaracterizations to the court. He ruled that the putative class, consisting of thousands of individuals formerly detained in the city jail, is now entitled to an adverse inference at trial.