Tiffany Burks will be the first Black district attorney in the history of Tarrant County, Texas. She beat Republican incumbent Phil Sorrells on Tuesday with 56.4% of the vote to his 43.6%, a rematch she had lost four years ago by 6.5 points.
The office decides who gets charged, who gets offered a plea and who sits in the county jail awaiting trial, in a county that includes Fort Worth. For the Black residents who live there, it is the most consequential job on the ballot that most voters never think about, and it has never been held by someone who looks like them.
Burks, 55, grew up in Oak Cliff in Dallas. She spent at least 25 years as a prosecutor in Tarrant and Fort Bend counties, including as a longtime homicide prosecutor and deputy criminal division chief at the very office she will now run. She takes over in January.
Her campaign leaned on the jail. Burks cited more than 80 deaths in the Tarrant County jail since 2017 and $4.3 million in settlements from custody death lawsuits since 2022, and said the office suffers from “a deficit in leadership.” She said she wants “a culture of mentorship” in the DA’s office and a new major crimes unit, and that “the people at the top in leadership will definitely change.”
Sorrells, a former criminal court judge from Lubbock, ran on his record and on falling violent crime. Murder filings fell from 150 cases in 2025 to 73 by mid-September 2026, his campaign pointed out. That is a real number and voters heard it. They chose the challenger anyway. A DA who prosecutes homicides well still answers for what happens inside the jail his office works alongside, and Burks made that the question.
The win was one piece of a county-wide sweep. Democrat Alisa Simmons unseated County Judge Tim O’Hare and will be the first Democrat in that job since 1986. Democrats took three of four contested seats on the Commissioners Court for a 4-1 majority, and also unseated Republicans in the district clerk and county clerk races. Republicans had redrawn the commissioners’ precincts in 2025 to lock in their own 4-1 edge. “We got the 4-1 court,” county Democratic chair Allison Campolo said, “just not in the direction [Republicans] wanted.”
A new DA does not fix a jail by winning an election. The sheriff, Republican Bill Waybourn, runs it, and he was not on the ballot. What Burks controls is whether deaths in custody are investigated as crimes, whether officers are held to the same charging standard as everyone else, and who her office decides to prosecute in the first place. Black Tarrant County voters just gave her that power. They should expect her to use it on the jail first, and the date to watch is January, when she is sworn in.
Have your say