Tarrant County voters will see a familiar pairing in the race for district attorney when early voting opens Monday: Republican incumbent Phil Sorrells against Democrat Tiffany Burks, the same two candidates who met in 2022.
Sorrells took office in January 2023 after winning that race with 309,730 votes to Burks' 272,066, according to county results cited by the Fort Worth Report.
The district attorney is elected countywide to a four-year term, serves as the county's chief prosecutor in cases from misdemeanors to felonies, and earns about $229,000 a year, the Fort Worth Report and KERA reported in a profile of the race published this week.
The challenger
Burks, 55, grew up in Oak Cliff and has spent nearly three decades as a criminal attorney, at least 25 years of it as a prosecutor in Tarrant and Fort Bend counties. She now leads the criminal division at the Fort Worth firm Varghese Summersett.
She told the outlets she is running again because she believes the office needs more transparency and accountability in its leadership and in how it does its work. "People are in positions of status and power. And it feels like they have forgotten what they are there to do," she said, describing what she called "a deficit in leadership."
Burks pointed to deaths in the Tarrant County Jail as an example. The report counts more than 80 deaths in jail custody since 2017, including at least six this year. Burks also criticized the roughly $4.3 million the county has paid since 2022 to settle lawsuits over jail deaths.
If elected, she said, she would restructure the office to help keep victims safe and meet with police chiefs across the county to go over her policies.
