Patricia R. Lykos took the oath of Office as Harris County District Attorney on January 1, 2009. She is the first woman to hold the position since it was created more than 170 years ago.

Lykos serves Houston, Texas and the surrounding area as the chief law enforcement official for a county of approximately 1,800 square miles and almost 4 million residents, a greater population than 24 U.S. states. She oversees an annual budget of about $56 million and a staff of approximately 500 employees including assistant district attorneys, investigators, and support personnel.

DA Lykos has dedicated her career to the pursuit of justice. She began as a Houston police officer, working her way through graduation at the University of Houston and South Texas College of Law. She entered private practice and went on to be elected to County Court and State District Criminal Court judgeships. She presided over more than 20,000 cases in her judicial career.

Lykos has served the community as a senior district judge, special assignments judge, and Director of Special Projects for the County Judge of Harris County. She is the former chief judge of the Harris County Criminal District Courts. She has taught in programs for the Texas Center for the Judiciary, the American Bar Association, the State Bar of Texas, and as an adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law. She has been named a Paul Harris Fellow, an American Bar Foundation Fellow, and a Houston Bar Association Fellow.

Lykos has launched several unique initiatives, including an elite Cold Case Unit that has successfully hunted down over 100 fugitives—including 25 murder and capital murder defendants—and returned them to Harris County to face justice. Her newly-created Child Exploitation Section works on the cutting-edge of today’s technology, and successfully brought the first charges ever against a sexual predator of using an Internet-connecting gaming device to solicit an underage victim.

She created, for the first time in Harris County, a Mental Health Section to provide community-based counseling and assistance for qualified, non-violent offenders, the first Animal Cruelty Section in the state of Texas, a Victims’ Rights Division to streamline information and restitution requests, a Post Conviction Review Section to aggressively investigate credible claims of innocence, diversion programs for non-violent first offender juveniles and the DIVERT project to reduce DWI recidivism.

Lykos has also been recognized for her work upgrading the Harris County District Attorney’s Office technology. Harris County leads the way with case management, disaster recovery systems and a “DA’s Most Wanted” alerting the public to dangerous fugitives.

In addition to numerous appearances on television news during her career, Judge Lykos has appeared on the national programs Nightline, 48 Hours, and Crime in America.