Who Is Judge Stephanie R. Boyd?
Judge Stephanie R. Boyd is the elected judge of the 187th Criminal District Court in Bexar County, Texas — a felony trial court in San Antonio. She won the seat in November 2018, took the bench in January 2019, and won a second term in 2022. She became widely known outside Texas for livestreaming her daily docket on the court’s YouTube channel, a practice that drew a formal public warning from the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct on June 3, 2026. She lost the March 2026 Democratic primary, and her term ends December 31, 2026.
That paragraph answers the question most people arrive with. What follows is the part that search results usually get wrong.
If you have typed her name into Google recently, you have probably run into three different versions of this story. One version says she was fired. Another says she is under criminal investigation. A third, generated by low-quality celebrity-profile sites, claims she is 35 years old, graduated from Princeton, went to Harvard Law, and is worth $2 million. None of that holds up against the actual record, and some of it is not even close.
This profile works from primary documents where they exist: the commission’s June 2026 sanction, the Bexar County canvassed election returns, the county’s own court directory, her campaign and candidate filings, and contemporaneous reporting from KSAT, the San Antonio Report, the Austin American-Statesman, and the ABA Journal. Where the record is silent — and on several of the most-searched personal questions, it genuinely is — this article says so rather than filling the gap with invention.
Quick Profile: Judge Stephanie Boyd at a Glance
Every line below comes from an official record, her own candidate filings, or named reporting. Anything that could not be confirmed is marked as such instead of guessed.
| Detail | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Full name | Stephanie R. Boyd (styled “Hon. Stephanie R. Boyd”) |
| Current position | Judge, 187th Criminal District Court, Bexar County, Texas |
| City | San Antonio |
| Court type | Felony criminal trial court (district court), established 1969 |
| First elected | November 2018; took office January 2019 |
| Re-elected | 2022 |
| Current term ends | December 31, 2026 |
| Political party | Democrat |
| Birthplace | Shreveport, Louisiana |
| Age | 58, per her February 2026 San Antonio Report candidate questionnaire — exact date of birth not published |
| Law school | St. Mary’s University School of Law, J.D. 1997 |
| Other degrees | B.A. in political science; M.B.A. (institutions not specified in her filings) |
| Before the bench | Criminal defense practice from 1997; first-chair prosecutor, Bexar County DA’s Special Crimes Unit, from 2015 |
| Judicial discipline | Public Warning, Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct, June 3, 2026 (CJC Nos. 24-0058 and 26-0278) |
| 2026 primary result | Lost to Stephanie Franco, March 3, 2026 |
| Marital status / children | Not documented in any official or news source reviewed |
| Net worth | No verified figure exists; see the section on salary below |
Early Life and Louisiana Roots
Boyd grew up in Louisiana, not Texas. She was born in Shreveport and, by her own account, baptized in a creek at New Zion Baptist Church in Grand Cane, a small community in DeSoto Parish about forty minutes south of the city. In a 2024 podcast interview she described being raised by a grandmother and mother who pushed history, work, and community service hard enough that she took her first job at twelve, selling Christmas cards door to door.
San Antonio was an accident of law school that turned permanent. She came for St. Mary’s and, as she tells it, friends talked her into staying.
How old is Judge Stephanie Boyd?
This one deserves a careful answer, because the internet is full of confident wrong numbers.
The only attributable figure comes from the candidate questionnaire published by the San Antonio Report ahead of the March 2026 primary, which lists her as 58 years old. That questionnaire was published in February 2026, which places her birth year somewhere around 1967 or 1968. Her exact date of birth has not been published by any official source, and neither has her height — a detail that appears in search suggestions only because aggregator sites pad judge profiles with celebrity-style data fields.
If you have seen a site claiming she is 35, or that she was born in 1975, those numbers were generated, not reported. The same pages tend to also claim Ivy League degrees she does not hold.
Education and the Road to the Bench
Boyd earned a J.D. from St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio in 1997. Her own campaign materials also list a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in business administration, though she has not publicly named the institutions for either. While in law school she worked as a professor’s research assistant on death penalty enforcement — early exposure to the kind of capital-adjacent criminal work that later filled her docket.
The career that followed ran through both sides of a criminal courtroom, which is less common than it sounds for a Texas felony judge.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1997 | J.D., St. Mary’s University School of Law; opens a solo criminal defense practice |
| 1997–2015 | Private practice — adult and juvenile defendants, plus representation of children in abuse and neglect cases |
| 2015 | Joins the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office as first-chair prosecutor, Special Crimes Unit (child abuse and domestic violence) |
| Nov. 2018 | Elected judge of the 187th District Court |
| Jan. 2019 | Sworn in; reported to be the court’s first Black judge and first woman to preside over it |
| 2020 | Begins livestreaming proceedings during the pandemic; receives the Bexar County Pioneer Award |
| 2022 | Re-elected to a second four-year term |
| Nov. 2023 | Visiting judge grants recusals in three felony cases over the livestream |
| 2024 | Receives San Antonio Black Lawyers Association Legend Award and two other community honors |
| Mar. 3, 2026 | Loses the Democratic primary to Stephanie Franco |
| June 3, 2026 | Issued a Public Warning by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct |
| 2026 | Scheduled for induction into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame |
| Dec. 31, 2026 | Current term expires |
One discrepancy is worth flagging rather than smoothing over. At least one legal-data aggregator states that Boyd began her career as an assistant district attorney straight out of law school, before moving into private practice. Her own candidate filings describe the opposite sequence: private practice beginning in 1997, with the DA’s office coming in 2015. Her filings are the more direct source, and this article follows them, but a reader researching her early career should know the two accounts exist.
Alongside the bench, she has taught trial advocacy, appellate advocacy, and campaign and election law at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and she has served as president of the San Antonio Black Lawyers Association. She is a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation, a member of the Order of Barristers, and has sat on the boards of SA100 and the literary nonprofit Gemini Ink.
About the “sorority” question
Searches for a Judge Stephanie Boyd sorority affiliation turn up constantly, and the likely source of the confusion is identifiable. Her biography lists membership in Pi Sigma Alpha, which is a political science honor society — not a Greek-letter social sorority. No public source reviewed for this article confirms membership in Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, or any other National Pan-Hellenic Council organization. She may well be a member of one; the point is simply that no document says so, and the honor society is not the same thing.
What the 187th District Court Actually Does
A lot of search traffic around this judge comes from people who watched a hearing on YouTube and have no idea what kind of court they were looking at. Here is the short version.
Texas district courts are the state’s general-jurisdiction trial courts. In large urban counties they specialize, and Bexar County runs a bank of criminal district courts that handle felonies only. The 187th is one of them. It was created in 1969 and sits in the Bexar County Justice Center in downtown San Antonio.
What lands on that docket:
- Felony indictments — murder, aggravated robbery, aggravated assault, sexual offenses, serious drug cases
- Plea hearings, where the large majority of felony cases actually resolve
- Jury trials and bench trials
- Probation revocation and adjudication hearings
- Sentencing, including deferred adjudication and community supervision terms
Boyd has also presided over a mental health court docket, a specialty program that diverts defendants with serious mental illness into treatment-based supervision rather than straight incarceration.
District judges in Texas are elected to four-year terms in partisan elections. That single fact explains more about this story than any other: it is why a primary in March could end a judicial career in December, and why a judge’s YouTube channel became a campaign issue rather than purely an ethics question.
One more piece of structure matters for the controversies that follow. Appeals from Bexar County felony convictions go to the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio, and administrative matters such as motions to recuse a judge are decided not by that judge but by a regional presiding judge or a visiting judge assigned for that purpose. Both of those mechanisms show up later in this story.
Key takeaway: The 187th is a working felony court, not a televised arbitration show. Everything that happened on camera happened in a real criminal case with real sentencing exposure.
The Judge Boyd YouTube Channel: How a Felony Docket Found an Audience
The channel started the way a lot of courtroom technology did — as a pandemic workaround. Texas courts needed a way to keep proceedings open to the public while the building was restricted, and the state’s Office of Court Administration provided YouTube channels to courts for exactly that purpose. Plenty of Texas judges got one. Most used it as a camera pointed at a room. The Judge Stephanie Boyd official YouTube Channel.
Boyd did something different, and that difference is the whole story.
She left the stream running on a regular daily schedule, built a following, and — critically — left the live comments open while active criminal cases were being heard. By November 2023 the channel had passed 14,600 subscribers. Defendants standing for plea or revocation were visible to an audience that could type about them in real time.
She has been consistent about why. Her position, stated across interviews and in her campaign materials, is that Texas courtrooms are legally open to the public, that these are elected positions, and that people are entitled to see what happens inside them. It is a defensible argument on its face. Courtroom transparency is a real value, and nothing about a public gallery is new.
The complication is that a physical gallery and a comment section are not the same instrument. A gallery cannot heckle a defendant in writing while the judge is deciding his sentence.
Why clips of her hearings are everywhere
If you found this judge through a short video with a dramatic title, you probably did not find her on her own channel. A cottage industry of reaction and compilation channels re-uploads Bexar County hearings under packaged headlines — the taunting defendant, the reality check, the moment the judge’s tone changes. Those edits travel far beyond the original stream and strip out the procedural context that makes a hearing comprehensible.
That matters for research, because a number of the “facts” circulating about Judge Boyd — including the much-searched “Judge Boyd wink” — trace back to clip titles and thumbnails rather than to anything in the court record or in reporting. No official document or credible news account reviewed here describes a wink incident involving Judge Boyd. It appears to be an artifact of third-party video packaging, not an event with a paper trail.
Docket management and the backlog claim
Her campaign materials credit her with significantly reducing the 187th’s case backlog, and daily coverage of her docket does show a court moving volume — multiple pleas, deferred adjudications, probation modifications, and resets in a single morning session. That said, “significantly reduced the backlog” is a campaign claim, not an audited statistic. Readers who want to test it should go to the Office of Court Administration’s court-level activity reports rather than take either a campaign site or a critic at their word.
2023: When the Channel Cost Her Three Cases
The first formal consequence arrived almost three years before the commission acted, and it came from inside the courthouse.
On November 30, 2023, KSAT Investigates reported that visiting Judge Sid Harle had granted motions to recuse Boyd’s court from three felony cases: one charge of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury, and two indecency with a child cases. The reason given was the livestream. Defense attorneys had complained that commenters on the channel were posting disparaging remarks about their clients and about them.
A recusal is worth defining, because people confuse it with discipline. When a judge is recused, the case moves to another court. It is a ruling about whether this particular judge should hear this particular matter. It is not a finding that she did anything wrong, and it carries no sanction.
Three recusals in one month over the same cause, though, is a signal — and it was granted by another judge, which makes it something more than an attorney’s complaint.
The Villamil hearing
The case that generated the original complaint was a plea hearing on July 6, 2023 involving defendant Wilberth Villamil, charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child. The State and the defense had negotiated a 15-year sentence, and prosecutors explained on the record that the agreement was structured to spare the victim’s family a trial.
More than 8,500 people were watching the stream. The comments turned hostile toward Villamil. Boyd then questioned whether she should accept the negotiated deal at all and indicated the court would take 20 years rather than 15.
The case did not stay in her court. It was transferred, and Villamil was ultimately sentenced elsewhere to the original 15 years the parties had negotiated in the first place.
That sequence became the first of the four findings in the commission’s 2026 order, and it is the clearest illustration of what critics meant when they said an audience had entered the room.
The June 2026 Public Warning: What the Commission Actually Found
On June 3, 2026, the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct issued a Public Warning to Judge Stephanie R. Boyd. The order was docketed as CJC Nos. 24-0058 and 26-0278, reviewed at the commission’s April 8–9, 2026 meeting, and signed by commission chair Gary Steel. Boyd was notified of the commission’s concerns by letter and submitted a written response before the decision issued.
The commission concluded she should be publicly warned on four grounds:
- Inserting herself into plea negotiations. In the Villamil case, the commission found she failed to comply with and maintain professional competence in the law when she injected the court into a negotiation that belongs to the parties under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.
- Failing to be patient, dignified, and courteous. This finding covered her treatment of two defendants — Villamil and Thomas Henson.
- Bias and prejudice toward a defendant. The commission found she performed judicial duties with bias toward Henson during his probation revocation hearing, and manifested it in words and conduct.
- Public comment on pending cases. The commission found her use of the court’s YouTube channel communicated things about pending proceedings in a way that would suggest to a reasonable person how she was likely to rule.
The order cited multiple provisions of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct — among them the canons requiring compliance with the law, patience and courtesy toward litigants, freedom from bias, and the prohibition on public comment that signals a probable decision — together with Article V, Section 1-a(6)A of the Texas Constitution.
The Henson hearing
The second incident came from an October 28, 2024 probation revocation hearing in State of Texas v. Thomas Henson. Henson was a young defendant facing up to 20 years in prison on the alleged violation.
Boyd directed the court reporter to go off the record — while the YouTube stream kept running. She then told Henson that if he did not take the plea offer, he would be passed around in prison for cigarettes and ramen noodles.
Boyd told the commission she believed Henson was not taking the charges or the potential probation seriously.
Two details in that paragraph do a lot of work. The first is that “off the record” protected nothing: the remark was simultaneously being broadcast to the public and preserved on video. The second is that a defendant at a revocation hearing has not yet been found to have violated anything.
The channel findings
Beyond the two hearings, the commission addressed the channel itself. It found that Boyd engaged in extrajudicial activity with viewers, including hosting a book club on the court’s channel and permitting real-time comments about live proceedings and the people in them.
Boyd’s response to the commission was that she never viewed or replied to viewers’ comments during proceedings, never relied on or considered them in performing her duties, and that her rulings were based solely on the evidence presented and the law. She also said she had discontinued the book club.
The commission did not find that viewer comments changed her rulings. Its concern was the appearance and the structure — a judge publicly engaging an audience about matters still before her.
Its concluding language is the part lawyers notice. The commission described her failures as willful and persistent conduct clearly inconsistent with the proper performance of her judicial duties, which cast public discredit on the judiciary and the administration of justice. “Willful” is a deliberate word in Texas judicial discipline. It separates a finding from an error or an oversight.
For a deeper breakdown of the order’s findings and the specific canons involved, see our full analysis: Inside Judge Stephanie Boyd’s public warning.
“Under Investigation,” “Disciplined,” “Fired”: Sorting the Words
This is where most of the bad information lives, so it is worth being precise.
A public warning is the least severe formal public sanction the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct can impose. The commission’s ladder runs roughly from private sanctions, through public admonition, warning, reprimand, and censure, up to recommendations for suspension or removal — and removal requires a separate Review Tribunal process, with appellate authority resting in the Supreme Court of Texas.
What the June 2026 order did:
- Put a formal finding of judicial misconduct on her permanent disciplinary record
- Made that record publicly searchable through the commission’s public sanctions archive
What it did not do:
- Remove her from the bench
- Suspend her, even temporarily
- Stop her from hearing cases — she continued presiding over the 187th after the order issued
- Charge her with a crime, or refer her for criminal prosecution
- Fine her, or impose any monetary penalty
On “Judge Boyd under investigation”
The commission did investigate, and that investigation concluded. It produced a finding. Searching “Judge Stephanie Boyd under investigation” in late 2026 surfaces coverage of a matter that is already resolved, not an open proceeding. No reliable source reviewed for this article indicates any pending criminal investigation, arrest, indictment, or charge against her — and none has been reported by KSAT, the San Antonio Report, the Statesman, or the ABA Journal, all of which covered the warning.
On “Judge Boyd fired”
She was not fired, and in Texas a district judge essentially cannot be. District judges are elected, not employed. They leave office by losing an election, resigning, retiring, or being removed through the constitutional process. Boyd lost an election. That is a different thing from being dismissed, and it happened three months before the commission’s order issued.
Key takeaway: A complaint is not a finding. A finding is not a removal. A primary loss is not a firing. All three of those distinctions get collapsed in search suggestions, and all three matter.
Is Judge Stephanie Boyd Still a Judge? The Election and Her Current Status
Yes — as of October 24, 2026, Boyd is still the sitting judge of the 187th Criminal District Court. And no, she will not be in January.
Both things are true, which is why this question generates so much contradictory content.
The March 2026 Democratic primary
Boyd ran for a third term and lost the Democratic primary on March 3, 2026 to Stephanie Franco, a first-chair felony prosecutor in the Bexar County DA’s Violent Crimes Intake division. Franco made Boyd’s livestreaming a central campaign theme and picked up endorsements from organized labor and law enforcement groups.
The official canvassed returns from the Bexar County Elections Department:
| Candidate | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Stephanie Franco | 82,004 | 53.26% |
| Stephanie R. Boyd (incumbent) | 71,965 | 46.74% |
| Total votes cast | 153,969 | 100% |
A note for anyone cross-checking: Ballotpedia lists 81,604 to 71,575, a slightly narrower margin. Those are election-night figures; the table above is the county’s official canvass. Use the canvass.
Two other numbers put the race in context. Roughly 40,714 Democratic primary voters skipped this contest entirely, which is ordinary for down-ballot judicial races. And on the money side, campaign finance data compiled by Transparency USA through mid-May 2026 showed Franco reporting about $86,300 in contributions against roughly $11,650 for Boyd — a funding gap of more than seven to one.
Why the primary decided the seat
No Republican filed for the 187th. Franco is unopposed in the November 3, 2026 general election. In a one-party race, the March primary is the election, and everything after it is a formality.
Boyd’s loss was part of a broader sweep: six San Antonio-area incumbent judges fell to primary challengers that night. Three of them — Boyd, County Court at Law No. 12 Judge Yolanda Huff, and 436th District Court Judge William “Cruz” Shaw — were Black, and their defeats mean Bexar County enters 2027 without a single elected Black judge on the bench. That outcome has been a live subject of local debate since.
So what happens to her seat, and to her?
Her term expires December 31, 2026. Franco takes the bench in January 2027.
She did not retire, and she did not resign. She served out a full term after losing it — which is normal in Texas and often surprises people watching from outside.
As for what she does next: there is no verified public announcement of her plans. Reasonable possibilities for a judge in her position include returning to private criminal practice, serving as a visiting or senior judge by assignment, teaching, or mediation work — but none of that is confirmed, and this article will not pretend otherwise. She has a long record in San Antonio legal circles and a 2026 induction into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame on her calendar. When her attorney was asked for comment on the commission’s warning, the response was that she had none and was focused on finishing her duties to Bexar County.
Husband, Marriage, Children, and Personal Life
These searches are among the highest-volume queries attached to her name, and they have the thinnest factual basis of anything in this article. Handling them honestly means saying less, not more.
Is Judge Stephanie Boyd married? No official record, campaign filing, court biography, or news report reviewed for this article identifies a spouse. Her candidate questionnaires and campaign biography do not mention a husband or partner.
Does she have children? The same answer. No source reviewed names children.
Her mother and family. The one family detail she has discussed publicly is upbringing. In interviews and campaign materials she credits her grandmother and her mother with instilling a sense of history, work ethic, and community obligation. Neither woman is named in the material reviewed.
What that absence means — and does not mean:
- It does not establish that she is unmarried or childless. A judge who keeps family out of public filings is exercising an ordinary privacy choice, not concealing something.
- It does mean that any site publishing a “husband name” or a “husband picture” is either sourcing from somewhere this research did not find, or inventing it. Several of the pages ranking for those terms are the same ones claiming Harvard Law and a $2 million net worth.
- Judges and their families are frequent targets. A sitting felony judge in a county of nearly two million people has concrete safety reasons to keep household details offline.
Justice Faces does not publish unverified family details about judges, their spouses, or their children. If an official biography, a reported profile, or a public filing establishes any of this, it belongs here — sourced. Until then it does not.
Salary and Net Worth: What Can and Cannot Be Known
Judicial pay in Texas is public, because it is set by statute. Personal wealth is not, because no state agency compiles it.
What a Bexar County district judge earns
For more than a decade the state base salary for a Texas district judge sat at $140,000, frozen since 2013. The Legislature changed that in 2025 with Senate Bill 293, which raised the benchmark base to $175,000, with tiers rising to $192,500 and $210,000 based on years of state judicial service. Counties may add a supplement on top; SB 293 raised the maximum county supplement for district judges from $18,000 to $25,000.
A judge in Boyd’s position — elected in 2018, on the bench since January 2019 — falls into the mid-service tiers of that structure, with whatever supplement Bexar County commissioners have set. The 2024 Judicial Compensation Commission report lays out the full framework if you want the underlying numbers.
For an exact figure, the place to ask is Bexar County’s budget office or the Office of Court Administration, not a search snippet. This article is not going to publish a precise salary it has not verified against a county pay schedule.
On “Judge Stephanie Boyd net worth”
There is no credible net worth figure for Judge Boyd, and there is unlikely to ever be one. Texas judges file personal financial statements covering sources of income, assets, and liabilities, but those disclosures report categories and ranges, not a bottom-line total — and they are filed with the Texas Ethics Commission, not published as a tidy dollar amount.
The figures circulating online — commonly “$2 million” — appear on sites that in the same breath claim she is 35 years old, attended Princeton, and earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is in her late fifties and graduated from St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio. When a source gets three verifiable facts wrong on one page, its unverifiable fourth claim does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
A public salary is also not a net worth. One is annual compensation set by the Legislature; the other is assets minus liabilities across a lifetime. Content farms treat them as interchangeable. They are not.
Myths vs. Reality: Clearing the Record
Judge Stephanie Boyd is not Judge Jean Hudson Boyd
This is the single biggest identity mix-up attached to her name, and it is worth settling completely. Two Texas judges named Boyd, two very different stories, roughly 270 miles apart.
| Judge Stephanie R. Boyd | Judge Jean Hudson Boyd | |
|---|---|---|
| Court | 187th Criminal District Court | 323rd District Court (juvenile) |
| County | Bexar County (San Antonio) | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) |
| Docket | Adult felony criminal | Juvenile |
| Party | Democrat | Republican |
| Years on bench | 2019–2026 | 1995–2014 (associate judge from 1987) |
| Born | Shreveport, Louisiana | August 26, 1954 |
| Known for | Livestreaming her felony docket on YouTube; 2026 public warning | The 2013 “affluenza” case of Ethan Couch |
| Status | Term ends Dec. 31, 2026 | Retired Dec. 31, 2014 |
Jean Hudson Boyd is the judge who in 2013 sentenced 16-year-old Ethan Couch to ten years’ probation after a drunk-driving crash killed four people — the case where a defense expert used the word “affluenza,” which turned into a national story. She stepped down at the end of 2014. Her record has nothing to do with Bexar County, and there is no evidence the two are related.
If you are looking for the affluenza judge, that is Jean Boyd of Fort Worth. If you are looking for the judge with the YouTube channel, that is Stephanie Boyd of San Antonio.
“Judge Stephanie Boyd reversal rate”
There is no published per-judge reversal rate for Texas district judges. The Office of Court Administration reports case activity at the court level — filings, dispositions, clearance rates — not individual-judge appellate outcomes. Anyone quoting a specific reversal percentage for the 187th is estimating.
To actually assess appellate performance, you would search Fourth Court of Appeals opinions for cases originating in the 187th and read the dispositions. That is real work, and it produces a defensible answer. A number pulled from an aggregator does not.
It is also worth separating recusal from reversal. Boyd was recused from three felony cases in 2023 and, separately, from the high-profile case of three former SAPD officers charged in a fatal shooting. Recusal means the case moved courts. Reversal means an appellate court overturned a ruling. These are unrelated concepts that search results blend together.
The “wink” and other clip-driven rumors
Covered above, but worth restating plainly: no court record or credible news report reviewed here documents a “Judge Boyd wink” incident. The phrase appears to originate from third-party YouTube clip titles.
What Reddit gets right and wrong
Reddit threads about her are a mix. Commenters often correctly identify that she livestreamed, that defense attorneys objected, and that she lost a primary. The same threads also carry claims of criminal charges, of removal from office, and of dollar figures — none of which appear in any record. Treat those threads as a map of what people are asking, not as a source.
There is no Wikipedia article
Searches for “Judge Stephanie Boyd Wikipedia” return nothing because, as of this writing, she does not have a Wikipedia page. Jean Hudson Boyd does, which is part of why the two get conflated at the top of search results. Ballotpedia is the closest encyclopedic entry for Stephanie Boyd, and it is limited to electoral data.
How to Check the Docket and Records Yourself
Most of what people want from a “judge docket” search is actually case information, and it is public. Here is where to go.
Court contact and location. Bexar County publishes its criminal district court directory, which lists the 187th Criminal District Court with Judge Stephanie R. Boyd and the court’s coordinator line, 210-335-2517. Courts in Bexar County sit in the Justice Center at 300 Dolorosa, San Antonio.
On email: this article does not publish a personal address for the judge. Courts route correspondence through the court coordinator, and for good reason — ex parte contact with a judge about a pending case is improper. If you have a matter before the 187th, your lawyer contacts the coordinator.
Case records. Felony case records are held by the Bexar County District Clerk, which operates a public case search. You can look up a cause number, see the filing history, and identify the presiding court. Some documents are restricted, sealed, or require a formal request.
Judicial discipline records. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct posts public sanctions by fiscal year at scjc.texas.gov. The Boyd order sits in the FY 2026 listing under her name, with the CJC numbers referenced earlier. Download the PDF rather than relying on a summary — including this one.
Election records. The Bexar County Elections Department publishes canvassed results. The Texas Secretary of State maintains statewide historical returns.
Appellate opinions. The Fourth Court of Appeals, covering Bexar County, publishes its opinions through the Texas Judicial Branch site.
The livestream archive. The court’s YouTube channel holds archived hearings. Keep in mind that the commission’s findings concern exactly this material, and that watching a clip is not the same as reading a record.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Judge Stephanie Boyd? She is the elected judge of the 187th Criminal District Court in Bexar County, Texas, a felony trial court in San Antonio. She took office in January 2019 and became nationally visible by livestreaming her docket on YouTube.
Is Judge Stephanie Boyd still a judge? Yes, through December 31, 2026. She lost the March 2026 Democratic primary, so her successor takes the bench in January 2027, but she remains the sitting judge until her term expires.
Was Judge Stephanie Boyd fired or removed from the bench? No. Texas district judges are elected, not employed, and the June 2026 public warning did not remove or suspend her. She lost an election.
Why was Judge Stephanie Boyd disciplined? The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct publicly warned her on June 3, 2026 for four things: inserting herself into plea negotiations in the Villamil case, failing to be patient and courteous toward two defendants, showing bias toward a defendant at a probation revocation hearing, and commenting publicly on pending cases through the court’s YouTube channel.
Is Judge Stephanie Boyd under criminal investigation? No reliable source reviewed indicates any criminal investigation, charge, or arrest. The judicial-conduct investigation concluded with the June 2026 warning.
How old is Judge Stephanie Boyd? Her February 2026 candidate questionnaire lists her as 58. Her exact date of birth has not been published.
Is Judge Stephanie Boyd married? Does she have children? No official record, campaign filing, or news report reviewed for this article names a spouse or children. That absence is not proof either way.
What is Judge Stephanie Boyd’s political party? Democrat. She was elected in the Democratic primary and ran as a Democrat in 2018, 2022, and 2026.
Did she lose the general election or the primary? The primary, on March 3, 2026. No Republican filed, so the primary decided the seat.
Who replaces her? Stephanie Franco, a first-chair felony prosecutor in the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, who is unopposed in the November 3, 2026 general election.
What is the difference between Judge Stephanie Boyd and Judge Jean Hudson Boyd? Different people entirely. Jean Hudson Boyd was a Republican juvenile judge in Tarrant County who presided over the 2013 “affluenza” case and retired in 2014. Stephanie Boyd is a Democratic felony judge in Bexar County.
What is the 187th District Court? A Bexar County criminal district court, created in 1969, that hears adult felony cases — murder, aggravated assault, sexual offenses, serious drug charges — plus pleas, trials, revocations, and sentencing.
When does her term end? December 31, 2026.
What the Record Establishes, and What Is Still Open
Stephanie Boyd spent eight years on one of the busiest felony benches in Texas, and she will leave it with two things attached to her name that are hard to separate: a genuine attempt at courtroom transparency, and a formal finding that the attempt went wrong.
Both are supported by the record. She opened a felony docket to anyone with an internet connection, at a moment when most courts were closed and most people had no idea what a plea hearing even looks like. Tens of thousands watched. For a lot of viewers it was the first real criminal court they had ever seen, and that is not a small civic contribution.
The commission’s finding is equally on the record. Leaving comments open while a defendant stood for sentencing introduced an audience into a proceeding where no audience has standing. Negotiating from the bench crossed a procedural line. The ramen noodle remark, delivered off the record and on camera, was the kind of thing that reads differently in a transcript than it felt in the room — which is precisely the risk of running a courtroom as a broadcast.
The voters reached their own conclusion first, three months before the commission reached its. A challenger who ran explicitly against the livestream won by about 10,000 votes with seven times the funding. Whether that outcome was mostly about the channel, mostly about a broader anti-incumbent wave that took down six judges in one night, or mostly about money is a question the returns alone cannot answer.
What stays unresolved: her plans after December. Any detail about her family. An exact appellate record for the 187th. Those are gaps in the public record, not conclusions, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.
If you want to check any of this yourself, start with the primary documents — the commission’s sanction PDF, the county’s canvassed returns, and the Fourth Court of Appeals opinions out of the 187th. They are all public, and they are all more reliable than a search result.
More from Justice Faces
- Inside Judge Stephanie Boyd’s public warning — a full breakdown of the four findings and the canons cited
- When a second chance unravels: the Gabriella Sanchez hearing — a deferred adjudication that collapsed over a drug test
- Judge Boyd and a five-year probation turnaround — how she handles early termination requests
- Judge Boyd sentences Tyrone Eads to 30 years — a sentencing hearing in full
- Judge Frank Caprio: the compassionate judge — the other judge who became famous for what happened on camera