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Overview

Texas misdemeanor courts are in crisis. Across the state, arrested people are routinely left to navigate the criminal legal system alone and undefended. Many plead guilty to misdemeanors without ever having a lawyer's help.

To understand why this is happening and how to fix it, Deason Center researchers studied how and when people are appointed – or denied - counsel in their misdemeanor cases in Texas. The Deason Center reviewed court cases across four strategically-selected Texas counties and tracked when people either retained a lawyer or applied for appointed counsel.  Researchers also collected data on indigent defense policies in each of the Texas’ 254 counties.

The project resulted in groundbreaking insights into the appointment process, the impact of prompt access to counsel on the criminal legal system, and how county policies can help – or obstruct – people from getting the defense counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.

Key Findings

Texas county standards routinely deny appointed lawyers to people who cannot afford basic necessities.

Each county in Texas adopts standards to determine who is entitled to appointed counsel. Depending on where in Texas a person is arrested, a different set of standards will apply.

In Getting Gideon Right, Deason Center examined eligibility standards in all 254 Texas counties and compared them to the local cost of living. In all but two Texas counties, the standards required arrested people to hire a lawyer even when their income was too low to afford basic necessities, like food, housing, and transportation.

Even when people request counsel, the appointment process breaks down in different ways across counties.

Center researchers retrieved and reviewed thousands of court files from four Texas counties to understand when arrested people requested counsel and what happened to those requests.

The interactive graphics on the Center’s Getting Magistration Right webpage reveal stark differences in how counties process applications for appointed counsel.

• In one county more than a third of applications for an appointed lawyer were denied.
• In another county, judges left paperwork on certain applications incomplete.
• In a third, Center researchers did not find a single application for counsel submitted at the magistration hearing.

By tracing each step in the application process, the Center’s research reveals not a single point of failure, but multiple breakdowns that can undermine the right to appointed counsel.

Outcomes

In Rothgery v. Gillespie County, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed that, at a minimum, a person’s initial appearance before a judge triggers the attachment of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The Court also ruled that "counsel must be appointed within a reasonable time after attachment to allow for adequate representation at any critical stage before trial." But what exactly is a "reasonable time?" Few researchers have had access to data to inform this important right-to-counsel question.

The data from this project demonstrate the importance of early appointment of counsel. Center researchers used statistical techniques to compare people of the same race and ethnicity, who faced similar charges, spent the same amount of time in jail pretrial, and had similar histories of contact with the criminal justice system. Researchers found people with counsel before arraignment were more likely to have their cases dismissed at arraignment. The difference in rates of dismissal was statistically significant. These findings suggest that earlier entry of counsel promotes earlier resolution, particularly of cases that do not belong in the criminal legal system.