Every year, thousands of Texans face criminal charges without proper legal representation.
The public defenders who serve them are under-resourced, overworked, and systemically unsupported. We gather and visualize data about public defense quality at the county level so the system becomes visible, measurable, and changeable.
The State of Public Defense in Texas
By gathering and visualizing data about public defense quality at the county-level, we aim to make the system visible, measurable, and ultimately, changeable by government leaders, advocacy groups, and the public.
28%
The percentage of all appointed cases disposed in Texas from 2022-2023 that were represented by attorneys who also disposed over 300 cases1
66%
The percentage of Texas counties, representing 11.4 million citizens, that do not have any kind of indigent defense institution as of October 2025.2
90%+
The percentage of counties that don’t provide defense attorney support at the first bail hearing for adults.3
The Human Impact of an Overloaded System
One researcher estimates that around 40% of the accused in Texas are represented by someone with an excessive caseload.4 In addition, each year between 2015 to 2023, the number of appointed defense attorneys statewide has decreased, from 6,249 to 4,993 (20%).5 With fewer and fewer attorneys available, pressure mounts to continue assigning large volumes of cases to the same few attorneys.
Fewer than 5–10% of counties in Texas provide counsel at a person's first appearance, where bail is set. For thousands of Texans, a misdemeanor charge doesn’t end in court but simply going through the process reverberates negatively through work, housing, and debt for years.7
Texas counties spent about $13 per capita in 2023.8 This is $7 less per person than the national average ($20 per state).9 Lack of funding is a large driver of high caseloads. National standards recommend between 7-59 felonies or 93-150 misdemeanors worth of work per year.10 By comparison, in Texas in 2023, about half of cases disposed in Texas were appointed to attorneys who disposed 200 or more cases that year.11
The Roots of the Crisis
Every year, over half a million people are arrested in Texas.12 Most are too poor to afford their own private defense attorney.
The outcome is longer jail stays, more convictions, and higher costs to people in their ability to keep their apartment, raise their children, or work a job.13
People accused of crimes may plead guilty and spend weeks, months, or even years in jail before they are released, not because they’re dangerous, but because they can’t pay bail or afford a private attorney to argue for affordable release options.14 Unnecessary incarceration leads to people losing jobs, losing custody of their children, and increases their likelihood of coming back into the system.
The problem is systemic. Poor rural counties have a harder time affording to build public defender offices. Officials trying to balance public safety and limited budgets often lack access to reliable data that could help them identify ineffective attorneys and improve outcomes.
At the state level, oversight is thin. The Texas Indigent Defense Commission has only a few monitors, visiting just a handful of counties each year.15 It takes decades to assess all 254 counties. Even well-intentioned counties are left without the guidance or tools they need to improve the quality of their indigent defense services.