About

Mission

The mission of the Texas Public Defense Database (TPDD, pronounced “tipped”) is to improve public defense in Texas by making public defense data more accessible to academic researchers, government policymakers, and advocacy groups.

Problem Statement

There are at least three problems facing those using data to improve Texas public defense:

1. Texas public defense is severely underfunded. On average, Texas counties spend about one-quarter of the national per capita spending on public defense. This has led to a persistent crisis in public defense that creates both extraordinary personal costs for low-income Texans, unnecessarily higher incarceration costs for county taxpayers, and inadequate government data systems.
2. The fox is guarding the data henhouse. Government agencies that provide inadequate public defense services are not incentivized to make that data available to the public. There is no right under the Public Information Act to the case-level court data necessary to do public defense research and hold governments accountable for poor service provision.
3. The criminal legal system is complicated. TPDD provides aggregate data and context to help users better understand their public defense systems and make decisions to improve it.

History

In 2021, the project started as a collaboration between Open Austin, a former Code for America brigade, and the Texas Fair Defense Project, an advocacy nonprofit fighting the criminalization of poverty in Texas. Its mission was to determine whether scraping and analyzing public court filings could help policymakers and advocates evaluate whether and to what degree appointed counsel in Hays County were providing competent counsel for their clients. In 2022, the project secured a $30,000 grant from Urban.org (a Microsoft partner) for front and backend developers to build a proof of concept. The project was a sandbox for civtech volunteers to gain technical skills and mentorship while creating a tool for illuminating public defense quality in Texas. As the project grew, in 2025, the project was migrated to Public Defense Technologies to host the expanding scope of the project to include statewide data and data from all 254 Texas counties. The project is entirely volunteer-run.