Cohort 2024
Texas Center for Justice and Equity
Increasing Public Access to Indigent Defense Data
Harris County, TX
Funding for indigent defense services, provided to defendants who are unable to pay for a lawyer, has repeatedly been found inadequate and creates inequities for people who use them. The majority of defendants use indigent defense, meaning that Black and Latine people, who are disproportionately represented in the criminal legal system as a result of systemic and social inequalities, are disproportionately assigned indigent defense. There is inherent bias in defense appointments, especially as local governments have different statutes around providing the right to counsel. In Harris County, Texas, large caseloads, a lack of meaningful oversight, and significant taxpayer expenses have resulted from the current appointment process. Harris County is Texas’s largest driver (PDF) of state incarceration, and its local judicial practices have an outsized effect on state corrections and budget allocations. The Texas Center for Justice and Equity (TCJE), an advocate for ending mass incarceration in Texas, has produced significant research on Harris County’s indigent defense. In 2021, it revealed that when making appointments, elected judges were far more likely to select lawyers who had donated to their campaigns. That research also found that donor attorneys’ clients were more likely to end up in prison or jail and received longer sentences on average.
With Catalyst Grant funding, TCJE will partner with Restoring Justice and January Advisors to design an independent, public-facing dashboard focused on judge-attorney relationships. To do so, these partners will acquire, clean, and analyze financial, caseload, and criminal court data. They will then produce the dashboard and present it to local officials and communities, particularly those identified in the data as having large numbers of defendants who cannot afford counsel, some of which are likeliest to have the highest concentrations of Black residents in Harris County. TCJE will use the dashboard as it demands reforms that will improve client outcomes and works to reduce racial inequities in the local criminal legal system. The tool will build awareness of indigent defense failures and the consequent, creeping footprint of incarceration, so that those most impacted can have a voice in changing local practices and addressing racial inequities.
TCJE was also a Catalyst Grant awardee in 2021. Read about its 2021 project, Understanding the Role the Policing-Prosecution Relationship Can Play in Perpetuating Racial Disparities.
