Cactus County
Applications for Appointed Counsel
Under the Cactus County indigent defense plan, full-time magistrate judges were responsible for presiding over magistration at the county jail and advising arrested people of their right to counsel. If a person wanted to apply for appointed counsel, a magistrate judge provided them a paper application form. People completed these applications in court and submitted them to the magistrate for a decision.
Decisions About Appointment of Counsel
The Cactus County indigent defense plan empowered a presiding magistrate judge to review and immediately rule on applications for appointed counsel. At arraignment, a county court judge asked unrepresented people if they wanted to apply for appointed counsel. If they did, the judge could instruct them to complete an application in court, or ask them about their financial circumstances and complete the application for them. The judge ruled immediately on those applications.
Key Findings
At magistration, arrested people in 228 cases applied for appointed counsel. Judges granted 206 applications and denied 22. Seventy-seven additional people requested and received appointed counsel by the day of their arraignment. A magistrate judge had previously denied day-of-magistration applications from eight of these people. On the day of their arraignment, defendants had appointed counsel in 51% of cases, the highest percentage of any county in the study.
*Tumbleweed figure includes some attorneys where appointed status could not be definitively verified.
Data Legend
1: Application at magistration? Researchers recorded whether each case file included an application-for-counsel form dated on the day of magistration. If there was no application, or if the application post-dated the magistration, researchers coded the case as ‘no’. (Researchers did not find any applications that pre-dated a person’s magistration.)
2: Request Granted? If a file included a day-of-magistration application for appointed counsel, researchers recorded whether officials granted or denied the request. This column does not depict outcomes of applications that post-dated a person’s magistration.
3: Represented at Arraignment? Researchers documented whether court records indicated that, on or before the day of arraignment, the defendant had an attorney. Researchers further coded whether that lawyer was court-appointed or retained. (Court records only indicated whether a defendant had counsel, not whether that lawyer attended the arraignment.)
About the Cactus Data
Deason Center researchers assembled files for 701 misdemeanor cases that closed between January 1, 2021, and September 12, 2022.
To construct the diagram above, researchers excluded 117 cases for which they could not locate magistration records. Researchers also excluded 22 cases in which application and decision procedures differed substantially from those described above. Finally, the Center eliminated 21 cases because researchers concluded that the case records were unreliable or mis-matched—for example, magistration documents appeared to post-date case disposition.
Magistrations for the 541 cases depicted in the diagram occurred between July 3, 2017, and July 15, 2022.