Court Appointed vs. Retained Attorneys in Bell County Felony Cases (1993-2009)

I created the following table with data provided by the Texas Office of Court Administration.  This table shows the total number of felony cases resolved during the last 17 years in Bell County, Texas.  It then shows how many cases out of each total had a defendant represented by retained counsel and how many were represented by court-appointed counsel.  It then shows the percentage of court-appointed cases for that year.

UPDATE: I received some calls from various persons who took issue with how I calculated this data.  I would point out that using this alternative methodology suggested results in this new table.  For anyone interested, here is the new methodology:  Go to this website at the Texas Office of Court Administration. Choose for report type "District Court Data Reports". For Report, choose "District Activity Summary by Case Type". On the new page, choose January through December of a particular year. The county is "Bell", the court is "All", and best format is "Export to Acrobat". Click Run Report and the data will appear. The bold numbers on the far right of the "Criminal Cases" report show totals for criminal felony data. If you take the number of "Total Cases on Docket" and subtract the "Cases Pending" at the start of the year, you get the total number of new cases (save that number as "NEW CASES"). Next, look at the bottom of that chart and it says "Cases in Which Attorney Appointed." That is the number of "APPOINTED CASES." If you divide APPOINTED CASES by number of NEW CASES, you’ll get the percentage of court appointed cases. Then, subtract the number of APPOINTED CASES from the number of NEW CASES and you’ll have the number of retained attorney cases.

NEW TABLE:

OLD TABLE:

UPDATE: Using either methodology, disposed cases for new cases, you get roughly the same numbers.  And either way shows a significant drop from 2008 to 2009.

Interesting.  In 2009 – even with the country in a major recession and presumably more Bell County citizens out of work than any of the other years for which data is available – the percentage of defendants with court-appointed attorneys dropped from 82% in 2008 to 55% last year.

Here’s a bar graph showing the changes:

What’s the reason for the change?  Perhaps you’ll recall an earlier post of mine (“Why high bail amounts cost taxpayers money”).  In that posting I argued that the high preset bail bond amounts imposed by Bell County magistrates result in criminal defendants qualifying for court-appointed attorneys because they’ve spent all of their money on bonding out of jail.

Well, since that post, the new Pretrial Services Office in Bell County has been bonding out more and more criminal defendants on PR Bonds.  So, even though the preset bail bond amounts have not lowered like they should have, it does not matter since PR Bond is getting more and more people out of jail and back to being productive members of society.

With more criminal defendants able to return to work, there have been more retained attorneys.  It’s nice to be vindicated by data.

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