You have the right to an attorney. But in Texas, don’t count on it.

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Jolie McCullough reported on failures of justice in rural parts of Texas as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

San Jacinto County prosecuted nearly 300 misdemeanor cases in 2023. In this poor region, nestled in the piney woods of East Texas, many defendants were likely eligible for a government-paid lawyer. Yet the county reported it had provided an attorney to just nine people.

Nearly 400 miles to the northeast, Wilbarger County, too, had about 300 misdemeanors that year. It assigned counsel to 15 defendants.

And on the state’s far eastern edge, Shelby County, the poorest of the three, took on 307 cases. Nine defendants were granted court-appointed lawyers.

The right to a criminal defense lawyer is so ingrained in the American idea of justice that fans of TV police dramas can recite these two lines from the Miranda rights by memory: You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.

But in much of Texas, that right is routinely denied. Every year, more than half of rural Texans accused of misdemeanors are left to represent themselves — five times the rate of defendants in urban areas, according to estimates from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, which is tasked by state statute with ensuring the right to an attorney is protected.

The New York Times reported last week that the court system in Maverick County, Texas, had repeatedly incarcerated people accused of minor crimes for months without filing charges, and seemingly lost track of some of the defendants in jail. The county rarely provided misdemeanor defendants with lawyers, who might have prevented those lapses.

But the failure to provide lawyers in minor cases extends far beyond Maverick County. Between 2019 and 2023, nearly 20% of Texas counties reported appointing lawyers for fewer than one in 10 misdemeanors, according to a Times analysis of state data.

That data does not show precisely how many defendants were able to hire a private lawyer. But interviews and records across the state showed that people have routinely faced charges without representation.

In San Jacinto County, Judge Fritz Faulkner said many defendants preferred to work out a plea deal with a prosecutor rather than wait for the court to appoint a lawyer.

“If you sit here all day, you hear the plea bargains,” Faulkner said. “They’re not outrageous by any means.”

Even some members of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission have seemed to question the extent of the state’s obligation to pay for lawyers.

Vivian Torres, a retired misdemeanor judge from Medina County, Texas, who was on the commission until last year, pushed back in a meeting in 2022 when a lawmaker argued that a defendant who made $17,000 a year should be automatically eligible for a court-appointed lawyer. She noted the state sometimes forced people to borrow money to pay child support.

“Now we’re making the taxpayers pay for the attorney’s fees of persons who are accused of committing crimes?” she asked, adding: “They’re in that situation not by something that we did to them.”

In an email to The Times, Torres said she was arguing against setting one threshold for indigence across the state, and did not intend to dispute the right to an attorney.

Geoff Burkhart, the commission’s former executive director, said in an interview that some commission members, who he would not name, had privately questioned whether misdemeanor defendants needed attorneys at all.

The Supreme Court has held for more than half a century that the U.S. Constitution guarantees legal representation to anyone facing jail time. But in rural parts of America, studies and news reports show, this protection is not always provided — especially when it comes to minor crimes.

Texas spends less per resident on indigent defense than all but four other states, according to the Sixth Amendment Center, a national nonprofit focused on improving access to counsel. And while more than half of the country pays for defense lawyers entirely at the state level, in Texas the counties shoulder about 85% of the costs.

The Texas Indigent Defense Commission’s periodic audits have identified at least half a dozen counties that did not follow state laws on indigent defense for a decade or more. But the only enforcement power it has is to cut off the little money the state provides, so it has taken a hands-off approach.

In recent years, some rural Texas counties have joined regional public defender offices, vastly increasing the number of times lawyers are assigned in their areas. As the Legislature finalizes its budget for the next two years, the commission has been pushing lawmakers to set aside money to open more offices. But lawmakers have previously allocated only a fraction of what the commission has requested, even when the state had large surpluses.

Aditi Goel, the deputy director of the Sixth Amendment Center, said the states with the best indigent defense systems are those that spend more, and control the practices at the state level.

“Texas is just at the bottom,” Goel said.

Judges with ‘zero courtroom experience’

In Texas, most misdemeanors — like trespassing, or possessing a small amount of marijuana — are punishable by up to one year in jail.

But in about 150 rural counties, misdemeanors are tried by county judges who are primarily elected as the area’s chief executive, akin to a mayor. Only about 11% are lawyers. They come from a variety of backgrounds: sheriff’s deputies, grocery store managers, foremen at trucking companies.

Most of those counties do not have hired public defenders. Instead, they pay private lawyers small fees — $311 on average in 2023 — to represent misdemeanor defendants.

In 2023, Jaylon LeBlanc was accused of trespassing on the grounds of an apartment complex in Robertson County in Central East Texas. The police said he was standing outside with a group of people who were smoking marijuana, and that he ran and resisted arrest. In many places, such charges are usually resolved with little to no jail time.

LeBlanc said he had twice asked for a lawyer but was never provided one. He had been in jail for two months, without charges, when he was first brought to court. The prosecutor offered him a plea deal: six more months behind bars. He accepted.“I didn’t feel like I had a choice,” LeBlanc, 24, said in an interview.

The misdemeanor judge who sentenced LeBlanc, Joe Scarpinato, is a former banker. His court closed 318 cases in 2023; he had appointed lawyers 31 times, state records show.

In an interview in his courtroom last year, Scarpinato said he started the job in 2023 with “zero courtroom experience.” He said he typically deferred to the district attorney — an old friend — and accepted whatever deals prosecutors worked out with defendants. During the interview, the district attorney answered many questions on the judge’s behalf.

In San Jacinto County, Faulkner said he had found ways to provide lawyers when defendants asked for them. But, he added, the county was short on lawyers willing to take the call.

“There’s a lot of them that could, but not too many of them actually want to,” he said last year in an interview with The Times. “They don’t pay all that much in misdemeanor court.”

His county typically offers $325 per misdemeanor case. Of the county’s $46 million budget for 2025, which Faulkner manages, only $5,000 was set aside for misdemeanor court-appointed attorneys. That is about what it gives the district attorney’s office for gas.

Denying lawyers for the unemployed and evicted

In some counties that have invested in public defender offices, indigent defense has been transformed.

Soon after he took office in 2015, Judge D.J. Wagner of Deaf Smith County began to face criticism from the indigent defense commission for almost always ignoring or denying requests for lawyers. He usually ruled that defendants had not completely filled out forms about their finances, even though the commission’s auditors said the forms they reviewed usually seemed complete.

After the sheriff’s office accused Aurelio Ferrer, 41, of threatening to kill someone during a drunken argument in 2023, he asked for a lawyer, noting on a sworn form that he was unemployed, had been recently evicted and was living on food stamps. He said his only asset was a 2009 Mazda worth roughly $3,500. Wagner ruled his form was incomplete and denied his request for a lawyer.

Unable to afford his $500 bond, Ferrer was held in jail for 75 days before appearing in court, where he pleaded guilty in exchange for his release. Mr. Ferrer later told The Times he had not threatened anyone during the argument.

Wagner, who before being elected was a safety director at a trucking company, did not comment on Ferrer’s case. But in an interview, he said he often denied requests because he did not believe defendants when they claimed they had no income or monthly expenses.

“Nobody lives on zero,” Wagner said.

But a few years ago, he started to grow concerned that the county was struggling to find lawyers, he said. The judge presiding over felony court told him it was increasingly difficult to persuade private attorneys, mostly from Amarillo, to drive about an hour to Hereford, Deaf Smith County’s largest town.

So he met with Jason Howell, the head of the new Panhandle Area Public Defender office, who wanted to expand its reach. Howell swayed the judge in part by promising that an investment in his office could save Deaf Smith County money by cutting the jail population.

Wagner said he had persuaded his fellow commissioners to invest. The county’s budget for indigent defense increased by 60%, or an additional $115,000, for felony and misdemeanor cases both.

Three public defenders are now based in Deaf Smith County; they are assisted by nearly 20 others in the regional office, Howell said. The office also embeds mental health professionals at the county jail, who help treat defendants.

In 2023, the county reported paying lawyers twice, for a total of $900, while resolving 431 misdemeanor cases. Last year, the public defender office said it had been appointed about 160 times.

And the promise of saving money came true, Judge Wagner said. Before joining the office, the county jail typically held about 100 people, he said. In August 2024, it held around 60.

‘We need the state legislature to step up’

The state typically pays for two-thirds of the total cost of regional public defender offices, significantly more than the 15% it provides statewide. But the offices usually still require additional investment from counties. And the Texas Indigent Defense Commission can afford to support only a limited number of offices.

In 2023, when Texas had a $33 billion budget surplus, the commission pleaded for $70 million to build more offices, writing in a budget request that the funds were necessary to “comply with state and federal law.”

Lawmakers set aside $5 million, even as they funneled $330 million into grants for rural law enforcement. As of December, $44 million had gone to prosecutors.

Even with those limits, eight multi-county public defender offices have opened since 2018, which now serve 52 mostly rural counties, the commission reported.

For the next budget, to be finalized in May, the commission asked for $35 million for regional public defender offices. The Senate and House budget committees have recommended $9 million and $18 million, respectively.

“Our budget is very, very tight,” Byron Ryder, the county judge of rural Leon County, said on the steps to the state Capitol after a news conference on the issue last month. “We need the state Legislature to step up and fund this.”

About the data. Counties report the number of lawyers they pay for court appointments each year to the Texas Indigent Defense Commission. The number of cases reflect the year a case is resolved, and includes cases that were dismissed.

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