The Dallas County district clerk’s office has failed to submit mandatory reports of criminal court data to the state for more than two years, and the omission has now put a state grant in limbo.
The Texas Indigent Defense Commission is withholding $1.5 million it was supposed to grant Dallas County in August for litigation costs for defendants who can’t afford an attorney, commission executive director Scott Ehlers confirmed. The funding is a reimbursement of expended costs, and budget officer Ronica Watkins said the anticipated grant was used to balance the budget.
The county has until August 2027 to claim its fiscal 2025 funding, but the commission will not release the grant until the reports are submitted to the Office of Court Administration.
District Clerk Felicia Pitre said her delay in completing the OCA reporting is due to technical issues with transferring old data from the county’s former case management system into the Odyssey platform it adopted in May 2023. Civil and family cases previously migrated to Odyssey and are not affected.
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Pitre told the County Commissioners Court earlier this month there were still 13,000 invalid data entries in old criminal case files that must be manually corrected before transferring them to Odyssey. She could not provide a date for when the work will be completed but said she is considering hiring a contractor to help with the load.
“It’s challenging,” Pitre said in an interview. “If I could fix it, I would. I know everyone is frustrated.”
Dallas County District Clerk, Felicia Pitre (left), Dallas County Clerk’s office employee LaTonya Hill (center) Dallas County Clerk John F. Warren discuss about county’s database changes storing criminal cases Friday, June 2, 2023 at Dallas County Clerk’s office.
Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer
The IT department’s attempts to run logic scripts to correct the data have not solved all of the issues. Much of the problem is related to how data was entered into the old system, Pitre said.
For example motions to revoke a defendant’s probation were not always filed before arrest warrants in a case. Pitre said the Odyssey system requires clerks to enter the information “the correct way,” preventing them from transferring the files automatically.
As a result the data corrections have to be done by hand. Pitre said it took her three hours to correct just 52 cases, glacial progress in finishing the project that began about a year ago.
“My staff is exhausted,” Pitre told the commissioners court. “I’m exhausted.”
The mandatory reports that Dallas County is unable to submit to the Office of Court Administration show cases handled by judges sorted by offense. These reports have been required for decades, but Dallas County stopped submitting them for criminal courts in May 2023 when it adopted Odyssey.
The district clerk however is able to complete two separate reports required under new legislation passed in 2023: the annual performance measures report showing clearance rates and monthly judicial statistics reports.
Pitre said this is because those reports don’t require sorting by offense type.
The district clerk said she was concerned about the conversion to Odyssey before it occurred in May 2023 and if she had known it would have impacted her ability to report OCA data “I would have chosen to delay” the switch to clean up the data first.
Earlier this month Pitre told county commissioners she was considering hiring a contractor at a cost of $70,000 to help expedite the data corrections.
“Done,” County Commissioner John Wiley Price said in response to Pitre explaining the cost. “Hire her.”
Commissioners expressed exasperation at Pitre’s explanation of having thousands of invalid data entries yet to be corrected after more than two years of reporting delays.
“We don’t seem to be making a lot of forward motion,” County Commissioner Theresa Daniel told Pitre. “I understand your frustration because we’re frustrated also.”
The commissioners court previously approved additional staff to help the district clerk’s office correct the data, but Pitre has not yet utilized this. County Administrator Darryl Martin said last week he had recruited 31 employees to work on the data corrections for overtime pay.
Pitre said due to the complexity, a team of six staff members from her office and herself have been focused on the work, some days working on the conversion through midnight.
“This isn’t something I can just hire a temporary person to come in and do, you have to know what you’re doing in order to do this work,” Pitre said.
Although the 2025 indigent defense grant is on hold until the OCA data is submitted, the outstanding data reporting has not prevented the county from applying for the fiscal year 2026 funding, Ehlers confirmed.
The commission will determine the amount counties will receive for 2026 in the spring. If Dallas County is not in compliance with its OCA reporting by then, the fiscal year 2026 grant will also be placed on hold, Ehlers said.
“My staff, we’re committed to correcting it,” Pitre said. “As the district clerk, it is my responsibility.”