Hi, I'm Charlie Roadman, Austin criminal defense attorney, and today I want to talk about looking up your criminal record on the Texas DPS website.

Okay, so first, what can you find on the Texas DPS website as far as criminal history and the answer is convictions or deferred adjudication cases. Cases that are resolved that ended in one of those two things. What you won't find are dismissed cases, and I'll explain a little bit later why that's kind of a big deal.

But basically, anybody that has a conviction or deferred adjudication result in Texas is going to have their information on this database. Who reports all this? And basically, the law says that all these arresting agencies, county attorneys, and all the courts have to report to DPS for Texas. That's why they have all this information.

Now, this first step is to get an account. So I just created an individual account for myself. And then you say how many credits do you want to purchase. And that's what's important is that you do pay for this, but it's just $3 per search plus some fees on top of that. I chose here to buy five credits, so I can do five searches.

I searched my name here just to see if there's anything for me in Texas DPS criminal history, and the answer was no. There was no matching records, which means either that I've never been arrested before, or I was arrested and got my case dismissed because that wouldn't show up here. Or I was arrested, I got the case dismissed and expunged because that certainly wouldn't show up here if I had my case expunged.

So now, basically, I want to find somebody else with a criminal record. The first thing is I tried Willie Nelson, but he didn't have anything because I think he's gotten all his cases dismissed or sealed. But then I tried someone else that I know about, and I found this record, which I've blocked out some of the information, of course. But this is what the details look like. Once you click on it and you find someone with some history, it'll look like this. So anybody can search for anyone. You don't have to just search for yourself. You can search for your friends, someone you're thinking about dating, stuff like that. But it will only show convictions and deferred adjudication results.

So, that brings us to the type of criminal history searches. So we've got this one, DPS for Texas convictions. It's not going to show anything from Oklahoma, and it's not going to show any dismissals from Texas. The next type is if you use a private background check company, for example, like publicdata.com. That will show all resolved cases nationwide, and that means dismissals from Maine, or dismissals from Alaska, or convictions from everywhere. But it won't show pending cases. So, these are resolved cases.

So the third type of searching is you can look under individual courts. So you can look under Travis County website, look under the clerk site. You can find resolved cases from Travis County plus pending cases from Travis County. So, that's how the Texas DPS website search fits into these types of categories. All right, I hope this helps. Good luck. Call us or email us if you have any questions.