How to Look Up DWI Records in Texas

There are two places a Texas DWI shows up, and they do not show the same thing. The state database at DPS carries convictions and deferred adjudications. The clerk’s office in the county where the case was filed carries the case itself, open or closed, won or lost. If you are checking on yourself, start with the county.

If a DWI turns up on your own record, call Blass Law at (713) 664-4000. A good deal of what shows up on these searches can be cleared, and clearing it is a great deal easier before a background check forces the question.

Can anyone look up a Texas DWI?

Mostly yes. Texas Government Code § 411.135(a)(2) entitles any person to obtain from DPS the criminal history that relates to a conviction or a grant of deferred adjudication, including the arrest information attached to it. DPS built its public name search to satisfy that section, and its own site puts it plainly: the information in the state system is public only if a conviction or a deferred adjudication has been reported to the department.

Two things follow from that, and both of them surprise people.

Deferred adjudication is public. It is not a conviction, and it still appears on the public search, because § 411.135 names it alongside convictions. Only an order of nondisclosure takes it back out of public view.

A dismissal or an acquittal is not on the public search, but it is still in the record. The complete criminal history, the version § 411.083(b) limits to criminal justice agencies, agencies authorized by statute, approved research projects, and you, holds the arrest whether or not anything ever came of it. That gap between what the public sees and what a licensing board sees is the whole reason expunction exists.

Running the DPS conviction name search

DPS moved this service and renamed it. It is now the Criminal History Conviction Name Search, at publicsite.dps.texas.gov/ConvictionNameSearch. The old Crime Records public site now forwards there.

Create a free account, then buy search credits. A credit is $3.00. Paid by card, the 2.25% convenience fee brings it to roughly $3.07, plus a flat $0.25 per transaction no matter how many credits you buy at once. Paid by mailed check it is $3.00 even, usable once DPS processes the check.

Last name and first name are the only required fields. Date of birth is optional, though a full one narrows the results considerably. The system runs Soundex matching, so it returns names that sound like the one you typed as well as the one you typed.

Spend the credits carefully. One credit buys one search and one record view. A “No Matching Records” response still burns the credit, and opening a second person’s record burns another. Use the preview screen, which shows descriptive information and a photo, before you commit to a full record.

DPS says twice in its own instructions that a name search cannot positively identify anybody and that only fingerprints can. Take that seriously if you are about to make a decision about someone based on what comes back. Common names produce false hits, and a false hit on a DWI has consequences for the person it lands on.

How to find Harris County DWI arrests and case records

For a Harris County case, the district clerk beats DPS, and it costs nothing.

The Harris County District Clerk is the clerk for the felony district courts and for the County Criminal Courts at Law, which hear misdemeanors. A first or second DWI is a misdemeanor and a third is a felony, so either way the case file sits in the same office. You now need a registered login to search, but the account is free and viewing public case information costs nothing.

What the clerk gives you that DPS will not is the pending case. DPS carries convictions and deferred adjudications. A DWI filed last month that is still setting for court, with no disposition yet, is in the clerk’s records and nowhere in the public state database.

Outside Harris County the pattern holds. Felonies go to the district clerk, misdemeanors to the county clerk or the district clerk depending on how the county is organized, and most Texas counties now run a free online case search. If the person you are looking for is still in custody, the county sheriff’s inmate search will answer faster than either.

What the state record actually holds

Article 66.053 of the Code of Criminal Procedure sets what goes into the system for every arrest above a fine-only misdemeanor: the offender, the arrest, the prosecution, the disposition of the case by the court, the sentence, and the handling of the person by any correctional agency. Article 66.101 puts DPS in charge of maintaining the database.

That breakdown matters for one reason. The arrest and the disposition are separate entries, reported by different offices. When an agency reports the arrest and nobody ever reports what happened to the case, the arrest sits there by itself with nothing after it. A dismissed DWI that still turns up on a background check is usually this, not an error by the background company.

The record is wrong. Now what.

Call DPS at (512) 424-7256 when a record is missing or carries incorrect information. If you need your own complete record and it contains material the public site will not show, that line is (512) 424-2474.

Fix the source first. An expunction order that describes a case differently from what the state database has recorded can leave the arrest standing, which defeats the point of filing. We straighten out the data before we file the petition, not after.

A background check still shows a DWI that was expunged

Then somebody owes you money.

Government Code § 411.0851(a) requires a private company that compiles and sells criminal history to destroy the information, and bars it from putting that information out again, once it has been notified of an expunction order under Chapter 55A of the Code of Criminal Procedure or an order of nondisclosure under Subchapter E-1 of Chapter 411.

Subsection (b) reaches further for companies not regulated by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Those companies may disseminate criminal history only if they obtained it, or received it as an update to their database, within the preceding 90 days. A vendor selling out of a database it has not refreshed in a year is selling something the statute does not permit it to sell.

Subsection (c) is the part with teeth. A private entity that disseminates information in violation of the section is liable for the damages the subject of that information sustains, and the person who prevails also recovers court costs and reasonable attorney’s fees.

So a stale background report is not an annoyance to be argued about over email. Bring it to us.

Finding the record is the easy half

Knowing the DWI is there does not do much on its own. What matters is which of the two routes off your record you qualify for, and those routes are not interchangeable. An expunction destroys the records and lets you deny the arrest happened, and it is available when the case ended without a conviction. An order of nondisclosure seals the record from public view while leaving it visible to criminal justice and licensing agencies, and it reaches some first-time DWI convictions and deferred adjudications that expunction cannot touch.

Which one applies to you turns on how your case ended, what you were charged with, what your BAC was, and how long it has been. That is a conversation, not a web form. Start with clearing a DWI from your Texas record.

Talk to a Texas DWI lawyer about your record

We have been doing DWI defense in Harris County since 2009, and only defense. That means we know what a Harris County DWI file looks like at every stage, what the clerk’s entries mean, what DPS reported and what it failed to report, and how to get the record to match what actually happened in court.

If you found a DWI on your record, or on somebody else’s and you are trying to work out what it means, call Blass Law at (713) 664-4000. We will tell you straight whether the record can come off and what it takes to do it.