About me
James Gerard McDermott lives in Alpine, TX with his four dogs . He is the founding
Chief Public Defender of the Far West Texas Regional Public Defender. The program
covers five counties in Big Bend country, about 20,000 square miles—almost twice
the size of Maryland—with a population of 25,000 people. James was raised in Dallas,
Texas, graduating from Cistercian Preparatory School in 1991. He attended Davidson
College in North Carolina, where in 1995 he received his bachelor’s degree in English
with honors. He then spent five years with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, two in
California working with the mentally-ill homeless, in Sacramento, and on Skid Row
in Los Angeles. The next three were as an organizer in Houston. He attended law
school at the University of Texas, in Austin, where he was a member of Texas Law
Review and graduated with honors in 2003. He started his legal career as a staff
attorney for three years at the Texas Third Court of Appeals.
In 2006, James moved to Del Rio, Texas, on the Texas-Mexico border, to work,
through Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, at their new public defender. In 2010, he spent
a short year working appeals at the Dallas County Public Defender before returning
at the end of that year to TRLA as the director of the Public Defender Division,
managing offices and trying cases across rural south Texas. In 2013, he started a
private practice in Williamson and Travis counties. James returned to public defense
in 2017 when a friend called to tell him about funding to create a new regional public
defender’s office in rural far west Texas.
An accomplished trial attorney, James has developed particular skills in complicated
cases such as child sexual assault and homicide. He is known for using innovative
training techniques, such as using skills and exercises from theater and acting in
developing narratives in the courtroom. James is also a skilled appellate lawyer. In
2017, he achieved one of the rarest outcomes for a Texas criminal defense appellate
lawyer—a unanimous opinion for the defense from the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals, in Queeman v. State, 520 S.W.3d 616 (Tex. Crim. App. 2017).
James has been a member of the State Bar of Texas Committee on Pattern Jury
Charges (Criminal) since 2013 and co-chair since 2021, and was a member of the
Texas Indigent Defense Commission’s 2020 Legislative Workgroup. He is currently a
member of the Advisory Council of the Rural Justice Collaborative, a national group
of innovative rural criminal-justice experts working to identify best practices for rural
communities to replicate. The Collaborative is a project of the National Center for
State Courts and the State Justice Institute. He is currently a member of the
executive committee of the Criminal Justice Section of the State Bar of Texas.
In 2019, James was honored by the State Bar of Texas with the Warren Burnett
Award, recognizing his efforts to improve indigent defense in rural Texas. Media
appearances have included on NPR’s 1A, in the Texas Tribune, the Public Defenseless
podcast, and in the documentary film Becoming Leslie, which premiered at South By
Southwest in 2019.
