District attorney urges county to buy Axon evidence system to avoid losing cases under new rules
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Summary
Potter County prosecutors asked commissioners to fund an Axon digital evidence management subscription, saying it will reduce risk of evidence suppression under recent Court of Criminal Appeals decisions; estimated recurring cost to county offices ranged from about $79,000 to $119,000 depending on allocation and data migration assumptions.
The Potter County District Attorney’s office asked commissioners to fund a subscription to Axon’s digital evidence management system to better preserve and share digital evidence across local law enforcement and prosecutor offices.
The prosecutor described Court of Criminal Appeals case law and the Michael Morton-era disclosure regime as drivers for the purchase: without a modern cloud-based chain-of-custody and transfer system, the prosecutor said, the county risks suppression of evidence and dismissal of otherwise strong cases if digital evidence cannot be reliably tracked and shared through the lifecycle of an investigation and prosecution.
The DA estimated the recurring licensing cost for his office at roughly $79,000 per year but acknowledged the budget documents initially showed a lower amount ($65,000). He said bringing both the DA’s and another office onto Axon to realize the full interoperability benefit would raise the total ongoing county cost to about $110,000–$119,000, though the budget sheet used during the meeting reverted the line to last year’s $65,000 number pending the court’s decision.
Prosecutors emphasized ancillary benefits: unlimited Axon storage would reduce or eliminate current TextShare cloud-storage overage charges, the system includes forensic and multilingual transcription tools, and it provides an API used by larger Texas jurisdictions to transfer evidence cloud-to-cloud. The DA said some one-time migration costs to move roughly 400+ terabytes of data would occur but that his office expected to cover the migration costs from its own special funds.
County Auditor Brandon noted the price-band uncertainty in departmental requests and asked staff to reconcile the budget line so the court could see both the recurring maintenance-and-operations cost and one-time migration charges before the public hearing.
No formal vote was taken on Axon funding at the meeting; commissioners asked for clearer dollar figures for the public hearing and budgeting process.
Why it matters: Prosecutors argued the system is an operational control that reduces legal risk and long-term costs. Without interoperable cloud storage and a reliable chain-of-custody, the DA warned that courts may suppress key digital evidence and invalidate prosecutions, which the DA said would carry legal and fiscal consequences for the county.