For what it's worth, I really have tried to find out the answer to this on my own, but I'm running out of time and still don't have a real answer. The office consensus here seems to be that we're exempt from the business of the $10 check for witness fees on a civil case that you're otherwise supposed to attach to a civil subpoena. But nobody, including me, can quite back that up with any kind of legal support. The closest I've come is 22.003, "Fees for Witnesses Summoned by a State Agency", which isn't really an exemption, and I'm not sure if we'd even count for their purposes as a "state agency". Does anyone know if District Attorney's offices are specifically exempt from this requirement? If so, could you please point me toward the statute that allows this? Thanks in advance!

Section 6.001 of the CPRC exempts a county from paying any bond for court costs or appellate costs. However, it's only a temporary out; if the county loses, it must pay those costs. In any event, this statute only provides an exemption from up-front payment of the initial costs of suit. I don't think it could be stretched to cover witness fees.

In a slightly different approach, section 154.004 of the Local Gov't Code provides that the "state may not pay a district officer a fee or commission for the performance of a service by the officer", and a county is similarly exempted from paying a fee or commission to any salaried county officer. Civil costs are excluded from this exemption in subsection (d)(2), however. So, unless your witness is a district or county officer, I don't see how this statute would help, either.

Those are the two cost exemptions we see in action most often. In practice, we have always attached a $10.00 check to our witness subpoenas, being unaware as we are of any exception that would keep us from having to do so. If some of the smarter folks out there know of one, I'd be glad to hear about it, too.

I was afraid that might be the case, but was hoping some sort of deficiency in my research efforts might be to blame and that magical statute was floating around out there somewhere. I was aware of the distinction as far as paying officers goes (since that's come up before on something else I dealt with), but I would imagine that we've had civilians subpoenaed occasionally on various things, so it surprised me that the issue had never come up. Let's just say that the witness I have in mind has felony convictions to his name, might be slightly, um, "hostile" to begin with, and is almost certainly in league with the defense attorney! So, I don't want to give him an excuse for arguing about the validity of the subpoena just because "we've always done it that way". Thanks for your help!