2024 Annual Report

The King County Department of Public Defense represents indigent adults and children facing a loss of liberty in both criminal and civil cases. Our department is an independent voice that promotes fair treatment under the law for our clients and advocates for their objectives, interests, and dignity.

Unwavering Advocacy: A Year of Exceptional Representation Despite Crushing Caseloads

 

Selena Alonzo, an attorney at DPD who represents clients facing felony charges.

Even as the increasingly unsustainable nature of criminal caseloads in public defense took center stage in 2024, DPD’s defense teams conducted a breakneck pace of trials while negotiating resolutions for thousands of clients facing felony charges. Through countless hours of hard work and compassionate advocacy, the department’s attorneys, investigators, mitigation specialists, paralegals and legal assistants fought to defend their clients’ dignity in a system stacked in the government’s favor at every turn.

Misdemeanor Defense: Counseling Clients Through Challenging Circumstances

 

Zulen Pantoja-Ortega, an attorney in DPD's district court practice.

In both King County District Court (KCDC) and Seattle Municipal Court (SMC), DPD’s lawyers and professional staff collaborate to provide clients facing misdemeanor charges with remarkable representation in service of their stated interests. These charges carry significantly harmful consequences for our clients and are often their only connection with the criminal legal system.

Simply having a pending criminal charge against them can cost DPD’s misdemeanor clients employment opportunities, destabilize their housing, and threaten their immigration status. Now that the King County Jail has lifted booking restrictions for many low-level misdemeanors, our clients face the additional risk of job loss and a resulting eviction if they are incarcerated on unaffordable bail pre-trial.

The reality that many of DPD’s misdemeanor clients have no or limited prior experience with the criminal legal system presents an additional challenge for this work, especially when representing clients who immigrated to the United States as adults or grew up in non-English-speaking homes. Attorneys like Ami Nguyen, whose parents immigrated from Vietnam and had limited English proficiency, are often the only person in a misdemeanor courtroom ensuring the person facing criminal charges understands the system trying to restrict their liberty.

“I often have to back up and explain the basics of the criminal legal system in order for [my clients] to even remotely understand what a probable cause hearing is,” Nguyen said, expressing frustration with judges’ and prosecutors’ lack of patience in cases where her client’s native language is not English. “When [a judge] gives me only eight minutes to meet with a client who needs an interpreter, that is out of touch with reality.”

“There was always some stranger who helped us”

Nguyen’s commitment to her clients, like many of DPD’s staff, is rooted in her personal experience of the criminal legal system’s impact on her family. Raised in a community predominantly composed of other immigrant families and defined by poverty, she saw her brother convicted and imprisoned for years for alleged conduct that happened when he was just eighteen years old.

The kindness and support her family received from strangers working on her brother’s case when navigating the system to support him through his trial and incarceration changed the trajectory of Nguyen’s life, inspiring her to devote her legal career to serving others facing similar challenges. Because of that support, Nguyen said her brother successfully advocated for parole and eventually the end of any state supervision of his life in their native California, where he now has a family and works as an electrician.

“There's so many of our clients who don't have any support, and so we become even more important to them,” Nguyen said. “Through the experiences I had, there was always some stranger that helped us, and yes, that was their job, but they could also have chosen to do something else.”

Like Nguyen, attorney Zulen Pantoja-Ortega has a personal connection to DPD’s clients for whom English is not their first language. Her parents immigrated from Mexico, and she also witnessed how language barriers for fellow native Spanish speakers created barriers in accessing essential government services. When she first joined DPD as a legal assistant in 2019, Zulen said the experience of interpreting for attorneys, investigators, and mitigation specialists working with Spanish-speaking clients opened her eyes to how impactful a quality public defender could be in the life of someone from her community.

Now, as a newly minted lawyer in DPD’s district court unit where most charges involve allegations of driving under the influence, Zulen litigates to protect her clients from discriminatory treatment by law enforcement when a language barrier impacts their ability to understand instructions during a field sobriety test.

“I have quite a few cases where I’ve reviewed discovery and it’s very clear that the person doesn’t speak English and troopers are not doing anything to try to effectively communicate,” Pantoja-Ortega said. “There’s no language line access or calling another trooper [to translate].”

Claire Beckett, another attorney working KCDC, said that the opportunity to litigate extensively in DUI cases drew her to seek a rotation to her division’s district court unit. DPD provides ample funding for expert witnesses, which she said makes a world of difference in a public defender’s ability to advocate for a client facing potential revocation of their driver’s license and consequently, the ability to provide for themselves and their families.

Beckett’s intuition is borne out in system-wide data analysis of outcomes for DUI cases in King County: DPD reviewed a random sample of cases involving a first-time DUI and found that DPD attorneys were unlikely to plead their clients as charged and would instead push for trial.

Revival of Failed Carceral Policies Drives Disorder in Seattle Municipal Court

Marissa Miller, an attorney in DPD's Seattle Municipal Court practice.

In Seattle Municipal Court (SMC), 2024 represented a reversal of recent reforms to the misdemeanor criminal legal system in favor of reviving failed policies and a renewed focus on jailing people accused of low-level, non-violent offenses. But even as the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (SCAO) filed more and more misdemeanor charges in SMC, data analysis from both DPD and SCAO revealed that nearly half of those charges filed resolved with a dismissal.

Last year, DPD analyzed every non-DUI, non-domestic violence charge filed in SMC from February 7, 2022, to February 29, 2024. Of the 13,148 charges in that sample, 4,584 were dismissed without a corresponding guilty plea on a related charge, deferred prosecution, suspended sentence, or stipulated order of continuance. In at least 1,042 instances where someone was arrested or booked into jail for allegedly committing a misdemeanor, prosecutors did not end up filing a charge based on the allegation.

Even when the harm of a criminal conviction is avoided, pre-trial detention on unaffordable bail or even a brief stay in jail after arrest can cause significant harm. Because the jail must independently verify any prescriptions someone incarcerated has before providing them with medication and that process takes time, people who only spend a few days in custody frequently do not get the medicine they have been prescribed during their incarceration.

Yujin Maeng, an attorney working in SMC, recounted the damage that being booked for criminal trespass inflicted on an elderly client of hers. “Despite having a valid prescription and being booked with [his medication] on him, he's gone to the emergency room a couple of times for potential strokes related to not being able to have his medication while he's been booked,” she said.

For supervising attorney Vincent Hooks, the coercive nature of pre-trial incarceration on low-level misdemeanors puts undue pressure for clients to agree to plea deals instead of fighting their cases. “Incarceration puts [our clients] in a desperate situation, and a desperate situation results in desperate choices,” Hooks said. “It unfairly punishes our clients in ways that I think that certainly individuals who have private counsel don't have to suffer the same way.”

 

Data from the Seattle City Attorney's Office 2024 Q3 Report 

When clients do choose to take their cases to trial, the SCAO’s own data for 2024 show that they were more likely to have their case dismissed than receive a conviction.

Attorney Melissa Miller recalled a particularly frustrating case where she got a case dismissed on the eve of trial in what she believes is a typical example of the disorganization at the SCAO driven by the office’s flood of filings. Her client was accused of an assault against a fellow resident of his senior living facility, but when she and her defense team began interviewing witnesses, it became clear to her that the SCAO had not turned over critical records in discovery – including notes from the detective who investigated the case showing the alleged victim’s repeated inconsistencies in interviews.

Once she interviewed that detective with only a week until trial was scheduled to begin, Miller discovered that the officer had sent their interview notes, medical records containing exculpatory evidence, surveillance footage of the alleged assault, and recorded statements of the alleged victim to the SCAO. Miller had received none of those records even though the SCAO received them more than seven months prior.

Miller got her client’s charges dismissed due to the prosecutor’s misconduct but pointed out that the dismissal only came after months of work on the case that she could have spent helping her other clients. “I worked so many hours, and we have an investigator do so many hours of work before we got to that interview,” Miller said. “I had to write all these motions as a result, and every brief is 30 pages. That’s time we can’t get back.”

Helping Families Shape Their Future

 

Colin O'Brien, a family defense attorney at DPD.

In all four of DPD’s divisions, defense teams work to zealously advocate for parents and children over the age of 12 entangled in the family policing system. In partnership with their clients, these public defenders strive to keep children in their parents’ care, reunify families torn asunder by state intrusion, and litigate complex and novel intersections of various bodies of law to minimize the surveillance and paternalism imposed disproportionately on low-income Black and Indigenous families.

“In criminal defense, the consequences for the client are immense about their future, but the work is all about the past,” said attorney Maddie Morrison, reflecting on what she finds most rewarding about representing parents and children in dependency cases. “In family defense, you are helping someone shape their future.”

2024 was also the first full year that courts implemented the Keeping Families Together Act’s (KFTA) which provides a more protective standard for emergency removal of a child from their parent’s care.

As DPD’s public defenders leveraged the law’s enhanced protections against the trauma of unjust emergency removal of a child from their parent’s home to keep their clients’ families together, our policy team faced arguments for the law’s repeal in the state legislature. However, lived experts, doctors, and drug policy experts formed a strong coalition against repealing the law and instead enacting clarifying legislation to make sure that removal decisions involving allegations of fentanyl use are based on guidance from public health experts instead of a moral panic.

“Walking the path together”

At 72-hour emergency shelter care hearings, dependency trials, and termination trials where the state seeks to permanently end a parent’s legal claim to care for their child, DPD’s defense teams go beyond providing excellent legal representation – they ensure each client feels supported throughout the process and preserve their client’s dignity while living under the state’s microscope. For attorney Henry Wiggins, the long-lasting nature of the attorney-client relationship fosters a sense of being embedded in the client’s family dynamic.

“There’s something rewarding about watching a family that’s been in crisis, that’s been in tumult, get to a place where they're not ruptured any longer and the children aren't outside of the parent’s home,” Wiggins said. “Relating to the people I’m representing, holding each other’s hands, so to speak, and walking that path together with the family through their crisis is a big part of family defense.”

Wiggins takes pride in the positive outcomes his negotiations with the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) create for his clients, but noted that his clients would often be much better served by a “softer landing place” that offered the same material supports without the specter of having their children taken from their custody.

Colin O’Brien, another family defense attorney at DPD, recalled a recent client’s case that illustrated the enormous hurdles parents living in poverty must jump through to get the assistance they need to provide a stable and safe home for their children: commuting via public transit for more than an hour each way for each of this client’s three weekly visits with his children, calling more than 40 apartment complexes to find somewhere that would accept the housing voucher DCYF provided, all while attending intensive outpatient treatment three times each week, and a weekly parenting class that takes up several hours.

“Of course, that’s nothing to him because he really wants to be with his kids,” O’Brien said. “But when you factor in a lot of the other barriers that our clients face that mostly stem from poverty, it becomes almost insurmountable at times.”

Despite those challenges, O’Brien said he finds his clients’ determination inspiring. “I’m always really heartened when I see clients who are really willing to do anything to get their kids back, and I see how hard they fight to remain in their kids’ lives. It motivates me to do everything I can to try to ease that burden for them.”

As a parent herself, Morrison knows the profound difference her advocacy can make for her clients. “There is nothing that approaches the joy of being able to tell someone, ‘You can go get your baby girl right now, today, at four o’clock.’”

Washington’s Fentanyl Crisis Clouds Implementation of Family Defense Reforms

Though the practice of family defense differs significantly from public defenders’ criminal practice, reforms to the family policing system are just as vulnerable to the cycle of backlash that typically follows any meaningful criminal legal system reform. In 2024, DPD partnered with legislative champions to defend key provisions of the landmark Keeping Families Together Act from repeal in the face of misinformation that incorrectly blamed the reform for the tragic deaths of several young children whose parents fell victim to the ongoing fentanyl crisis.

Tara Urs, DPD’s Special Counsel for Civil Practice and Policy, helped draft the KFTA and worked with community-based organizations to secure its passage in 2021. “Not only was the text of the law based on the language of the Indian Child Welfare Act, but it was also inspired by the same values: a recognition that family separation harms not just children, but communities, and generations,” Urs said.

Despite a two-year wait for implementation to facilitate trainings for judges and DCYF staff on the new legal standard, it became clear in 2024 that additional guidance specific to the ongoing fentanyl crisis was needed. DPD and its community partners provided lawmakers with constructive feedback on SB 6109, which ultimately passed the state legislature and provided funding for training and instructed judges to rely on public health recommendations when evaluating the risk that fentanyl poses to children.

Ultimately, the bill reflected what Urs told KIRO7 the twin objectives of the KFTA: “The goal was to ensure child safety and also to prevent unnecessary removal.”

Preserving Clients’ Autonomy in Involuntary Treatment Act Court

 

Sarah Tietz, an attorney in DPD's ITA practice.

When the state seeks to compel someone to remain in a hospital to receive treatment for a mental health condition against their will, a DPD attorney is the only person they can rely on to fight for their stated interests. These commitment proceedings under the Involuntary Treatment Act (ITA) have the potential to force someone to stay involuntarily in a psychiatric facility for anywhere from 14 to 180 days without the freedom to leave or direct their own care.

More than 4,000 people depended on a King County public defender’s representation in ITA court in 2024. Our attorneys, in collaboration with DPD’s mitigation specialists and other professional staff, opposed petitions to keep their clients confined in a treatment facility, negotiated to secure less restrictive alternatives to forced hospitalization, or advocated for continuances to give clients additional time to engage with their care and convince the state to agree to an uncontested release from the hospital.

The high-volume nature of ITA practice presents inherent challenges, as attorneys often only have three or four days between being assigned a client’s case and the first hearing where their client’s liberty is at stake. Even amid these circumstances, attorney Katie Morris said she enjoys working with ITA clients. “Most of the time, the client can understand their options for their hearing and what the potential consequences are,” she said. In her experience, clients appreciate having someone involved in the process whose only loyalty is to preserve their autonomy.

A Cycle of Hospitalization

Attorney Sarah Tietz, another public defender practicing in ITA court, believes the flood of filings in ITA court in 2024 can be traced back to decades of under-investment in community-based mental health care. After large-scale state hospitals for people with psychiatric care were decommissioned more than forty years ago, the shortage of outpatient mental health services leaves many of her clients with serious mental health conditions cycling in and out of involuntary treatment.

“What we need are social workers and case managers, who can go to people to give them their medication and take them to their appointments,” Tietz said. “But instead, we have people who just decompensate to the point where the only thing they can do is go to the emergency room and then they're treated for maybe a week before they are discharged out. They end up back where they began, and that’s where you see the cycle of hospitalizations, because they’re never really getting set up for success.”

DPD’s mitigation specialists endeavor to craft release plans for clients leaving the ITA system, but the shortage of available resources for people who need substantial support to live independent, fulfilling lives often confounds their best effort. “I’ve had clients who were supposed to go to a certain shelter or a certain place for a bed, but that’s not available by the time they arrive, and so they’re out on the streets,” Tietz lamented. “All these moving parts have to line up perfectly so that this client can be supported all the way through, and if one piece is gone, the whole plan falls apart.”

Due to the scarcity of supportive housing, even clients who have their own financial resources can cycle in and out of ITA court.

Morris recalled one client, a former professor whose mental health condition manifested after retirement, who spent six months in a hospital waiting for a supportive housing placement that would accept him even though his retirement savings meant he did not qualify for Medicaid. He left the hospital without supportive housing and is now back in ITA court while also facing eviction from his apartment.

Repeatedly cycling through the adversarial process of involuntary commitment harms clients’ long-term chances of successfully managing their conditions, as it often pits beleaguered family members against the person in need of care. “I deal with a lot of family members who are just at their wits’ end,” Tietz said. “They don’t know what to do. They’re desperate for help.”

“I have a client who is 24 years old and has been ITA’d 20 times already,” Tietz explained, noting that the client’s parents do their best to care for their son but managing his schizophrenia requires more expertise and resources than they can provide. “Now their relationship has really soured because it has become confrontational, and the client no longer believes it is in his best interest to engage with his mom and dad.”

Capacity Constraints Threaten to Compromise Effective Representation for ITA Clients

The continued over-reliance on the ITA process to respond to acute mental health crises in King County finally crossed a tipping point for DPD’s ability to provide representation to clients in ITA court in 2024.

Both the Washington State Supreme Court (WSSC) and Washington State Bar Association (WSBA) recognize that attorneys should represent a maximum of 250 ITA clients each year and those case assignments should be reasonably distributed throughout the year. In April, however, DPD had exhausted our attorneys’ capacity to accept new case assignments for that month and advised the King County Superior Court of the department’s inability to accept new ITA cases without violating these standards.

The torrent of ITA filings continued in May, when DPD’s attorneys again reached their limit to accept cases, and the Superior Court issued orders for DPD to appoint counsel in dozens of ITA cases in violation of the WSSC’s and WSBA’s caseload standards. DPD complied, but also appealed the orders to the state Supreme Court seeking enforcement of the standards and protection for our attorneys’ ability to provide effective representation to their clients. In November, the Supreme Court accepted review of DPD’s appeal.

While the outcome of the litigation remains uncertain, the effect of the unacceptably high caseloads for DPD’s ITA attorneys is clear. Both Morris and Tietz agree that the last-minute nature of the court-ordered appointments leave attorneys with much less time to establish trust with their clients before hearings. On top of the additional strain on a challenging attorney-client relationship, the heavy caseloads take a toll on the attorneys themselves.

“We’ll be in trial for a few hours each day, sometimes all day,” Morris said. “We’re still getting new cases where we have to make contact with the clients within 24 hours and prepare for our other cases.”

Centering the Humanity of Our Clients by Capturing Each Person’s Unique Story

 

Katie Leifer, a mitigation specialist at DPD.

In each division, DPD’s mitigation specialists put their training in social work to use cultivating relationships with clients in order to capture all the circumstantial factors that led to their involvement in the criminal legal system. Through a combination of motivational interviewing and combing through records of prior treatment providers, mitigation specialists create compelling social histories and mitigation reports that DPD’s attorneys rely on in advocating for compassionate decisions from prosecutors and judges in that client’s case.

“It’s really rare for our clients not to have some sort of childhood trauma,” said Katie Leifer, a mitigation specialist who primarily works with clients in mental health court. Despite their challenging pasts, Leifer’s experience working with DPD’s clients is defined by their kindness. “Clients are consistently so kind to me and so thoughtful. I’m struck by that, over and over again, because I think it’s so different than what people would assume.”

Although many mitigation specialists have advanced training in social work, the work they do for DPD’s clients does not substitute for the lack of social service providers in the community. “I’m not a case manager,” Leifer said, reflecting on the challenging nature of not having the ability to make direct referrals to housing or other services that her clients need to stabilize. “Everything I do has to be tied back to [the client’s] legal case and legal outcomes.”

Incarceration Impedes Clients’ Treatment and Recovery

For clients struggling with substance abuse or other mental health conditions, the widespread belief that jail can serve as a “tool” to compel them into treatment does an immense amount of harm in the opinion of experienced mitigation specialists like Kyle Ankeny.

“In the 15 years that I've been doing this, I've only met a couple of people during the course of that time who actually expressed that they wanted to remain using drugs and addicted to substances,” Ankeny said. “The vast majority of the folks that I work with don't want to be addicted. They don't want to have this substance controlling them.”

And yet, the practical challenges of accessing the medical care these clients need while incarcerated often result in someone leaving jail in worse condition than when they were booked. The process of getting medication while incarcerated can often take as long as 30 or 45 days, and if clients are fortunate enough to start medication while in jail, they are released with only a week’s supply of those medications.

“A lot of times releases happen in the middle of the night or in the late evening, so there’s no one [a client] can even see immediately,” Leifer said. “Then whatever happens, happens. [Clients] use or do whatever they can to self-medicate symptoms and then are back in the same position, or worse.”

“An impossible task”

Mitigation specialists do get an opportunity to fill the gap in the social safety net left by a shortage of social service providers when judges set conditions for a client’s release from custody, but frequently encounter the frustrating reality those conditions end up being impossible to meet.

Kyle Ankeny recounted one particularly frustrating example of this dynamic, involving a client in need of intensive mental health care. After two months of work with staff in King County’s Behavioral Health and Recovery Division of DCHS, Ankeny had secured approval for his client to enter into PACT. He had also found housing that would accept the client’s Section 8 housing voucher, so that the client would have stable housing where the medical team could make regular visits and keep the client on course with their treatment plan.

“PACT is like the Rolls Royce of treatment within the County,” Ankeny remarked. “Where else can you find the program where a psychiatrist or psychologist will literally come into your home and see you?”

Despite that level of supervision, the judge in this case denied the petition for release and asked the defense team for an alternative release plan with a more restrictive living environment. “The problem being there’s not anything that’s restrictive, aside from Western State Hospital, which requires [a client] to be not competent or detained against their will,” Ankeny said. “PACT really is the most wraparound, comprehensive program.”

“Now the client’s family, who was in attendance in court, keeps on contacting us, saying, ‘What programs can we get this client into?’” Ankeny recalled, lamenting the gap in understanding between what judges order and the services available to his clients. “It’s a hard conversation to say this judgment is just ordering an impossible task.”

Molly Hennessy, a mitigation specialist who primarily works with juvenile clients, pointed out that the lack of capacity among treatment providers for youth is especially dire.

“I do a lot of referrals to treatment, which has been really difficult, because there are maybe three or four [providers] in the whole state of Washington,” she said. “There are youth and families crying out for help and they’re running into barrier after barrier with systems of support. Then, someone calls the police, and now they’re in the juvenile system and they want this system to solve some of these really complicated problems when it’s just not the appropriate remedy.”

Uncovering the Truth: The Vital Contribution of Investigators in Public Defense

 

Matthew Huang, an investigator at DPD.

Investigators play a critical role on DPD’s defense teams. They comb through countless hours of body-worn and in-car video, interview witnesses, spot inaccuracies in police reports, and uncover exculpatory evidence. In modern public defense, where any given case can include hundreds of gigabytes of discovery from prosecutors and police, our ability to provide high-quality representation to our clients depends on DPD’s dedicated investigators.

In many cases, a positive outcome for the client can be traced back directly to painstaking work by an investigator. Felony attorney James Keffeler, who worked at a private law firm with only a single investigator before joining DPD, knows the difference that immediate access to a talented investigator can make.

“When I was down in Kent working on misdemeanor cases, one of the investigators and I did a whole scene visit where we got photographs of the whole layout of the location where the alleged incident occurred,” he said. “We did measurements, because it was a court order violation case. Having those resources available to me right away made such a difference in that case. I couldn't even imagine being able to do something similar at my old office.”

Scrutinizing Sloppy Policework

DPD’s investigators come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Journalists, administrative professionals, and even police officers put the skills they acquired in a former profession to use ensuring that the information the state relies on to charge our clients is actually accurate.

Thomas Baker began his career in the armed forces and then spent nearly a decade as a police officer prior to joining DPD as an investigator. Now, he leverages his understanding of police training and tactics to spot when a detective likely cut corners in their investigations. “I think having that lived experience of working the third shift, when it’s 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and there’s a corner an officer could cut to get off on time, gives me an intuition informed by experience to know when to do that extra public disclosure request,” Baker said.

Baker’s knack for “speaking the language” of the officers he interviews was particularly useful in a DUI case where the attorney he was working with had a suspicion that Spanish-speaking clients were being discriminated against due to their inability to understand instructions during field sobriety tests. By providing the cops with a familiar narrative of staffing shortages to evade individual blame for the practice, he elicited an admission that a lack of interpreter availability led patrol officers to routinely arrest non-English speakers after a single failed test despite offering native English speakers multiple different tests to demonstrate their sobriety.

Not every police error caught by an investigator stems from bias; investigator Matthew Huang recalled a case where identifying a simple, good-faith mistake was essential to securing a positive outcome for the client involved.

The client was charged with burglary, based primarily on an allegation that a witness saw the client fleeing the scene of the alleged incident with burglary tools, including a crowbar. When police pursued him and a co-defendant, who was ultimately never located or identified, the officer who arrested the client could not find a crowbar on his person.

In reviewing the body-worn video of the officer sent back to the scene the next day to collect evidence, Huang noticed that the officer mistakenly failed to include a crowbar discovered with other tools that could have been used in the alleged incident and flagged the omission for the attorney working on the case.

By the time police returned to locate the missing crowbar, it had disappeared. Without that evidence, the state failed to convince the jury that the client was responsible for the alleged crime and the client was found not guilty.

“He was just walking up the street”

For investigator Taylor McKay, having her work lead to a client’s charges getting dismissed makes her feel both thrilled and deeply frustrated. In one especially egregious example of the difference a talented investigator can make on the outcome of a case, the prosecutor who filed several counts of robbery in the first degree against a young boy ultimately apologized to the client in open court when dismissing the charges.

The boy was wrongly arrested while walking up the street near his house on the way to a convenience store to buy some gift cards for a friend he planned to visit on the evening of the alleged incident. At the same time, police arrested several other young people alleged to have committed a series of robberies of convenience stores by following a GPS tracker hidden in one of the bags of cash taken from one of the stores. The unrelated suspects had ditched a car in the same general area where McKay’s client was walking, and police mistakenly assumed he was involved in the alleged robberies.

“Our client was adamant that he was not involved at all,” McKay said. “He was just walking up the street in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Immediately, McKay and the defense team began collecting as much evidence as possible to corroborate the client’s alibi. She interviewed the client’s mother and sister, who provided detailed descriptions of the clothing the client wore on the night he was arrested that did not match anyone on the surveillance footage from the alleged robberies. They also provided a time-stamped receipt for the gift card the client purchased, confirming that he could not have been present at the scene when the robbery allegedly occurred.

McKay also manually plotted the location of the tracking device used in the police investigation down to the second that evening, constructing a map clearly showing the bag of cash was nowhere near the path the client took from his home to the convenience store. “The mapping took me hours to do,” McKay recalled. “This car was going over 100 miles an hour at times, so I had to plot hundreds and hundreds of latitude and longitude points.”

Though the client was eventually able to repair the strain on his familial relationships the charges caused, McKay remains irritated that the prosecutor even filed the charges in the first place. After all, almost all the evidence McKay collected was available to the police at the time of the client’s arrest and the prosecutor’s office could have done the same mapping work McKay did to vet the client’s alibi prior to charging him.

“On the body-worn video, the police officer was discussing that he didn’t even know if he had probable cause to arrest our client, but he was still arrested and charged,” McKay said. “Robbery one is a very, very heavy charge for anyone, but especially for someone of that age.”

These are just a couple examples of how our investigators play a vital role in ensuring our clients receive a rigorous defense. These investigators, through diligent work, exposed false or sloppy policework on which prosecutors relied when filing charges against their clients. They are good examples of the critical role all investigators play in DPD’s defense teams’ ability to deliver positive outcomes for our clients. Without them, public defense in King County would not be anywhere near as successful in ensuring every piece of evidence from the prosecution is scrutinized and fact-checked before a life-altering sentence is handed down.

Leading the Charge for Revolutionary Public Defense Caseloads

In 2024, our office joined public defenders around the state to advocate for meaningful caseload relief that will, when implemented, begin transforming this work into a sustainable career. In partnership with DPD’s union leaders (locals Teamsters 117 and SEIU 925), we successfully lobbied the Washington State Bar Association (WSBA) to adopt groundbreaking criminal caseload standards for public defenders based on the recommendations from the 2023 ABA/RAND National Public Defense Workload Study – the first bar association in the country to do so.

That effort resulted in real caseload relief set to take effect on July 2, 2025. Under the new standards, criminal cases are weighted according to seriousness on a scale of 1 through 8. For example, a theft of a motor vehicle carries a case weight of 1 and most homicides are weighed at 7. Instead of allowing defenders to carry 150 felony cases of any kind which is currently the state caseload limit, the new standards cap the credit maximum at 110 credits in 2025, 90 credits in 2026, and 47 credits in 2027. Mandatory staffing ratios for non-attorney professionals take effect the following year, in July 2028.

Building on that success, our office also led the drive to adopt similarly transformative caseload standards for attorneys in family defense. In September 2024, the WSBA adopted the new standards, which apply equally to child and parent representation and phase in over several years: the hybrid cap will start at a maximum of 45 clients and 60 open and active cases on July 2, 2025 before the caseload standards take full effect on July 2, 2026. The new standards also mandate supervision and training for attorneys in this area and a 1:1 staffing ratio for family defense social workers for each family defense attorney providing representation to parents in dependency matters by July 3, 2028.

Although the Washington State Supreme Court is currently also considering whether to change court rules to codify these standards, DPD has been taking strategic steps to prepare for successful implementation of Phase 1. The King County Code, and labor agreements with DPD’s unions direct DPD to comply with the WSBA’s Standards on Indigent Defense Services. Once fully implemented, the new standards will ease the burden the current system places on all of our public defenders and allow for attorneys the time needed to consistently provide high-quality representation to their indigent clients.

The Human Cost of the Public Defense Crisis

Our staff offered brutally honest testimony in support of the proposed standards during the WSBA’s public comment period on the proposal, highlighting how the outdated caseload standards have made it all but impossible for public defenders to provide constitutionally effective counsel to all their clients. They relayed stories of clients sitting in jail for years waiting for their lawyer to have enough time to work on their case, only to be acquitted once they finally got their day in court.

Reflecting on the cost of the current unsustainable caseloads, attorney Reid Burkland emphasized that even clients ultimately found not guilty pay an enormous price for the delays caused by excessive caseloads – profound harm that he believes should be treated more seriously by prosecutors and other policy makers in the criminal legal system.

“Our clients are already living so close to the margins that going to jail for a day can then cause them to miss work and get fired, then not be able to pay their rent and get evicted,” he said. “It can mean missing family events and missing connection to the community. It can mean being put in an environment that has rampant drug use, and people are then under stress and surrounded by drugs and relapse.”

Burkland also gave an example of the kinds of sacrifice such excessive caseloads require of public defenders and their families: “I remember when my first son was born, there was a stretch when he was an infant where I never saw him awake, because I would go to work and he would still be asleep,” Burkland said. “I would come home from work, and he'd be asleep. I would interact with him on the weekends, but during the week, I wasn't seeing him awake at all.”

Promise of Caseload Relief Inspires Cautious Optimism for DPD Attorneys

For many attorneys like Liza Parisky, the new standards are essential for their ability to continue practicing public defense despite their passionate commitment to the work and their clients. They have watched the burnout well-chronicled in the ABA/RAND study among public defenders nationwide claim too many of their former colleagues to assume they can sustain a long-term career without the significant improvement in working conditions promised by the new WSBA standards.

“I think that the colleagues of mine who have left here largely it's because they just want to do better by their clients than the court system is allowing them to do,” said Parisky. “That just really takes a toll on people.”

Even with the first phase of the new standards not set to take effect until July 2, 2025, the fight to win caseload relief has brought many staff at DPD closer together.

Attorney Hana Yamahiro described the process as a “bonding moment” among the friends she made since moving cross-country to work at DPD, recounting the twin feelings of affirmation and anger brought up by reading both her colleagues’ public comments to the Washington State Supreme Court in support of the standards and those written by prosecutors and politicians opposing their adoption.

“It's certainly obvious that no one understands the work that we do and what we go through except for us.”

Modernizing Public Defense: How DPD Leverages Technology to Improve Client Outcomes

In June of 2024, DPD finally completed a multi-year project to replace our outdated case management system with one that now allows the department to have an integrated platform between the Director’s Office and the divisions, track individual attorneys’ caseloads in real-time, integrate our system with the courts in which our staff practice, and, most importantly, transition to the new WSBA caseload standards. As DPD embarks upon the unprecedented work of implementing the new caseload standards, it will be critical it has a robust and well-functioning IT infrastructure to track case outcomes and other important data points.

Though our staff’s initial experience with the new system, named eDefender, fell far short of what the vendor who developed it promised, the department’s in-house administrators Stev Weidlich and Alison Liu worked around the clock to implement workarounds and improve the user experience based on staff feedback. Once those bugs were fixed, eDefender has become an invaluable asset to both DPD management and the staff in our divisions.

With eDefender in place, a host of administrative tasks that formerly required untold hours of staff time to accomplish manually are now fully automated. For example, by integrating with the systems used by King County’s courts, newly scheduled adult criminal hearings automatically populate on attorneys’ calendars instead of requiring manual entry by the lawyer or paralegal assigned to a case. The system also interfaces with the software used by King County’s jails to identify when a client is booked into custody, allowing their attorney to proactively contact someone who had been out of touch on warrant status or initiate negotiations with prosecutors on charging decisions.

The new system saves DPD supervisors and program managers a substantial amount of time in monitoring individual attorneys’ caseloads, automating what used to be a manual process of tracking case assignments on a weekly basis to provide daily reports on who in each unit is approaching or exceeding their capacity.

“Instead of tracking assignments and capacity by hand using dozens of individual spreadsheets, we now have much more accurate and timely information to guide how we assign cases on a daily basis,” said Matt Pang, DPD’s Interim Deputy Director. “Not only can we better manage each unit’s capacity to ensure compliance with the WSBA’s new caseload standards, individual unit supervisors now have more transparency about their attorneys’ capacity to more equitably distribute cases within their unit.”

Most importantly, the new system tracks case weight tiers of every new case assigned to DPD. Without this functionality, implementing the new WSBA caseload standards would have been practically impossible.

Looking ahead, Strategic Planning Manager Stev Weidlich believes the data generated by eDefender’s ability to track the work done by DPD’s public defenders and aggregate it will be a powerful tool in advocating for systemic reforms to lighten the load on DPD’s staff and improve outcomes for our clients.

“With less than a year of data in the system, we’re barely scratching the surface of what we can learn about how cases play out and identify disparities that impact our clients’ rights,” said Weidlich. “In the future, there’s no ceiling on the potential benefits data-driven decision-making could have on our staff’s ability to deliver positive results for the people we represent.”