2023 Annual Report

Anita Khandelwal reflects on this past year

As promises made in the summer of 2020 to dismantle racially disproportionate systems of oppression continue to fade in the minds of policymakers, our work defending those facing a loss of liberty has become even more crucial.

Although those systems are seemingly teetering, they persist. Our clients have faced the impacts of staffing shortages, aggravated by long outdated caseload standards, and increasingly dire conditions for people incarcerated in King County jails.

But even working in these collapsing systems, and with heavy workloads, our staff stood by our clients in court and spoke up for them in the halls of power. Our lawyers raised the alarm about continually deteriorating conditions in King County’s jails and battled to keep our clients out of inhumane conditions of incarceration.  We won not guilty verdicts in numerous homicide trials, we ensured that clients facing misdemeanors did not find themselves caught in the revolving door of misdemeanor probation and prosecution, and we helped families stay together.

In spite of the growing backlash against systemic reform, DPD also won our fair share of victories for our clients in 2023. The Keeping Families Together Act that we worked to pass in partnership with a coalition of community-based advocates finally went into effect. The law now requires the State to prove that a child is danger of imminent harm before taking that child away from their parents, providing a much more protective standard for our family defense practitioners to oppose the removal of our clients’ children.  

We managed to continue advancing reforms to mitigate the harm of the criminal legal system, helping to pass legislation to reduce sentences for people entangled in the system during childhood and allowing more than 2,500 people to have their names removed from an ineffective sex offender registry. DPD staff pushed back in the state legislature and Seattle City Hall against policymakers determined to repeat failed strategies of criminalization to combat the opioid crisis, making them confront the harm that a criminal conviction inflicts on someone in need of housing, treatment, and compassion.

Finally, we have helped jumpstart a long overdue conversation about caseloads. We have used a new national study of the work required to zealously represent indigent clients to help policy makers and the public understand that public defenders need far lighter caseloads in order to meet their ethical responsibility to their clients, and to avoid pitting one client’s needs against another’s. In part due to the advocacy from DPD leadership and staff, Washington became the first state in the nation to adopt new criminal caseload standards for public defenders. 

Our Department’s many achievements would be impossible without the tireless dedication of DPD’s lawyers, investigators, mitigation specialists, paralegals, and legal assistants. They unearthed exonerating evidence, provided context for the trauma that shapes our clients’ lives, helped keep clients without stable housing informed about their cases, and preserved clients’ dignity by making sure they had clothes while standing in court and when they walked free from incarceration.

Their determination inspires me each and every day and drives my commitment to the work of public defense. Within this report, you’ll find that tenacity runs throughout our department and our resolve to keep up the fight against systems of oppression harming our clients remains undaunted.

Notwithstanding pressure from prosecutors and judges to clear the backlog of cases remaining from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, DPD’s defense teams worked through an extraordinary volume of trials and negotiated resolutions to felony and misdemeanor charges on behalf of thousands of clients. The department’s lawyers, mitigation specialists, investigators, and administrative staff demonstrated exceptional tenacity and ingenuity to achieve clients’ stated interests and preserve their humanity. 

Through their determination, they won not guilty verdicts at trial, convinced prosecutors to dismiss or reduce charges, secured clients’ release from inhumane conditions while incarcerated pretrial, and helped people avoid exiting jail only to end up on the street without support. DPD’s staff also continued fighting for resentencing hearings for people sentenced to decades in prison for offenses committed in their youth.

DPD worked in partnership with community, the department’s line staff, and other institutional system participants to propose court rules, advance legislation, and advocate for policies that to mitigate some impacts of the classist and racially disproportionate systems that oppress DPD’s clients.

Conditions Worsen for People Incarcerated in King County

Despite a surge of in-custody deaths in 2022, King County prosecutors continue to advocate for, and judges continued to impose, bail amounts that result in the incarceration of our community’s most vulnerable members. Rather than heed the calls of community advocates to close the King County Jail, the County attempted to adapt to the continued shortage of corrections officers by shuffling clients between its facilities in Seattle and Kent while contracting for additional capacity to cage people at the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) jail. Both strategies failed to address the excessive time spent by our clients in their cells. Disruptions in medications to support the physical and mental health of those jailed continued, and re-entry resources grew increasingly scarce. 

The shuttling between facilities increased hardships for clients and DPD staff as some clients failed to be transported to court, requiring rescheduled hearings and releases, unnecessarily prolonging clients’ time in jail. Following media reports about four people who died while in custody at SCORE, thankfully none of whom were DPD clients, the County terminated its contract after three months.

Heavy Caseloads Compound the Crisis

Against this backdrop, DPD’s staff worked tirelessly to minimize the time their clients spent incarcerated. Their efforts were stymied, not just by jail operational challenges, but also by King County’s Prosecuting Attorney’ Office, which continued to flood the County’s criminal legal system with new cases (primarily involving property crime) while also pressing to resolve older cases.

Attorneys faced a persistent lack of responsiveness from prosecutors when attempting to negotiate resolutions to serious charges, according to felony attorney Clare Riva. In one particularly exasperating case from last year, she recounted conveying her client’s willingness to plea to a lesser misdemeanor during an early stage of the case but Riva never got a response from the prosecutor assigned to the case. After committing substantial time and resources to preparing for trial, the State made the very same offer to her client on the eve of opening statements.

Felony attorney Noah Lerner echoed the frustration with the KCPAO’s willingness to press forward with weak charges on which jury after jury refused to convict his clients. In the final two months of 2023, Lerner said he secured three not guilty verdicts in a row – but had to begin each trial while still waiting for a verdict in the trial he’d just finished. That pace isn’t sustainable, in his opinion: “No one can do that forever without taking some time to decompress and time off from that level of intensity.”  While presiding judges in both Seattle and Kent have acknowledged that driving defense attorneys at this pace destabilizes the criminal defense bar, the pressure to push cases forward remained relentless.

While the KCPAO pointed to declining plea rates as the source of overload in the system, Clare Riva insightfully recognized that prosecutor’s possessed a far more efficient mechanism of reducing the backlog by "actually looking at their cases and talking to their witnesses and not filing things.”

Client-Centered Representation Gets Results

Dre Glaspy and his defense team were thrilled by the outcome of his 14-week trial. From left, Anna Samuel, Emily Willard, Alix Willard, Dre Glaspy, Michael Schueler, and Molly Gilbert.

One notable trial from 2023 exemplifies the importance of DPD’s client-centered approach to public defense. D’Andre Glaspy, who goes by Dre, spent 5 years in jail simply because he couldn’t afford the $1 million bail imposed in his case. Prosecutors alleged he was responsible for the death of his girlfriend’s two-year-old son Moses, when in actuality he had done everything in his power to save the boy’s life. 

Moses died after Mr. Glaspy, who was like a father to the boy, followed devastatingly incorrect instructions from a 911 operator on how to perform CPR.

Mr. Glaspy appreciated not just the work but the humanity that his defense team, Michael Schueler, Anna Samuel, Gary Shaleen, Alix Willard, Emily Willard, and Molly Gilbert, brought to his case: “They put their everything into it; they made my truth come to light. That means the world to me.”

Providing this kind of quality representation to every client is DPD’s goal. But heavy caseloads driven by unrelenting filings from prosecutors complicate that effort and lead to long stays in jail prior to trial. As the resulting strain caused more and more attorneys qualified to represent clients facing Class A charges like Dre’s to leave DPD in 2023, the transfer of those cases to an even smaller group of lawyers delayed those clients’ day in court even further.

Overcoming that “rapport deficit,” as felony attorney Kyle Ehlers described the challenge public defenders face in bonding with clients rightly suspicious of anyone involved in the criminal legal system, takes an incredible amount of work and attention to detail. “If you miss a couple calls or a couple text messages, you can destroy a relationship very easily. And that's something you can't necessarily get back.”

Mitigating the Harm of Racist Systems of Oppression

Katie Hurley (far right) joins coalition partners as Gov. Inslee signs law restricting youth sex offender registration.

To complement and support the outstanding representation DPD’s line attorneys provide to their clients, the department also worked at the city, county, and state level to reduce the harm of the systems that oppress poor people in King County. 

In 2023, DPD won a significant victory for the department’s current and future clients in passing a state law that prevents someone’s juvenile adjudications from leading to a longer sentence when convicted for wholly separate conduct as an adult. An “offender score” – based on prior convictions or adjudications – determines a person’s standard sentence range. 

The new law ended the automatic use of the vast majority juvenile court adjudications in calculating that score – but prior to passage, lawmakers stripped a provision from the proposal that would have made the reform retroactive and grant resentencing hearings for people serving unnecessarily long prison sentences as a result of the now-outlawed practice.

“This bill will make a tangible difference for thousands of our clients,” Anita Khandelwal said. “Long sentences are a driver of mass incarceration, and anything we can do to shorten those sentences and make a harshly punitive system a little less punitive is movement in the right direction. But we still have a long way to go. We’re disappointed that people now in prison due to sentences made longer by this harmful policy will not be resentenced, and we’ll continue to work with our partners to ensure people receive the relief they deserve.”

DPD also finally managed to get another legislative proposal over the finish line in 2023, passing a law to limit the list of circumstances that require a young person to register as a sex offender and completely ends registration for almost all youth under the age of 16. The reform was badly needed, as youth required to register are four times more likely to report having actively attempted suicide compared to unregistered youth; five times more likely to be approached by an adult for sex, and twice as likely to be the victim of sexual assault by an adult.

“The passage of this bill will help thousands of young people who will no longer suffer from the harm and trauma of registration,” Katie Hurley said. And in fact, it did: by the year’s end, more than 2,500 young people had their names removed from Washington’s sex offender registry because of the new law.

In addition to working to pass legislation, DPD proposed amendments to several court rules that would effectively render the private bail bonds industry unnecessary, expedite the availability of redacted discovery for DPD’s clients without adverse consequences for ongoing plea negotiations, and broaden judicial authority to dismiss a case in the interests of justice. As 2023 came to a close, Washington’s Supreme Court ordered all of those proposals published for public consideration and potential adoption in 2024.

In contrast to the extraordinary caseloads DPD’s felony attorneys carried in 2023, this year marked the beginning of a new contract with the City of Seattle that brought caseloads for the department’s new lawyers practicing in Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) much closer to the ABA’s new recommendations for misdemeanor defense. The new contract also provided more support staff for those lawyers, with three additional mitigation specialists, four additional paralegals, and two more legal assistants dedicated to DPD’s work representing clients in SMC.

The increased support and ability to dedicate more time to each client couldn’t have come at a better time. Following the decision in 2022 to ban clients on its “high utilizer” list from Community Court in 2022, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (SCAO) unilaterally walked away from a program that mitigated the harm of the criminal legal system on clients accused of nonviolent misdemeanors this year.

In a statement following the SCAO’s decision, Anita Khandelwal criticized the choice to “push people deeper into a criminal legal carceral system that is expensive, deadly, and deeply racially disproportionate.”

Without Community Court, most cases assigned to our teams practicing in SMC had to be resolved through traditional prosecution. That meant countless hours spent drafting and reviewing discovery, negotiating with prosecutors, and investigating allegations of minor property offenses like theft and criminal trespass – time and public resources that could have been better spent on finding housing for clients living on the street and community-based treatment for those struggling with substance use or mental health issues.

Despite the additional time required for cases in mainstream court, DPD’s lawyers have one advantage most public defenders in misdemeanor practices in other jurisdictions lack: most of their clients walk free while fighting their cases. According to Katie Melnick, an SMC attorney, the King County Jail’s restrictions on booking clients accused of misdemeanor offenses make an extraordinary difference in her clients’ lives.

“My out-of-custody clients can focus on fighting their cases and attacking the evidence,” Melnick said. “Then, if we plead, it’s because pleading is the best option for their goals, not just the best option to get them out of jail.”

SMC attorney Marième Diop agreed with the impact of incarceration on her clients’ objectives. “Because they have their freedom, and they’re still working their jobs and are still with their family, they’re more willing to take a case to trial,” she said. “But the ones who had to be in custody until trial, none of them wanted to take their cases to trial.”

Each division employs mitigation specialists who use their training in social work to develop relationships with clients and ensure prosecutors and judges consider the full context of a client’s life when making decisions about their case.

“Most of the clients that I talked to have had extensive histories of trauma,” said Lauren Cudaback, a mitigation specialist who came to DPD after several years working in crisis care for people with mental health issues. Through motivational interviewing and gathering records from a client’s past treatment providers, mitigation specialists like Lauren prepare social histories and mitigation reports that a client’s attorney then uses to advocate for a reduction in charges, a lower sentence, or an alternative to incarceration. Kelly Trujillo, another of DPD’s mitigation specialists, reported one prosecutor quoting her report during a sentencing hearing when explaining his agreement with the defense’s recommendation for a reduced sentence.

Over the course of 17 years working as a mitigation specialist, Roopali Dhingra says the attitude of prosecutors and judges to the work of people in her role has shifted dramatically. “When I started, abstinence was the thing,” she said. “Over the years, we have really gotten judges to understand the importance of harm reduction, and that relapse is part of recovery.”

“This is not a therapeutic environment.”

Although their work can sometimes help clients understand how the trauma they’ve endured has led to their involvement in the criminal legal system, mitigation specialists are quick to point out that they are not providing therapy to clients. The best they can offer a client who wants treatment is assistance in connecting with a community-based provider, but the stigma of a criminal charge or a client’s incarcerated status often frustrates those efforts.

“They don't get any therapeutic services in jail,” said Cudaback. “At the bare minimum, they can reach out to a psychiatrist to start medications, but they're not given tools, and they're not regularly meeting with the psychiatrists.”

Contrary to rhetoric from policymakers advocating for jail as a ‘tool’ to get people treatment for addiction, Cudaback says clients face a waitlist of “months and months” in jail before getting access to in-patient treatment for substance use disorder. “The path to treatment does not have to go through jail,” Cudaback pointed out. “There are resources in the community where you can get outpatient mental health and outpatient substance use treatment. And in fact, I would say it's easier to get those things when someone is not in jail.”

Trujillo echoed the importance of finding ways to get young clients the support they need outside the jail, fostering relationships that will hopefully outlast their entanglement in the youth legal system.

She remembers one case involving a young client where her work to document his lack of support prior to his arrest helped convince a judge to reduce his bail to an amount his family could afford. Upon release, Trujillo connected him with a mentor and found him housing that enabled him to live independently. Now, she says, “he’s gone above and beyond” in seeking a GED and thriving as a part of the supportive community his mentor helped him build for himself.

Overcoming the scarcity of community-based supports

The continued lack of investment in housing, treatment facilities, and other services needed by the clients can stymie mitigation specialists’ best efforts at achieving a client’s goals or complying with a judge’s order.

Unhoused clients offered the possibility of electronic home detention as an alternative to continued incarceration, for example, need to provide a permanent address to take advantage of the opportunity. But most shelters DPD’s mitigation specialists can connect their clients to only allow them to stay there overnight, meaning they would be in violation of their terms of release when they are forced to leave each morning. “There’s no pathway to get someone into long term housing from jail,” Cudaback said.

The unique circumstances of the only client she has found a place to live demonstrates the counterproductive nature of incarceration. Cudaback recounted finding a placement in an adult family home for an elderly black man with Alzheimer’s who was arrested while living in supportive housing. After years of experiencing chronic homelessness, his arrest and consequent stay in jail caused him to lose that housing. In turn, the judge overseeing his case would not authorize his release without an assurance that he had a permanent place to live, and so he languished in jail, unaware of why he was incarcerated, as Cudaback and the client’s attorney worked to find somewhere that would care for him. Once they did, a review of the client’s medical records demonstrating the extent of his illness convinced prosecutors to drop the charges against him.

Finding the four minutes that matter

April Tate began her career at DPD as a legal assistant after getting her paralegal certification during the early days of the pandemic. After spending a year as a paralegal, she transitioned into a role as an investigator and was immediately assigned to a team preparing for trial on behalf of a client charged with assault in the first degree. 

As the client and his attorneys were unwilling to waive the client’s right to a speedy trial while he sat in jail unable to bail out, April had to hit the ground running in her very first case as an investigator. She was tasked with sifting through hours and hours of footage from police officers’ body-worn cameras, their in-car video, and surveillance footage where prosecutors claimed the incident took place.

After processing the entirety of the footage turned over to the client’s lawyers in discovery, April found the four minutes when the alleged incident occurred and revealed, in her opinion, that the client was not actually involved in the conflict. Following up on her finding, she canvassed the neighborhood where the assault was alleged to have taken place and found a witness who backed up April’s theory that another person was responsible for the alleged incident.

"It really feels like we're making a tangible impact on people's lives."

For investigator David Becker, working in public defense brings a sense of purpose in serving the community where he grew up. After working in a low barrier homeless shelter in Seattle and serving the same population as a social worker, Becker left a job as a criminal investigator with the Air Force to join DPD in a similar role. 

In contrast to the investigation work he did in the Air Force, Becker said he values the immediacy of his work for DPD’s clients: “Steps I take in an investigation or phone calls I make really could lead to the exoneration of someone or getting a case dismissed, and you get to see that play out in real time.”

In addition to gathering and reviewing evidence, Becker appreciates the opportunity his role provides to make direct connections with clients. In one case from last year, he recalled the effort it took to locate a client who had been out of contact with his attorney for a significant period of time due to the client’s lack of stable housing. After hours spent driving around the client’s last known location and interviewing other people experiencing homelessness, Becker successfully found the client and reengaged him with his attorney.

Though this kind of work to reach a client might seem basic, Becker pointed out that the criminal legal system routinely fails to account for people who lack a permanent address or the ability to afford technology to stay in touch with their lawyer. “People have so many things going on in their lives, especially if they’re experiencing homelessness, that it’s really not fair to just presume that they don’t care about what’s happening to them legally because they don’t show up for a court date,” he said. 

“When you have clients that grew up in the same neighborhood as you, or went to the same elementary school, or had similar interactions with the community, those things kind of stick with you,” said Becker. “It reminds you of how fortunate you are to be in the position that you're in and how it could have gone differently earlier on in life.”

For people who the state seeks to have civilly committed to a mental health institution against their will, the only people working to advance their stated interests is their defense team at DPD. Facing the possibility of anywhere from 14 to 90 days of confinement and involuntary treatment, more than four thousand people in King County mental health care facilities relied on our representation in 2023.

DPD’s lawyers, mitigation specialists, and other support staff worked with clients to negotiate orders granting less restrictive alternatives to forced hospitalization, oppose the state’s petition to keep them confined to a treatment facility, or continue proceedings in the hope that a temporary extension of their time in a hospital may yield an uncontested release. Even when a client decides not to contest a commitment, DPD’s defense teams ensure their agency is respected and they are able to reach that decision without coercion from the state.

“It can be a very challenging practice,” said Hong Tran, an attorney in one of the two units at DPD who represent clients in ITA court. “You're dealing with people that can be in the throes of psychosis,” making it challenging to get clear direction from them. Complicating matters further, the quality of care patients receive varies greatly depending on the facility they get sent to once a designated crisis responder decides they should be held for an initial period of 120 hours against their will. Tran recalled one case from 2023 where a client who had fled religious persecution abroad had his legitimate trauma misdiagnosed as evidence of schizophrenia, resulting in an unnecessary month-long stay in the hospital.

A system bursting at the seams

In 2023, cases assigned to DPD in ITA court reached a tipping point where attorneys were in danger of exceeding their maximum caseload and required the department to oppose the assignment of new cases from Superior Court. In an unprecedented move, the Court initially ordered DPD to assign new cases regardless of caseload maximums without citing to any statute or case law that would grant the Court such authority. Following DPD’s opposition, the Court ultimately rescinded its order mandating assignment of counsel in excess of the annual limit for each attorney of 250 cases.

The resolution of this standoff with the Court did not end the intractable crisis in ITA court, however. Incoming assignments continue to push the limit of DPD’s capacity to represent clients facing involuntary commitment, just as the lack of investment in alternative interventions for people in crisis has flooded the involuntary treatment system itself with more patients than it can handle. DPD will not allow this systemic failure to compromise the quality of representation clients in ITA court receive, and has continued opposing assignments that would exceed attorneys’ caseload limits.

Lawmakers in King County and the state legislature took action last year to fund more treatment capacity and bolster the ranks of mental health treatment providers in the community, but those investments in building additional crisis care centers and training more staff will take years to pay off. Meanwhile, DPD’s clients in ITA court cycle in and out of the system without effective long-term treatment.

“We don’t have enough off-ramps for people as they start slipping into a crisis to try different modalities, so they don’t end up in the ITA system,” said Katy Wallace, who supervises one of DPD’s units representing clients in ITA court. “All roads seem to lead to here instead of other places.”

Even the programs designed to support clients released on less restrictive alternatives struggle to handle the volume of people who need assistance, and their inability to deliver care often lands clients back in a hospital court room facing the loss of their liberty. Since the key to keeping many clients stable enough to live independent lives depends on consistently taking medication, the PACT program—when properly staffed—sends a case manager to wherever a client is living to ensure they keep their prescriptions filled and take their medication.

But when that support fails due to a lack of staffing, clients can decompensate rapidly. “Some of my clients who have been enrolled in the PACT program, they haven't seen their case managers for weeks, sometimes a month, when they're supposed to be seeing these case managers every day,” said Tran. “You can see how these clients would deteriorate without anybody knowing. They're not taking their medications. They're not going to counseling. And nobody knows until the point that a crisis responder has them recommitted to the hospital, which is the most expensive way of triaging someone.”

Despite the challenging nature of the practice, Tran emphasized she finds meaning in the importance of having an advocate at the side of anyone facing the loss of their freedom in a system with a well-documented history of abuse. “We are here to ensure that they have a voice in the process.”