Chasing Gideon by Karen Houppert

defender’s office, told the Spokesman-Review that week, hoping she wouldn’t be sent to jail for being in contempt of court. He also affirmed Huneke’s skill as a lawyer. “She’s incredibly aggressive and effective,” he told the paper.
    It was a very risky strategy. One might even argue, a desperate gesture.
    How did the crisis in the courts reach this impasse?
    The last half century of indigent defense in Washington State reflects the experience of states across the nation. Like most states on the heels of the 1963 Gideon decision, Washington made a mad dash to meet the broad requirements of the law, leaving the details up to individual counties. The larger cities tended to create public defender offices, hiring full-time staff. The smaller towns and counties were more likely to pay an hourly rate to lawyers typically appointed by judges from a rotating list hired to defend the poor on an as-needed basis. A few jurisdictions in the state—only six in the 1970s—signed a flat-fee contract with an attorney or firm for all indigent defense. 27
    Over the decades, however, the flat-fee system became an expedient way for local governments to control costs. Local politicians and administrators could organize their budgets by agreeing to costs in advance, rather than paying an hourly wage to lawyers for representing clients. Under an hourly system, by contrast, one big murder case with a lawyer zealously representing his client—and chalking up some serious hours in the process—could decimate a small local budget. Thus by 2004, in a development representative of national trends, twenty-six counties in Washington embraced the flat-fee arrangement. But while it may save small local governments money, flat-fee contracts create a disincentive for lawyers to do quality work. Because many flat-fee attorneys also continue in private practice, where they charge paying clients hourly fees, flat-fee defenders are also incentivized to serve their paying clients at the expense of the indigent clients. As long ago as 1984, Washington State officially recognized that clients got wildly disparate defense, depending on which county they happened to live in and how public defense was funded there. The newly formed Washington Defender Association developed a set of professional standards that all public defenders should adhere to (including caseload limits based on the American Bar Association’s recommended limits) and began pushing the legislature to mandate compliance with the standards. By 1989, the Defender Association had made only incremental progress with its reform efforts. The state legislature passed a law requiring each county to adopt standards, but declined to specify what the standards should be. “The standards endorsed by the WashingtonState Bar Association for the provision of public defense services may [emphasis added] serve as guidelines,” the law read.
    Even these vague standards were routinely ignored. In March 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State issued a report warning that the “checkered system of legal defense” means there is “no guarantee that a person who is both poor and accused will get a fair trial.”
    Then a month later, the Seattle Times published a three-part investigative series revealing exactly how this “checkered system of legal defense” played out in a solitary county in the state, digging deep into the finances, court records, and history of Grant County, Washington. 28 In April 2004, three intrepid Times reporters discovered that about $500,000 was going to a Grant County public defender named Thomas J. Earl, who handled 413 felony cases himself in a single year as compared to the American Bar Association’s recommended 150. “At that rate, Earl could devote an average of only four hours per case,” the journalists observed. Earl retained about $255,000 himself and farmed out to