Chasing Gideon by Karen Houppert Page A

subcontractors additional cases and the remaining funds. Needless to say, he hired those who would work cheap, and the work they produced for him was below par. Earl’s trial acquittal rate between 1999 and 2003 was 6 percent (compared to the state average of 15 percent), while his guilty plea rate was 88 percent (compared to the state average of 76 percent). Reporters discovered that there were two findings of “incompetence” against him, one in a rape case and one in a drug case, and that his license was suspended in February 2004 after the bar “found misconduct in eight cases, including three in which Earl solicited money from indigent clients or their relatives.”
    The reporters also investigated another Grant County public defender, Guillermo Romero, who had represented more than a thousand clients over the previous seven years but had taken only twenty-three cases to trial, losing all of them. “Twice, reviewing courts ruled that he was so incompetent, the adversarial system had collapsed,” reporters noted. “He was supposed to punch holes in weak cases, to intercept police and prosecutors when they ran afoul, to investigate and analyze and advocate,” the Times noted. “But legal basics eluded him. In a rape case, he once filed a motion seeking‘D and A testing.’ What he meant was DNA.” In addition to being convicted of assaulting his girlfriend, being sued by creditors, and going into drug rehab, Romero was found by the bar association to have “committed theft and solicited money from relatives of court-appointed clients.”
    The Seattle Times also raised questions about systemic problems. How was there so little oversight that incompetent attorneys could continue landing lucrative contracts? How had they been assigned such staggeringly high caseloads? How common were flat-fee contracts?
    In fact, like most states, Washington was plagued by sweeping problems that were jeopardizing equal justice for the poor. Reflecting a national trend, felony filings in the last fourteen years in Grant County had jumped from 278 in 1990 to 1,070 in 2003, the Seattle Times reported. Meanwhile, funding for public defense in the same period had gone only from $240,000 to $500,000—meaning the caseload had more than tripled while the spending for defense had only doubled. The impact was measurable. “Grant County leads the state in the percentage of Superior Court cases that are resolved with a guilty plea,” the Times reported, noting that 85 percent of clients accepted a guilty plea though “[i]ndigent defendants in Grant County have repeatedly complained of court-appointed attorneys failing to investigate their cases or claims of innocence, leaving defendants with little choice but to take whatever deal is offered.” Yet, despite the terrible outcomes, county governments continued to opt for the cost-effective flat-fee contracts.
    The Seattle Times series shined a rare spotlight on indigent defense, and a shocked public—and legal community—finally insisted that something had to be done. On the heels of the exposé, the Washington State Bar Association appointed a Blue Ribbon Panel on Criminal Defense to investigate. The panel reported in May 2004 that the mandate for any kind of standards is “being ignored in many jurisdictions and there is no effective enforcement program.” Further, “[t]he lack of enforceable standards, especially caseload standards, jeopardizes the ability of even the most dedicated defenders to provide adequate representation.” The panel blamed inadequate funding, poor contracting practices (“especiallyfixed-rate defense contracts”), and inadequate oversight or accountability.
    At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State filed a class action suit, Best, et al. v. Grant County . “Despite knowing of the deficiencies in the Grant County public defense system,