Chasing Gideon by Karen Houppert Page B

defendant Grant County has failed to take reasonable steps to protect the constitutional rights of indigent persons,” lawyers for the plaintiff stated in the complaint. 29 “Indeed, even after the Washington State Bar Association recommended in June 2003 that Tom Earl be disbarred for misconduct as a public defender, defendant Grant County refused to terminate Earl as the public defender and refused to terminate his exclusive public defense contract with Grant County. Defendant Grant County allowed Earl to remain in this position until finally, in February 2004, the Washington Supreme Court suspended Earl from the practice of law pending the determination of the appeal of his disbarment.” According to the ACLU, problems mounted. “Even then, defendant Grant County failed to take reasonable action to protect the rights of indigent persons. Although Earl’s suspension had long been a possibility, defendant Grant County failed to make reasonable preparations for the suspension. The Board has, instead, allowed the public defense system to descend into chaos. Things have become so bad that the judges of the Grant County Superior Court recently had to issue a plan that calls for the conscription of attorneys, some with no criminal defense experience, to represent indigent persons charged with felonies.” 30
    The need for a serious overhaul of the state’s indigent defense practices had long been indisputable; now, for the first time, the public understood the scope of the problem—and the potentially devastating consequences.
    All along the way, public defenders make hard choices about how they will represent their clients. Carol Dee Huneke, faced with the possibly dire consequences of taking Sean Replogle’s case to trial before she was ready, had set aside her other hundred cases to focus on Sean’s. With the judge’s refusal to delay Sean’s trial hanging over her, Huneke spent the weekend worrying about her fate for publiclyrefusing to proceed with a trial when she was unprepared and overworked. Would she be reprimanded? Formally disciplined? Fired? Jailed? She hustled all weekend to collect the facts on the public defender system and the evidence needed to bolster her argument. When it came down to it, this was a fairly straightforward ethical matter: “It was just wrong to proceed,” she says.
    Sean and his family have nothing but good things to say about Huneke. “She felt so much that I was innocent that she was prepared to go to jail and be held in contempt because she needed more time to prepare right,” said Sean. “And she had a three-year-old then. I thought, ‘Wow, if the mother of a three-year-old is ready to go to jail for me, if she is fighting that much, I have to fight twice as much.’” Sean recognized that his life was, to some extent, in Huneke’s hands, and that bond was powerful and important. “I think she believed in me as a person, too,” he said.
    That thought sustained him.
    When Huneke showed up before the judge on Monday morning and made her case—again—for delaying the start of the trial, she spoke persuasively. Someone had also tipped off a local reporter about the showdown in court; this time the judge granted Huneke a three-week extension. The trial would start in March.
    Sean and his family sat through seven days of the trial. Sean wore khakis and a dress shirt and tie that his aunt, a teacher in Michigan, had sent him because the family had no money to buy proper clothes. (“I still have them hanging up in my closet,” he would tell me eight years later, “to wear to job interviews.”)
    The way Sean saw it, the prosecution spent three days painting a picture of him as a “crazy street racer.” The prosecutor described his car as a gun, a deadly weapon that Sean kept “firing and missing until [he] hit Mr. Stack.”
    Huneke really wanted Sean to take the stand and