When the Metropolitan King County Council approved County Executive Ron Sims’ $3.4 billion budget last month, it included increases for both the prosecuting attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department. But it also included almost $1 million in cuts from the county’s public-defense system, a traditionally underfunded program that provides court-appointed attorneys for low-income and indigent people accused of crimes.
The 2005 budget situation is so bad that Northwest Defenders, one of four nonprofit public-defense firms that are under contract to the county, will be run at a deficit and might have to close its doors.
“We’re the least favored in human services,” says Eileen Farley, director of the Northwest Defenders Association. In 2004, the 22-lawyer firm laid off three staffers and remaining lawyers took a pay freeze. With the budget cuts, she says, the situation is even more dire. “I don’t have anyone left to lay off.”
County officials say they made the cut because in 2005 prosecutors will be handling fewer complex aggravated- murder cases, which cost $234,000 a year for public defense. With the recently settled case of cop killer Charles Champion, and prosecutors charging minor felonies (theft, for example) as misdemeanors, there will be fewer expensive cases to defend.
“If there is no increase, we’ll be looking at a big deficit,” says Bob Boruchowitz, director of the Defenders Association, which handles much of the public-defense work in King County. He says he hopes that Sims and the council will reconsider the cuts come January.
There might be some support for that on the council. In a letter to Northwest Defenders, County Council member Dow Constantine wrote that he was committed to maintaining funding for public defense. “Our system of justice is tremendously weakened when we fail to live up to our promise for a fair and competent defense for all who stand accused of a crime.”
Public defense attorneys say much of the problem lies with King County’s Office of the Public Defender, which administers contracts for public defense. They say that OPD director Anne Harper built a model to forecast expenses that made mistakes in estimating rents for the agencies and didn’t include salary increases for support staff. Neither did it do anything to address the disparity in salaries between public defenders and prosecutors, which can be as much as $20,000 a year. Harper calls that “slippage.” The County Council will hear testimony from Harper and the public- defense agencies in January.
