What Whatcom County’s lead public defender called “a violation” of inmates’ rights in early May — nine in the county jail at the time didn’t have attorneys — has been relieved somewhat, after the county’s Office of Assigned Counsel took the unusual step of hiring an in-house lawyer.
The nine incarcerated defendants were among 43 overall who did not have legal representation for their court cases. These included 26 misdemeanor cases, 12 felonies and five juveniles, Whatcom County Public Defender’s Office Director Starck Follis said in May.
As of Thursday, June 29, that number has been reduced to six, said Dave Reynolds, the director of Superior Court administration, who runs the Office of Assigned Counsel.
Four of the six are felony cases in Superior Court, one is a misdemeanor in District Court and one is a juvenile, Reynolds said. Also, four of these unrepresented defendants are currently behind bars in Whatcom County Jail.
The Office of Assigned Counsel’s job is to find private attorneys who will take the cases of defendants who can’t afford their own lawyers and who can’t be represented by the public defender’s office due to conflicts of interest.
“In addition to our contract (with private attorneys), we have hired a staff attorney in Assigned Counsel to take cases,” Reynolds said in a June 29 email. “She started June 12. As of today, we are down to six cases not having attorneys.”
Follis said Whatcom County is caught up in a statewide, if not nationwide, shortage of attorneys who are willing or qualified to take court-appointed cases.
The public defender also noted that a significant gap in legal representation remains, even after the Office of Assigned Counsel hired its own lawyer.
The office’s new lawyer “is not qualified under the court rules to take certain serious (mostly violent and sex) felonies,” Follis said in an email. “When we conflict or overflow those serious cases, it is very difficult to find lawyers to represent those people, despite Assigned Counsel’s efforts to find even lawyers out of this area.”
Prior to the new hire, Reynolds had said the Office of Assigned Counsel couldn’t keep up with the demand for lawyers among the county’s indigent defendants, despite reaching out to private attorneys from as far away as Tacoma.
