Seattle panel puts two conditions on mayor's public-defense plan

By Bob Young
Seattle Times staff reporter

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To protect Seattle's public-defender system, which has been hailed as a national model, council members voted to impose two key conditions on an open-bidding process proposed by Mayor Greg Nickels.

First, firms bidding to defend poor Seattleites would have to be nonprofits. Second, they would have to maintain the current standard of no more than 380 cases per lawyer in a year.

Such protections could prevent a "race to the bottom" among public defenders, said John Strait, a Seattle University law professor and one of a dozen lawyers who critiqued Nickels' plan at a meeting with city officials last week.

Edsonya Charles, the mayor's adviser on criminal-justice issues, told members of the council's public-safety committee not to worry. The caseload standard would be maintained and was inadvertently left out of a request for bids, Charles said.

She also said the mayor is trying to improve, not degrade, legal services and has no bias in favor of for-profit firms. Nickels' aides have stressed that the mayor is sensitive to public defenders' concerns because his father founded a local public-defender agency, the Society of Counsel for Accused Persons, in 1976.

Under the current system, Seattle pays King County to provide public-defense services for Municipal Court. In 2004, the city will pay about $5.2 million, including $1 million for the county's administrative costs.

By contracting directly with two law firms, Nickels hopes to save at least $300,000 the city has been paying King County for administrative services.

The new contracts would cover public-defense services in Seattle Municipal Court — the state's busiest court, where each year thousands of defendants face criminal charges up to gross misdemeanors, punishable by as much as a year in jail.

Councilman Nick Licata, who sponsored the legislation that would amend Nickels' proposal, said he was trying to prevent Seattle from going down the same path as Grant County, which contracted with for-profit law firms that then provided poor service.

Seattle Times staff reporter Ken Armstrong contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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