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Larry Jefferson went to justices of the Washington State Supreme Court last fall with an unprecedented request for a public defense system he told them is “on the verge of collapse.”
Jefferson, director of the state’s Office of Public Defense , asked them to halt, for 90 days, the assigning of new felony cases to public defenders if the accused was not in custody so they could clear a backlog of clients who were in jail.
And, after three months, he wanted the court to bar any jurisdiction from assigning new clients to public defenders with a caseload exceeding 90 cases in a year.
“It has become quite clear that the public defense system in Washington is under significant strain and in need of decisive action,” he wrote in his Nov. 27 memo .
Too many cases, too few lawyers and too little funding imperil the ability of local governments across Washington to provide timely, equitable and effective counsel to every person unable to afford a lawyer, he wrote.
Jefferson knew he had essentially asked justices to violate the constitutional right to counsel for those not in custody in order to preserve that right for those who were locked up.