On a recent Friday afternoon at the King County Jail in downtown Seattle, a District Court judge, clerk, and county prosecutor tried to make it through their afternoon calendar of new arrest cases, sitting in a small courtroom inside the jail.
But in the next room, a man in a bright orange jumpsuit was talking to his lawyer, in a mix of Korean and English, so loud everyone could hear.
"We're gonna have to wait to do anything else," Judge Rebecca Robertson finally said. She paused the proceedings until the attorney-client meeting was over. Moments later, a Korean interpreter appeared on Zoom.
The defendants who could afford private lawyers were gone already. The ones remaining: a white 19-year-old suspected of robbing a 7-Eleven and a Chevron, a Black man who broke into a vacant floor of a building and slept there, and the loud man speaking Korean in the next room.
Their lawyer is Anita Khandelwal, the King County Public Defender, who is in the next room trying to interview the defendant.
Public defenders like Khandelwal have a front-row seat to the homelessness, drug, and mental health crises playing out on the streets of Seattle and across the state. It’s a job that’s never been easy, but King County has tried to make it better in the last decade by making it a government job with good pay and retirement.
Still, Khandelwal said in September that the public defense system was at its breaking point in a Seattle Times op-ed. She told KNKX that King County courtrooms are in danger of going the way of nearby Yakima County, where people are reportedly waiting weeks to get a public defender.
There's a public defender shortage in many parts of the country, such as Oregon. In Washington, rising costs of public defense have prompted three other counties to sue the state for funding. The state director of public defense is calling for drastic measures.
This was a typically chaotic day in the jail courtroom, although the calendar was much shorter than usual, Khandelwal said. The interpreter's voice boomed through the screen, then she froze, or asked the lawyers to speak up. There was conflicting info in the system about when this man was booked into jail: was it mere hours after his arrest or the next morning?
The yelling stopped in the next room; the defendant entered and popped in his dentures. Clumps of hair were missing from the back of his head. When proceedings got underway, he interrupted the judge, speaking Korean interspersed with a few English phrases. Khandelwal tried to quiet him.
He was arrested two days earlier at Sea-Tac Airport with a pair of scissors. Police recognized him; he’s actually been banned from the airport previously. Later on, he said through an interpreter that he wanted to travel to Washington, D.C., and New York, and that the scissors were to cut up food for the road.
"Oh no, I didn't guilty," he told the judge.
"It's okay," Khandelwal said.
The prosecutor wanted him charged with second-degree assault. But the previous week, he was released from another jail in South King County, found mentally unable to stand trial.
"He’s alleged simply to have held scissors and 'yelling unintelligible words,'" Khandelwal argued to the judge.
Khandelwal is not just a public defender; she’s the King County Public Defender, who supervises over 400 government lawyers and staff. One day every month, she volunteers for this court calendar. She started during COVID lockdowns but keeps it up to stay in touch with the front lines.
Her public defenders each shoulder 70 to 80 felony cases a year in county courts, or roughly 200 misdemeanors in Seattle and other municipal courts in the suburbs.
How bad the workload issue is at the King County Department of Public Defense is not quite clear: an audit from before Khandelwal took office found administrative issues around time entry, data, and measuring performance. The department has made progress on the audit's findings under Khandelwal's leadership, but the King County auditor wrote in 2022 that not all those issues have been resolved.
Public defenders aren't the only ones in the system saying they're overburdened — the city of Seattle is one of many struggling to hire police, even with hiring incentives.
"You see it in the jail, too; they don't have enough jail guards. We don't have enough lawyers," Khandelwal said. "So even if you want to just keep processing people and caging them, you can't. We don't have the resources to do that."
Last year a RAND corporation study of 17 states over 17 years found a public defender could spend anywhere from 13 to nearly 300 hours on one case.
The shortage is partly because people can do less work and make more in the private sector, despite efforts to improve the job in King County in the last few decades. Khandelwal remembers what it used to be like; she started as a rookie defender in this jail courtroom in 2008.
"I still remember my first day. They said, 'go to the jail and quash a warrant.' I had no real idea what a warrant was; no idea where the jail courtroom was," Khandelwal said.
The system was a messy group of nonprofits then. In the last decade, it has shifted to one government department. Now, defenders get a week of trial skills training and a public retirement.
Even their critics say they've improved.
"I mean, they are some of the best attorneys that I have ever seen, when I was a judge, come into my courtroom," said Judge Ed McKenna, who retired from Seattle municipal court in 2020.
He and Khandelwal have clashed publicly, and she’s gotten plenty of criticism from other elected officials for protesting against a new youth detention center and calling for the King County Jail to be shut down.
After that Friday's proceedings, Khandelwal headed back to her office, down James Street, a hill she’s hoofed many times. It never gets easier. The work, too, feels Sisyphean. Take the client who spoke over her and the judge in Korean.
"He was released," she said, from another county jail the week previous, "after being found incompetent, and like, we've just turned around and like shoved him back into the system that did absolutely nothing for him the first time around, right? Like, what are we doing?"
She walked through the Department of Public Defense headquarters, which was once Seafirst Bank. Old vaults with three-layered steel doors now hold a file room and a break room.
It’s ironic for the public defenders. Across the street are crowded tents. A staffer said they were removed by the city this morning, but are already back.
"All you have to do is take a walk around the block here, and you'll see we’re failing," said Kim Cronin, who heads the team that gets clients to treatment if they want it or a judge orders it.
"Since COVID, a lot of the judges are supportive of us getting clients out into the community, which means we're trying really more than ever to link people to treatment services. But the options have just gotten smaller and smaller," Cronin said, bringing her hands together to demonstrate how mental health and drug treatment facilities have been shrinking over the decades she’s worked in public defense.
All this makes the job demoralizing.
"How many times ... [do] they meet their client and their client goes, 'I want a real lawyer.' And that's — they just gotta get past that insult," said Dan Satterberg, who was King County prosecutor from 2007 to last year. His staff argued opposite the public defenders.
This year, Khandelwal and her allies are lobbying the county council to fix the caseload problem. A bill introduced in the legislature would provide more state funding.
What Khandelwal has advocated for since she took the position in 2018 – fewer prosecutions – seems unlikely, given recent elections that swung to candidates decrying decriminalization.
"We used to have coffee in my office," Satterberg said. "Just close the door and share...I think there were times where she said this wasn't worth it. And she would talk privately about – ‘can't, can't keep doing this job. It's ruining my health and my life.' But she's still there. And she's — she's — she's a fighter, and I appreciate her."
Khandelwal listened to tape of Satterberg saying that and sort of nodded. She and Satterberg disagreed about who should be prosecuted. However, she commiserated about managing this crumbling system and its old bank offices full of lawyers.
"It's a really hard job," Khandelwal said. "And I both hire people who are fighters and really want to oppose authority, and I’m also a figure of authority."
As for the client from the airport, the day after that appearance, he was released to court-ordered treatment (records don't indicate where or whether he was able to get into treatment). The prosecutor – Satterberg’s successor, Leesa Manion – filed charges for second-degree assault with a deadly weapon. Last week, the client didn’t appear at his court hearing, and the judge issued a warrant.
