Rookie Public Defender Devoted To Her Clients Tireless Worker Motivated By Helping Those Who Are Less Fortunate

A wild mane of hair swirling around her face, Gloria Porter stops glaring at the prosecutor sitting next to her and fumbles for a file in a messy stack.

“Your honor, my client will be here,” Porter confidently tells the judge. The target of her glare has just asked for an arrest warrant for the defendant, who is five minutes late for court. “A warrant won’t be necessary.”

She whispers something angrily under her breath. Before the prosecutor can respond, the judge holds up his hand.

“I’ll give him 10 more minutes,” he says. “Until then, we’ll move on to the next case.”

That’s fine with Porter, who smiles as the prosecutor dismisses assault charges against her next client for lack of evidence. She makes a point to announce that the man accused of that crime is present in court.

“Just for the record,” she adds, throwing a half-wink to the prosecutor, who ignores her.

To Porter, a rookie in the county’s public defender’s office, even the smallest victories count in a job she sees as a one-woman war on injustice.

She stands up in court for accused criminals who can’t afford an attorney on their own, people charged with misdemeanors like drunken driving, possession of drug paraphernalia and disorderly conduct.

Like most public defenders, she handles about 150 cases at a time. For Porter, that translates into 70-hour work weeks, plus more time spent getting to know her clients.

Usually, she’s convinced the defendants are victims of a system “that picks on poor people” - something that infuriates the Gonzaga University law school graduate.

“The guy in the Mercedes has cocaine in his car,” she says, spreading her hands out. “But he doesn’t get pulled over for having a broken tail-light because he has the money to get it fixed.”

To fight back, Porter treats her clients with respect “because it’s not a crime to be poor.” She calls them by their first names, meets them for breakfast and begins many of her opening statements to jurors by saying what “an honor” it is to represent the defendant.

“I believe I’m supposed to be their friend,” Porter says of her clients.

Her style often annoys prosecutors, who have complained to her boss about her hair, the shortness of her skirts and the way she bluntly tells them what to do with their plea bargain proposals.

Some say she gets so emotional about the defendants that she forgets about the law and becomes frustrated by routine trial procedures.

“She acts like she’s their mom or something,” said one deputy prosecutor, who asked not to be identified.

A District Court clerk who sees Porter in action almost every day says defendants couldn’t hire a lawyer who would care more about them than Porter.

“She meets them, she likes them, she feels bad for them and she wants them out of jail, out of court, out of the entire situation,” says Cathy Reiber, who works for Judge Richard White. “She’s very passionate, but because of that she’s sometimes hard to work with.”

Porter doesn’t deny that.

She said she knows about the complaints from prosecutors about her courtroom style and appearance and it doesn’t bother her.

“They want to hurt my clients, man,” she says of prosecutors, clearly irritated they would do such a thing. “I’m just trying to stop that moving train.”

At 37, Porter is a late bloomer in the legal profession, having passed the bar exam just last year. But already she’s earned herself a reputation among colleagues as a “warrior” who enjoys daily courtroom battles.

Fellow public defender Karen Lindholdt calls Porter’s style “unconventional.”

“She’s not afraid to get in people’s faces day after day if she has to,” Lindholdt says. “Some of the rest of us, we’ll fight but then we go back and lick our wounds for a while. Not Gloria. She thrives in this environment.”

What sets Porter apart from other lawyers is the concern she has for her clients, says veteran public defender Jim Sheehan. When she’s not working, Porter is hanging out with other attorneys, talking about her cases and brainstorming trial strategies, he says.

“She outworks everybody,” says Sheehan, who has asked for Porter’s research help in several felony cases, including one high-profile murder. “She is phenomenal that way.”

Porter also knows that the poor are easy targets because they have no power base, Sheehan says. Nearly 85 percent of all people charged with crimes in Spokane County are represented by the public defender’s office, he says.

“Gloria treats them all with dignity,” Sheehan says. “That sort of makes her a maverick. Certainly very few in the system do that.”

Her boss, Richard Sanger, says Porter’s drive is impressive, especially because public defenders carry caseloads he calls “crushing.”

“It’s a thankless job sometimes,” Sanger says. “It’s easy to get worn out.”

Porter’s been warned that burnout could happen, but she can’t imagine it. She’s wanted to do this since she was 11, when her mother introduced her to a defense attorney representing a Texas man accused of killing his wife.

Porter remembers quizzing the lawyer about the evidence and his client. It wasn’t long before she reached a verdict: “That guy’s innocent!” she recalls saying, and out sprouted an 11-year-old’s first doubts about the criminal justice system. The man was later acquitted.

“Nothing could change my mind after that,” she says.

After high school, Porter spent time traveling, visiting her divorced parents and working with her sister in a shop outside Washington, D.C. When she was 29, she moved to Tennessee to live with her grandmother, who was in her 90s, and enrolled at Cumberland University.

Shortly before graduation, she received a letter from Gonzaga asking her to consider going to law school in Spokane. Her only other choice was the University of Miami, where Porter says she knew the beach would be a distraction from school.

She moved into an apartment near the Gonzaga campus and three years later started an internship at the public defender’s office.

Now she handles cases along with a dozen other misdemeanor public defenders, but admits she’s “a long way from being a pro.” Many of her breaks are spent in other courtrooms, watching her colleagues work. If it helps the people she represents, Porter says it’s worth it.

“My clients did not have the opportunities I had,” she says. “I’m fortunate and I want to share some of that fortune with them. They’re counting on me.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo