Spokane public defenders are at a ‘critical moment’ as homelessness crackdown stresses courts and caseloads

A recent spike in citations driven by Spokane’s new homelessness laws comes at a “critical moment” when public defenders are already faced with stricter limits on caseloads, city officials warned Monday.

In October, the city significantly toughened its laws against camping in public or sitting on the sidewalk, giving police more discretion over whether to issue a citation or refer people to homeless services.

Under a 2025 state Supreme Court ruling, public defenders across Washington must reduce their caseloads by about 10% each year until 2036, by which point their maximum caseload needs to be about a third of what it currently is. Yet in the first three months of this year, Spokane’s public defenders saw a roughly 8% increase in their caseload, Chief Public Defender Nick Antush and Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates reported Monday.

“We’re at this critical moment right now where we’ve seen this increase in case filings at a time where new case load standards are taking effect,” Yates said.

Without taking steps to lighten the load, Antush warned that a growing number of indigent defendants won’t be quickly assigned a public defender, which could violate their right to a speedy trial and result in their cases being dismissed. He pointed to a decision by the Oregon Supreme Court in early February that threw out more than 1,400 criminal cases because defendants weren’t getting timely legal representation.

Antush noted his office has already had to tell the municipal court more than 160 times this year that it couldn’t take on a client who had been assigned to them. The city needs to hire two more public defenders just to keep up with this year’s caseload requirements, Yates said, let alone keep abreast of the mandatory 10% reduction in future years.

Caseloads

National caseload standards have been effectively unchanged since the 1970s, when the federal Department of Justice-funded National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended that attorneys not exceed 150 felony cases or 400 misdemeanor cases per year.

But it took more than 40 years for the state of Washington to adopt that standard, Antush noted Monday, and only after a series of lawsuits.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington sued the cities of Burlington and Mount Vernon in 2012, saying that those cities jointly contracted with two part-time lawyers to represent indigent defendants in misdemeanor cases. The two lawyers together handled more than 2,100 cases in 2010 alone, the plaintiffs said, more than double the 400-caseload national standard.

Those lawyers were so overburdened that public defenders in those cities were “little more than a sham,” U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik wrote at the time.

In 2012, the state Supreme Court made the national standards mandatory in Washington state, limiting caseloads for felonies to 150 and 400 for misdemeanors.

But these standards are also inadequate to avoid “endangering” defendants’ right to legal representation, according to a 2023 National Public Defense Workload Study. The standards set 50 years ago failed to differentiate the work involved in different kinds of crimes, “giving equal weight to a burglary, a sexual assault, and a homicide,” but also don’t account for the expanded scope of a public defender’s duties or modern forensics that didn’t exist in the ’70s, according to the report.

Later that year, the state Supreme Court requested that the Washington State Bar Association review the study’s findings and provide recommendations. In 2025, after an extensive review, the state’s highest court adopted significant reductions in maximum caseloads for public defenders, capping attorneys to 47 felony cases or 120 misdemeanor cases per year, effective as of the beginning of 2026.

However, while the court ruled that the new caseload standards “must be accomplished as soon as reasonably possible,” it gave jurisdictions 10 years to come into full compliance, requiring at least a 10% caseload reduction per year.

Between 2022 and 2024, Spokane’s public defenders averaged roughly 320 and 360 misdemeanor cases per year, Antush said.

“That’s well within the 400-case standard,” he added. “The problem we face now is that the standard has gone lower, and the caseload has gone up.”

The need for public defenders has also gone up in recent years, and not just because of an increase in cases, Yates noted in a brief interview. The percent of defendants in Spokane Municipal Court who cannot afford a lawyer has risen from roughly 70% before the COVID-19 pandemic to about 90% today, Yates said.

If a judge assigns a public defender an indigent defendant who they can’t fit into their caseload, the public defenders effectively have to refuse until they work through their load, Antush noted.

But the right to a speedy trial puts a 90-day timer on cases if the defendant is out of custody and a 60-day timer if they’re incarcerated, he added. Both of these requirements are nonnegotiable, and these two brick walls are closing in on the Spokane Public Defender’s Office.

“You could theoretically see individuals who are unrepresented running into a speedy trial issue,” Antush said. “You’re going to have individuals potentially running up against speedy trial violations that will lead to dismissals, potentially, of these charges.”

Solutions

Yates on Monday noted a number of steps that the city is taking to try to both increase the capacity of the public defender’s office and lighten their load.

Work is underway to fill a current vacancy in the office, and likely to request the council to approve funding for a new position, and city officials are also looking to bring on four third-year law students as interns who, combined, could take on the caseload of a single attorney.

Antush noted that low pay is likely making it more difficult to fill the office’s vacant positions. City Hall is reviewing whether to increase the minimum pay for new hires, Yates added.

The city is also focused on diverting more cases from the courts, Yates noted, including by expanding its homeless outreach teams and potentially creating a second daytime navigation center in a bid to connect more people to homeless services “so law enforcement doesn’t need to become engaged and issue citations,” Yates said.

The Spokane Police Department is working to provide patrol officers with a more robust catalogue of social service programs that it can route unhoused people to, rather than arresting them, she added.

Yates also noted that Spokane is one of relatively few cities that allows its police to directly file cases to the court system, rather than requiring a prosecutor to review charges that the police recommend before deciding whether to file a case. The city is reviewing whether to reform that process, Yates said, and expects fewer cases would be filed following prosecutorial review.

Councilwoman Kate Telis, who previously worked as an assistant district attorney in New Mexico and now chairs the Public Safety and Health Committee where Yates and Antush presented, expressed some shock that Spokane allows police to directly file charges.

“As a former prosecutor, I have received a lot of cases that have even come under prosecutorial review that simply don’t have the facts to pursue that case, so from my perspective, that seems like one of the first things to handle,” Telis said.