Spokane County appears poised to overturn decades of precedent and hand the responsibility of representing indigent suspects to lawyers who work for a nonprofit rather than the county. The move comes as turnover in the Public Defender's Office has meant more time in jail for some clients as they await progress on their cases.

Every release from the Spokane County Jail, from the least serious to the most, from allegation to conviction to dismissal, tells a different story. But we apply the same blunt tool to every one: a jail cell, at a daily rate of $133.

Spokane County’s top law enforcement officials say proposed budget cuts would force them to lay off deputies and prosecute fewer cases.

Thursday was the last day on the job for Deputy Spokane County Prosecutor Joe Kuhlman, who resigned. But nobody is saying why.

Convicted killer Roy H. Murry will not face the death penalty. But barring a successful appeal, the gun-loving Iraq War veteran will never again walk free.

A jury convicted Roy H. Murry of murdering three members of his ex-wife’s family in a grisly ambush that ended when he torched the family’s Colbert-area home to try to conceal his crimes.

Jurors will now decide whether Roy H. Murry will spend the rest of his life in prison for a grisly triple murder or walk free from a prosecution that lacked direct evidence such as a murder weapon. The jury began deliberations 3 p.m. Monday afternoon after weeks of testimony in the killings of Terry and Lisa Canfield, and John Constable.

A jury of eight women and four men has been selected to hear the case against 31-year-old Roy H. Murry, who faces three counts of aggravated murder in connection to the deaths of his estranged wife’s family.

Roy H. Murry either planned and carried out a “swift attack” in May 2015, when he shot three members of his estranged wife’s family and then waited in vain to ambush her before setting fire to the victims’ Colbert home; or Murry, a 31-year-old Republican who was once considered to fill an open state Senate seat, is the victim of Spokane County sheriff’s detectives who immediately focused on the disabled Iraq War vet and pulled out every stop to convince prosecutors he’s a killer. “Mr. Murry has no history of violence,” Public Defender Tom Krzyminski wrote earlier this year in court records. “To date, the physical evidence against Mr. Murry is either nonexistent or a stretch of the limits of imagination.”

A first-degree murder trial began Tuesday in the 2007 bludgeoning death of an adult-bookstore owner, even though another man already was convicted for that crime. The man on trial now, Julio J. Davila, 46, became a suspect last year after DNA evidence was re-run on the murder weapon. Davila’s name came back as a match in a computer database of convicted felons.

Three witnesses put the gun in her boyfriend’s hand either during or immediately after a Spokane man was shot last December following a bizarre altercation. But Melinda R. Barrera admitted pulling the trigger and a jury convicted today her of second-degree murder while acquitting her boyfriend of all charges.