I’m in a small, mostly beige upstairs hearing room in Spokane when I find myself thinking way too much about footwear.
I’ve started to develop a quick hack to identify public defenders in the wild by paying attention to their shoes. At the table of attorneys in front of me, the prosecutors on one side are wearing the expected formal footwear, while the public defenders on the other side tend toward something that strikes a better balance toward comfort than strict formality.
It’s about 1:30 p.m. and I’ve been shadowing Dustin “Dusty” Howie, an assistant public defender for the city of Spokane, for about five hours. More accurately, I’ve been power walking to keep up with Howie while he scurries between his office, courtrooms, and the jail. Howie confirms to me that comfortable shoes are a must for this type of work and this type of pace. He used to wear a Fitbit step-counter, he says, but stopped because the notifications were getting out of hand “and I would always hit above 10,000.”
Howie spends much of his time on his feet. In court, he usually stands in the back ready to confer with both newly assigned clients and existing ones. Otherwise, he operates in the hallways, his desk a strip of particle board bolted to the wall.
In a gray suit, with a brown leather bag slung over his shoulder, neatly trimmed goatee, and cushiony brown leather shoes, Howie is chatty, personable, and comes across with an almost suspiciously cheery attitude toward exhaustion that I usually associate with Ironman triathletes.
“Now, because I’ve got 40 minutes until next appearance, I’ve got time to prepare for first appearances,” Howie says as we’re sitting in his office in between the early morning docket in district court and the slightly later morning in-custody appearances.
His office—shared with his wife, Alex, who was first hired on a grant to handle Blake cases before coming in full-time—is a testament to a highly kinetic work life. What follows is a short list of items I spot on a bookshelf in their office:
- Files in manilla folders
- Files in spiral binders
- Packets of madras lentils
- Cheetos
- Cans of chili
- Cans of soda
- A dog leash and poop bags
In addition to parenting two young children, the couple parents foster dogs, some of whom get adopted by their coworkers. Today Honey and Lily are wandering from room to room in search of pets. Outside the office, Howie and Alex still have to squeeze work into the margins of home.
“It’s not uncommon that we come home and do work, and because we have kids it has to wait until they go to bed,” Howie says.
“It is a lot,” Alex continues. “Your days and afternoons are packed. I’m kind of relishing today because I don’t have court so I can actually get some stuff done.”
By noon Howie had appeared in municipal court, closed cases for two clients in district court, and represented about 10 first appearances. These first appearances also highlight stark differences between the life of a public defender and everyone else: The judge and prosecutor sit together in the hearing room, while Dustin appears over video from the jail. This setup creates a host of difficulties: Imagine the frustrating video-audio experience of a Zoom call with a bad connection, while trying to provide legal representation to a shackled person whom you’ve likely never met, with a line behind you of other in-custody clients waiting for their turn. Today there are also technical issues with the court’s internal network—Howie tells me the system is great when it’s working, but court grinds to a halt when it’s not. The bailiffs have also decided to bring in one client who’s shirtless and shackled to a wheelchair, and they don’t seem too concerned about taking him out of the room when he starts interrupting other people ahead of him by frequently and loudly saying things like “hurry up, bitch.”
“Do you know what lunar phase we’re in?” the judge says after sending away that client for being disruptive. “Feels like a full moon.”
Not long ago, Howie would have been in the room with the judge and prosecutor. Before becoming a public defender, he worked for the Office of the Spokane Prosecuting Attorney. He started there as an intern, got hired full-time, but jumped ship because, as he describes, “the public defenders came calling.” Steven Clark, another local attorney I meet when he whispers in my ear about Howie, “he’s wonderful; make him look good,” took an opposite route. Clark started in public defense and stayed for about four years before shifting into private practice where the pay was better, the hours fewer, and the stress lower. Unlike almost any other practice area, public defense provides a new attorney with a wealth of real-world experience but, Clark says, “there’s just so many cases, and every time you think you’ve gotten to zero they pile more on you.”
Howie says he usually has between 80 and 100 cases on his plate. It’s a lot, but he and Alex have found a balance, which is helped by working in the same office and being able to tag team and help each other out both at work and at home.
Although no one is going to get rich in public defense, in Spokane Howie has found a job that pays the bills and, because his office is represented by one of the city’s largest unions, provides some perks almost unheard of in other public defense offices, such as consistent pay increases and even allowances for CLE courses. Some people in the office have been working there 10 or even 20 years. Spokane public defenders have such a good deal that they refer to the benefits as “golden handcuffs.”
“Almost nobody else leaves,” Howie says.
“I mean why would you? It’s so good,” Alex adds.
Howie works a hefty caseload, unsurprisingly, and his colleagues do a good job of sharing the load to ensure that the office can meet the substantial demand without burning out any one attorney. He and Alex also try to share their skills and knowledge where it’s needed. Attorneys in the office have met with other offices in the state to provide education on such topics as the state toxicology lab, which has its own backlog of about 12 to 14 months, Howie says. In fact, following our interview, Howie and Alex are going to scoop up the kids and head to King County to give a presentation. Howie says he and other Spokane public defenders also share their resources as much as possible with other public defense contractors who don’t have an office with support staff, for instance.
My day with Howie showed me a Spokane public defense system that appears highly functional, but operates at a blistering pace. If the public defense system in Kennewick (where I spent the day shadowing another local public defender) is an assembly line, Spokane is speed dating. In just the afternoon, Howie confers with about a half-dozen clients, most of whom he meets in the hallways, leaning against those little wedge tables to handle everything from consoling a brother who says his non-English-speaking sister was badgered and threatened by police, to simple license suspensions, to a case that should’ve been a prosecutorial slam dunk but—in a move that even surprised Howie—got thrown out due to police misconduct. What I saw in Spokane differed greatly from the scene in Kennewick, but when I talk to Howie about the new caseload standards, I hear something similar. There are about 20 staff attorneys in Howie’s office; to fit within lower caseload standards they would likely need two to three times that staffing level.
“I love the idea of having fewer cases,” Howie says when we discuss this at the end of the day. “I think it’s necessary and something they should do. I just don’t know how they’re going to come up with the funding.”
Colin Rigley. Colin worked as a print news journalist and editor in California, as well as a content strategist in the Puget Sound area, before joining WSBA as the communications specialist in 2018. He can be reached at colinr@wsba.org.
