To Combat Vigilantism, We Must Lower Public Defender Caseloads

Prosecutors across Washington have been warning the public to prepare for a wave of vigilante violence. It’s true that Washington has experienced plenty of recent vigilantism, from steadily increasing attacks on unhoused folks to Forks-style Facebook panics. But some senior Washington law enforcement officials—both prosecutors and police officers—are warning against another threat: giving poor people decent lawyers. 

These powerful officials argue that Washington’s Supreme Court must continue forcing public defenders to represent too many clients. Otherwise, they claim, the public will lose faith in Washington’s legal system, causing frustrated vigilantes to take the law into their own hands.

This argument is exactly backwards. Effective public defenders don’t cause vigilantism—they prevent vigilantism. Because without effective public defenders, there’s no meaningful difference between our criminal system and vigilantism. By claiming that we must choose between our constitutional rights and effective law enforcement, these senior law enforcement officials are arguing for authoritarianism—the same Trump-style authoritarianism voters must reject at the ballot this November. Washington’s Supreme Court must reject their anti-democratic arguments and reduce public defender caseloads. 

To understand what these officials are really arguing, it’s worth reflecting on why vigilantism is bad. By vigilantism, I mean any attempt to prevent, investigate, or punish crime more broadly or severely than the law allows.  As Paul Robinson, a law professor and former prosecutor, explained (in a bizarrely pro-vigilante article), vigilantism “not only invites bias and lack of restraint, it is also antidemocratic.” Robinson and other scholars don’t limit vigilantism to ordinary citizens; law enforcement officials become vigilantes whenever they exceed their legal authority to investigate or punish people.

Our founding fathers, for all their flaws, understood that powerful officials would always abuse power without proper oversight. Unfortunately, Washington’s police officers and prosecutors face weak oversight, at best, when they exercise their sweeping powers to kill and cage people. Our opaque legal system prevents effective public oversight. And local judges, who are better positioned to prevent law enforcement from abusing their power in individual cases, are mostly former prosecutors facing constant political pressure from law enforcement. That often leaves Washington’s public defenders as the first, last, and only defense against law enforcement vigilantism. 

It’s not hard to find examples of Washington police officers and prosecutors behaving like vigilantes. An internationally recognized policing expert hired by the City of Seattle to analyze Seattle police responses to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—which ultimately cost Seattle $40 million in legal fees—said that he “had not seen that level of aggressive violent police response against protesters in any democratic state.” 

Police vigilantism can also target individuals. In October of 2023, Spokane County Sheriff’s Sergeant Clay Hilton savagely beat a 62-year-old grandfather for sleeping in his own car in a public parking lot, breaking eight ribs. Prosecutors initially charged the grandfather with resisting arrest, but his defense attorney was able to use Sergeant Hilton’s own body-worn video to get the charges dropped.

And police vigilantism isn’t always brutal; sometimes it’s more subtle. In June, Seattle police arrested an anti-war protestor for an act the officer described as a hate crime: placing a single sticker on a McDonald’s that read, “This company helps fund genocide. Peace in Palestine.” At the first hearing, a city prosecutor asked a judge to ban the protester from all local McDonald’s, among other conditions. A public defender convinced a judge that the officer had arrested the protestor without any legal authority. The city grudgingly dismissed the case. 

In these cases, injustice was thwarted because  defense attorneys had the time and resources needed to effectively defend their clients. But these outcomes are the exception. Washington’s public defenders—who protect approximately 90% of Washington defendants—are overworked and underfunded. Washington’s Chief Justice, Steven Gonzalez, acknowledged last January that “significant and unacceptable delays” in providing poor people with lawyers had led to a “crisis.” Right now, Washingtonians are sitting in jail for days, weeks, even months just to get a lawyer. To fix this crisis, the Washington State Bar Association, relying on high-quality national research and input from local experts, recommended that the Washington Supreme Court protect Washingtonians’ Constitutional rights by dramatically reducing crushing public defender workloads.

By arguing against reducing public defender caseloads, Washington’s police and prosecutors aren’t protecting us from vigilante justice, they’re preventing public defenders from exposing law enforcement vigilantism. They’re expressing the prevailing law enforcement ideology in America: don’t challenge us. That ideology is completely incompatible with democracy, but aligns perfectly with Donald Trump’s authoritarianism—including his recent calls for one “violent day” of police vigilantism and his promise to use local police for “bloody” mass deportations. Unsurprisingly, Washington’s two largest police union federations, the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs and the Washington State Fraternal Order of Police, both belong to national police unions that have endorsed Trump. 

To be clear, reducing public defender workloads isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats or even prosecutors versus defenders—some prosecutors acknowledge the need for better public defense. This caseload fight is about democracy versus authoritarianism. We all know that democracy is on the ballot this November, but protecting democracy requires ensuring the checks and balances on powerful local officials are just as effective as those on the President. Public defenders are that check. 

Those senior prosecutors are, ironically, correct: we do have a vigilante problem. Public defenders are often the only people who can expose and combat vigilantism, but they can’t do that if they don’t have time to review evidence or meet with clients. Every Washingtonian forced to choose between a speedy trial and an effective lawyer is a victim of vigilantism. 

The only solution is to reduce public defender workloads. 

This election season has been full of national pundits acting as though only Pennsylvanians can save democracy. But Washingtonians have an opportunity to strike a major blow against authoritarianism: voice your support for reduced caseloads. The public comment period ends on October 31st.

Austin Field is a public defender in Seattle. Before attending law school at the University of Washington, he was an Army infantry officer, a law firm operations manager, and a public defense investigator.