DURING A DEBATE last week at city hall, emcee City Council Member Jim Compton had to tell City Attorney Mark Sidran and Seattle-King County Public Defender Lisa Daugaard to shut the hell up. The long-winded lawyers were duking it out over Sidran's impound ordinance. It's too bad for Sidran that Compton can't be around in the courtroom to quiet Daugaard down. That's where she's beating him.

Just last month, a municipal judge sided with the public defender against the city attorney in a landmark case that could have serious implications for the city's problematic impound ordinance.

"Operation Impound," which went into effect in January 1999, gives police officers the power to confiscate someone's car when that person is arrested for driving with a suspended license. Last year 5,096 people were caught driving with suspended licenses and had their cars impounded.

Daugaard and the community group Drive to Survive want to kill the ordinance because they think it targets poor and minority drivers. According to Drive to Survive, this economic injustice stems from a root problem: how licenses get suspended under Washington state law in the first place. In addition to suspending licenses for reckless driving, driving permits are often suspended simply because people can't pay their fines. So, drivers who are in a position to pay in time are in the clear. People who can't afford to pay their tickets face the additional penalty of losing their cars. Eighty-five percent of those who had their cars impounded last year were people with unpaid tickets, not drunk or unruly drivers. Moreover, 40 percent of drivers whose cars were seized are black, a crazy number considering Seattle's population is only about 10 percent black.

Lucky for low-income Seattleites, judges and local pols are starting to listen to this economic argument. Last year, Daugaard and Drive to Survive convinced the King County Council not to consider an equivalent to the impound ordinance. Meanwhile, this month, city council members Nick Licata and Richard McIver are putting together a proposal to decriminalize driving when a license is suspended simply for not paying a fine.

Daugaard has been tearing up courtrooms, trying to win back her clients' cars. She has a success rate of nearly 60 percent. But her biggest achievement so far was a March 16 victory in the Seattle Municipal Court. Judge Theresa Doyle found that officers wrongly confiscated Monroe Watson's car. Watson was Daugaard's first impound client.

In March 1999, Watson, a 53-year-old black man, was polishing his Cadillac when Seattle police officers approached him. His license had been suspended for unpaid traffic tickets. Even though he wasn't driving and the car was legally parked in South Seattle's Kubota Gardens, an officer claimed he had seen Watson driving earlier that day. So he fined Watson and had his Caddy towed away.

Citing city code, which includes the adopted impound ordinance, Doyle wrote in her decision that a vehicle can be impounded only when the driver is arrested. This bombshell calls Sidran's whole impound program into question. Watson was among an estimated 90 percent of drivers who were not arrested when their cars were impounded last year, according to Daugaard. In other words, if most of last year's impoundment cases were subject to Doyle's ruling, they would be overturned.

Doyle ordered the city to pay Watson for the $750-plus towing charge, a daily user fee, and the cut in profit he suffered when he sold the car off the tower's lot for below market value.

Sidran says he'll appeal the decision. People who "fail to respond" (or pay parking tickets) should be punished, says Sidran, because they are irresponsible. He claims that drivers with suspended licenses (including drunk drivers and poor people) are more dangerous than licensed drivers. He opposes any attempt to change the law. With Public Defender Lisa Daugaard challenging him in court, he's going to need a lot of luck.