Attempted murder charges against a 16-year-old will not be dropped despite the Kennewick teen not having an attorney for nearly a month and a half.
Superior Court Judge Jackie Shea Brown ruled Tuesday that Franklin County’s office of public defense attorneys couldn’t have predicted the severe shortage of qualified lawyers who could represent the teen.
“The (Office of Public Defense) shortage is, and the circumstances contributing to it are, unique and extraordinary and certainly not routine and expected,” Shea Brown told the attorneys during a short hearing Tuesday.
Alejandro Garcia is facing attempted first-degree murder for shooting Christian Uribe, 20, in August 2022. Uribe was left paralyzed from the chest down.
Garcia was charged as an adult because of his age and the seriousness of the charge and remains in the Benton-Franklin Juvenile Detention Center in Kennewick awaiting trial as an adult.
His arraignment on the charges started the 60-day deadline when a trial must begin, which meant he needed a trial to start by this week or the charges could be thrown out.
Shea Brown’s ruling came after Garcia’s attorney, Tim Dickerson, asking the judge last week to dismiss the charges because his constitutional right to a speedy trial and right to an attorney were being violated.
While Dickerson said he could be ready for a trial this week, he said his client deserved to have an attorney who had more time to prepare without Garcia having to give up his right to a speedy trial.
She said Dickerson didn’t show how the lengthy delay was caused by an arbitrary action, government misconduct or mismanagement.
“Rather this very extraordinary, non-routine situation was unavoidable,” she ruled. “The extraordinary situation was caused by circumstances beyond OPD’s control.”
The ruling extended Garcia’s speedy trial time by about a month, giving the defense and prosecutors more time to prepare.
A tentative trial date is set for June 14.
Right to an attorney
State and federal constitutions guarantee anyone charged with a crime has the right to an attorney if they can’t afford one.
But a confluence of circumstances have converged to create a shortage of defense attorneys across Washington state, particularly in Benton and Franklin counties. But the problem recruiting defense attorneys is not unique to the Tri-Cities.
A combination of increasing retirements and fewer law school graduates has combined with fewer attorneys who want to go into lower paying public agency jobs because of their high college debt.
The lack of attorneys has been exacerbated by rules set by the state Supreme Court that limit who can take what cases and how many can be handled at once.
Compounding the problem is the backlog of trials because of COVID pandemic delays.
The situation in Franklin County has become desperate. At the moment, there are only two attorneys qualified to handle murder cases and three attorneys for felonies.
That’s down from a high of five or six public defense attorneys that Dickerson said he recalled during his 19 years as a Franklin County deputy prosecutor.
The defense attorney office is on its third month of not having enough attorneys for newly filed cases, and is continuing to have a backlog of about 80 felonies in need of an attorney.
And finding an attorney for Garcia was difficult because of conflicts of interests with other available attorneys.
Who is to blame?
Dickerson’s motion to dismiss the charges is one of the first to come from the lengthy delays.
He argued that Washington state could have foreseen the problem and that it’s the state’s job to make sure that the system is adequately funded so that attorneys can be recruited and retained.
Shea Brown limited the scope of that responsibility to the county’s Office of Public Defense. She pointed out that department’s manager, Larry Zeigler, testified that there was enough money to hire an attorney and that steps were taken to hire someone.
Shea Brown ruled it was different from a landmark 2013 case that found Mount Vernon, Wash., and Burlington violated people’s right to an attorney by assigning too many cases to their public defenders.
In this case, the county’s defense office was willing to find Garcia a qualified attorney who could dedicate the appropriate amount of time to his case but couldn’t find someone to take the job.