You’ve heard it before. If not in real life, then certainly on TV: “You have the right at this time to talk to a lawyer. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed by the courts to represent you if you wish.”

But what if that court-appointed attorney sucks? What if she can’t do her job properly because she’s got a crazy caseload?

That could be the future of public defense in King County, where the proposed budget calls for the elimination of 40 Department of Public Defense employees, including 20 attorneys, come January 1. Often described as the least loved social service, this safety net of 390 defense attorneys, administrators, paralegals, and investigators helped 16,400 low-income defendants in 19,000 cases last year.

“These proposed cuts would undercut the 45-year history of effective representation for poor people who cannot afford their own lawyers but face the loss of their liberty, their family, and in some cases their lives,” said Bob Boruchowitz, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and the director of the Defender Initiative. He noted that the public defense system in King County is among the best in the nation.

Matthew Pang, president of the King County Public Defender SEIU Local 925 chapter, said a study conducted a couple years ago found that the average public defender in King County was working 50 hours per week. Losing one attorney for the department would be a hardship. Losing 20 would be a travesty, not just for the attorneys who’ll lose their jobs but for the clients they currently represent as well.

Why are such drastic cuts being proposed?

Back in 2006, public defender Kevin Dolan decided that after 30 years of defending the accused, he was sick and tired of being the only guy working in the courtroom who didn’t have a county retirement plan. The court clerk, the bailiff, the judge, and the prosecutor all had one, so why shouldn’t Dolan and his fellow defenders be allowed access to the same secure future as their colleagues? So he filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the four nonprofit defense agencies that had a contract with the county, seeking inclusion in the state’s Public Employees Retirement System.

And they won. The Supreme Court ordered King County to let the defenders enroll in the retirement system in 2011. After lengthy negotiations, a settlement was reached in May 2013 that included $31 million to be doled out to former employees. The bigwigs at King County ultimately decided “to adopt a new structure for the efficient delivery of public defense,” according to the proposed budget.

“The county was basically like, ‘You made such a convincing argument,’” explained Department of Public Defense communications manager Leslie Brown. “’We’ll make you county employees.’ It was approved by the court, by the county, and by the class in 2013.”

This brought the four nonprofit contract firms that had fulfilled the county’s public defense needs since the 1970s—Society of Counsel Representing Accused Persons, Associated Counsel for the Accused, Northwest Defenders Association, and the Public Defender Association—in house on July 1, 2013. If the explanation given for the upcoming purge by county officials is to be believed, record keeping and communication were so amiss at the time of the merger that the county had no idea it was acquiring 40 more employees than it had anticipated.

How did this happen? Dwight Dively, director of the Office of Performance, Strategy and Budget for King County, says the firms divided salaries intended for single full-time employees between multiple employees, paying employees significantly less than the county intended.

“When the folks showed up on July 1, 2013, and became county employees, there were fortysome more than we thought we had,” said Dively, laughing and throwing his hands up in the air to signify the county’s surprise. “They had more employees and support staff, and they were just paying those employees less.”

In the proposed budget, King County will actually be shelling out 21 percent more for public defense in 2015-2016. The elimination of 40 full-time employees, Dively said, is necessary to bring the attorneys that remain up to the same pay grade as their peers in the prosecutor’s office.

“The defenders are responding to work that is created by the police who arrest people and the prosecutors who file charges,” said Boruchowitz. “If it is important enough to prosecute, it is important enough to defend, and the same resources need to be available to both departments.”

Dively isn’t worried about the effect of the cuts, however. There’s already a system in place for private attorneys to handle some of these cases. Known as the “conflict panel,” this pool of private attorneys exists to handle cases in which there are conflicts of interest.

The private attorneys work the conflict cases for as little as $50 an hour, Dively said, a figure that includes all their investigative and administrative costs.

But Twyla Carter disagrees. Carter, who works as a public defender in King County but was speaking to me on her own behalf, said, “The hourly rate does not include investigators, experts, transcriptionists, or mitigation specialists. All of those costs are extra. More importantly, even if it is cheaper to send cases to conflict panel attorneys, I did not know that King County was in the habit of outsourcing work when it is cheaper to do so.”

Boruchowitz said his concern is that the panel wasn’t designed to serve as a catchall for cases that the public defenders office can’t fit in. It has inadequate supervision from the private bar, lacks in-house support, and doesn’t have the not built-in social service resources of the Department of Public Defense.

“There’s an assumption that the outside counsel is not as good as the inside,” said Dively. “I don’t know that there is any evidence of that. They’re all lawyers, they all have a duty to defend their clients, they have the same ethical professional standards regardless of being outside inside counsel, and if I was a member of that panel, I might be kind of unhappy about people saying that.”

In the proposed budget, King County is basically telling us to relax about all this. Justice is getting more efficient. They’re cutting gun-screening costs by adding a dedicated employee entrance and are planning to file 1,800 fewer driving-with-a-suspended-license cases, which the county says will reduce attorneys’ caseloads. Boruchowitz is skeptical of these claims. All cases are not equal in terms of hours required and complexity, he said. Plus, the elimination of driving-with-a-suspended-license cases will only result in more complex cases for the defenders, meaning they can handle fewer total cases.

“You’re starting from a situation where the defenders were not overstaffed, they’re staffed where they should be,” said Boruchowitz. “To cut more than 10 percent of the staff without cutting the work threatens the ability to do the work that needs to be done.” The county’s proposed budget also doesn’t appear to allocate extra funds for the conflict panels.

The debate isn’t over yet, but it’s pretty close.

Department of Public Defense employees received a grim e-mail from interim public defender Dave Chapman yesterday outlining the budget committee’s decision to approve King County executive Dow Constantine’s budget and ignore the advisory board’s recommendations that the county maintain public defense in its current form for long enough for the board and the Department of Public Defense director to develop a budget plan. The budget committee will vote on that budget bill today and— assuming it makes it through, and these budget bills always have in the past—the entire council will participate in a final vote on Monday, November 17.

Boruchowitz wrote a letter pleading with the council to issue a budget that will keep things operating at current levels until “a budget based on the real needs of the clients and the staff who represent them,” can be established, noting that hundreds of current clients will suffer under the current plan.

“Unlike other county departments, we can’t reduce the volume of work we’re responsible for,” said interim deputy public defender Lisa Daugaard.

Hopefully, the council takes that volume of work—tens of thousands of humans, in dire legal and financial trouble—into account before axing 40 employees.