 Welcome to Lawn the Time of COVID-19 Public Facing Course hosted by the University of Washington School of Law. I'm speaking on behalf of my co-teacher Scott Schumacher and our dean, Mario Barnes. My name is Zara Said. And I'm pleased to welcome a distinguished group of panelists today to speak on an incredibly important topic, which is one of the vulnerable communities that has been hardest hit by this pandemic. I don't want to spend too much time with preamble so I'll simply introduce the key people you'll be hearing from now. The first is Loran Baker, who is the special counsel for affirmative litigation and policy with the King County Department of Public Defense. She graduated from the University of Washington School of Law. Welcome. Next we have David Montes, who is the special counsel for criminal policy and practice at King County Department of Public Defense. He graduated from Northeastern University School of Law. And we welcome him to University of Washington. Anyway. Next we have Jackie McMurtry, who is probably known to many of you. She is the distinguished founder of what has now become known as the Washington Innocence Project and Clinical Faculty Director, the Bets Patterson and Mayans Professor of Law. And a dear friend to so many in this community and indeed in this vulnerable community of people who have been incarcerated. We have Helika Chasarro, who is an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington, and who teaches immigration, professional responsibility, critical race theory, and poverty law, and is a rising star in this area. Finally, we welcome Nick Allen, who is the Deputy Director of Advocacy for Columbia Legal Services. He is counsel for the individuals who are incarcerated in the case Colvin B. Inslee, which was recently heard, I believe it was a week ago today, if I'm not mistaken, in the Washington Supreme Court. Please join me in welcoming this incredibly distinguished group of panelists. We will also have a terrific moderator in the form of Kimberly Ambrose, who teaches at University of Washington. She's a senior lecturer and director of the Race and Justice Clinic. She teaches in the areas of race, juvenile justice and professional responsibility. And she will do a wonderful job of moderating amongst the speakers. She is coming from a class she is teaching back to back. So I'll get us started and then you'll see her join us shortly. Jackie, we'd like to begin with you. Your decades of work in this area have shown many in the legislature, in the academy, in the public, just how important it is to consider the rights of people behind bars. I'd like to ask you what about the pandemic is making this group so imperiled. How can we understand the lens of this pandemic's impact through your work and your interests. And it's an honor to be included among this distinguished group of people. We have shifted our focus in the work that we're doing and merely trying to protect our clients from the pandemic that is raging throughout the jails and the prisons and it's the work that I do is of course, dear to my heart and the concept of incarcerating an innocent person for a crime that they did not commit is one of the worst mistakes that the criminal justice system can make. And it's not, however, the only mistake that the criminal justice system makes. And so I think what this has exposed is an issue of over incarceration within our Washington State prisons. For me personally and working with my students on cases, the questions arise of whether what's the purpose of keeping an almost 80 year old person in prison who's in a wheelchair who suffered from a stroke who can't see who has an innocence claim that has yet to be litigated. However, what's the purpose of even having him in there in the first place and why is it that the danger that he's now facing is either serious injury or death at the hands of this pandemic. So I'm really honored to have been working with a group of people on these issues. And I think it should give us pause to say, let's take a look at what's going on inside the prisons at this moment and into the future. Thank you. As promised, here's Professor Ambrose Kim I introduced you before we're delighted to see you and I will hand over the moderation to you now. Thank you. Great. Thank you, czar. Thank you Jackie Professor McMurtry for sharing with us. We are going to start I'm going to start with with you David, because I'd like to start sort of at the at the front end, your public defender office represents thousands of individuals in King County, where we sit. How has the COVID-19 crisis affected them? And how is your office responded. Yeah, obviously, for people who are incarcerated they have much less control over the circumstances that they're in so they don't have the opportunity to isolate. I think that was identified as a huge problem right at the beginning. And the jail made a goal of reducing the jail population by a third. I think it's important to note that that was not a public health related number they just sort of pick that number out of the numbers. It allowed them to sort of say that people were isolated so part of that happened through two efforts one the King County prosecutor's office went through all their pending cases and identified people they agree to release. Then booking we advocated for an Anita candle all the head public defender here advocated strongly for booking criteria misdemeanor booking criteria were put into place. We've also been working. And booking criteria let me just interrupt just explain what that means. Sure, booking criteria basically means that if someone is arrested for certain crimes they just won't be brought into jail. So right now to meaners that aren't DUIs or domestic violence related, they will not book you into jail. And so that was a huge step because it's important to realize that as people are being booked into jail, they get exposed to everyone who's in the jail and they expose everyone in the jail to everyone who's outside of the jail and many people and continue to be many people come in for short 24 hour periods and are released immediately exposing the people inside the jail. To whatever they have and bringing the pathogens from outside the jail. So, at a higher level we advocated for booking criteria advocated for releasing more folks. At a sort of granular level our attorneys went in and litigated release on almost every single person who is current motions where our attorneys did a lot of work to go in and try to get these people out. And I think they did especially good work of trying to identify those issues to the judge about the real danger of incarceration for people. Now, people can't socially distance in the jail and they have to use the same facilities as everyone who is coming in and out. The other thing that our attorneys have continued to do is go in and on a day to day basis go into the jail calendars and advocate for people to be released so our attorneys really have been going into the jail every single day and advocating for people who were booked to be released. And this is super important can the people who are being booked into jail don't have any control over their environment and you know we see things like they're all using the same phones they're all using the same sinks and those things are not being cleaned between those those things between uses and so you end up in a situation where people really are totally out of control over the social distancing aspect of things and in a very, very dangerous situation so those are the higher level things that we've sort of done to try to address that issue. Thank you David and have the numbers actually come down do you know what's going on in the jail. Yeah, so on March 6, the jail population was just over 2000 currently it's hovering right around 1300. And that's the daily average so that's fluctuated a little bit but we're hovering right around 1300 right now. Thank you. So that's jails these are people that are being held pre trial, or maybe on shorter sentences. But Nick your office at Columbia legal services, you've been representing individuals who are very vulnerable in the custody of our Department of Corrections our state prison system. Can you tell us a little about how you and your colleagues came to that decision of filing the petition in the Supreme Washington Supreme Court. And what is it meant for your clients. So, yeah, first of all, you know litigation was not the was not the was always an option but it wasn't the first option. You know, there were a number of efforts and other contexts to address the need for release of people from institutions as a as a necessary measure to protect people in those institutions and in the community generally. And I think this all really started kind of maybe the first week of March or so when COVID hit Seattle King County, and there was a raise awareness around how this, how this virus might impact other impact the community generally, including those on those institutions. And so, by the end of that first week, we had met with a number of, you know, community legal organizations that have begun having discussions with one another about the risk of harm that COVID-19 presented to people in institutions. Because you know, it's really a forgotten about population. I think there was a general understanding of what was going to need to happen in our communities, but prisons, jails, detention centers were left out of that discussion. And we also started coming across information reports articles from public health experts that were saying look release is not just an option. It's really the necessary option. It's not one of the things that you can choose you're going to have to release people from institutions, given the crowding in prisons, the print the layout of prisons, and the in the congregate nature of those of those environments. So, in working with a lot of the community folks that are on the ground with family and folks who are in prisons. We had a meeting and I think some of the folks on this phone call a part of that meeting where strategy was developed on what would be the steps to try and get folks from prisons and improve the conditions in those facilities and a letter was sent to Governor Inslee and Secretary Sinclair, urging them to take a number of steps, highest among those being releasing immediately those individuals who are vulnerable in those facilities care, but also, you know, repurposing community custody officers to provide assistance to individuals who are leaving the facilities, ensuring that the same level of testing is happening in the community, in prisons that's happening in the community access to soap and hand sanitizer, implementing social distancing measures, addressing some of the costs in prison around telephone and email access and saying those should be free for people. And providing, you know, timely and an accurate information to families and people who are in prisons, and then also sending the separate letter to the governor, you know, directing him to order that do see take those steps, but also use his own authority to do things such as identifying all those that are high risk in custody and calling for an emergency meeting of the clemency and pardons board, having the clemency and pardons board advise him as to folks who should be released. We didn't receive any response from the governor or the Department of Corrections. And at the same time, we began to have more detailed conversations with people in the institutions and painted a really ugly picture where, you know, social distancing is impossible. Sick folks walking around coughing and sneezing nothing being done around that no PPE being provided, you know, including masks, a lack of testing. We started to have personal discussions with some of these public health and correctional experts that were like, look, you need to get people out of the prison, they have to release people. And as David explained, for all the reasons that he described, people sharing sink, sink, showers, common areas, yards, dining halls, all of these things, one, you can't social distance to you can't appropriately have hygiene measures that are necessary to protect people in those situations. And so with that information, you know, we reached out again, and didn't get a response and information that release was going to happen. So we decided to file the petition for a writ of mandamus with the Washington State Supreme Court. We did that because we, we understood the urgency of this issue, going through the lower courts, the trial courts and the Court of Appeals would take too long to get a decision around this. And, you know, article four section for the Washington Constitution says that the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in habeas and mandamus as to all state officers. So we thought let's give that a try filed that with a motion for accelerated review, which was accepted by the court, and it moved pretty quickly over the course of three weeks, you know, this case was heard. As you all probably know, at this point, the court issued a five for opinion, denying the petition for the writ of mandamus and also denying our motion to amend to allow the petition be construed as a PRP. As far as what it's meant for our clients, you know, to date, none of the petitioners has been released, even though they're all at a really heightened risk of harm if exposed to COVID-19. I'd like to think that the work that all the community organizations have done that the legal organizations have done have raised awareness around this issue. I think getting the court involved and having that court order early on in the process, in response to an emergency motion that we filed coming in the middle of all this. Finally led to the governor admitting that release was a necessary option and led to a recent, you know, a limited release plan. But we all know that that's not sufficient. We continue to hear from people in the prisons that are still terrified about what's happening there. It's still not an opportunity for social distancing conditions haven't changed. And so it's still a really scary situation that chance of additional outbreaks has not decreased. Thank you, Nick. So let's turn to another group of folks Professor Chaucerau. You have heard David and Nick describe what's going on in our in our prisons and our jails. Similarities or differences to what you're seeing with immigrant folks that are detained. Oh, you're muted. Of course, it has to be one every time it's me this time. Thank you, Professor Amber. So I'd have to say unfortunately, a lot of it is similar, rather than different. For those of you who don't know we have a detention center here in Washington state that's one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the country. It's in Tacoma, Washington, and it has a capacity of about 1500 people who they hold because they're awaiting civil deportation proceedings. And it's owned and operated by a private prison company called the Geo group, and it's run for them for by them for ICE or immigration and customs enforcement are the agency that enforces the country's immigration laws. And I just want to take a step back from it and think, you know, the theme for today is so broad, you know, vulnerable communities and that's what we're focused on. When you think about it, we're all vulnerable to the virus. And I know that much of what's been keeping me relatively sane has been control, knowing that I am scared but I can do something about the terror that I feel. And as David and Nick talked about the folks that we're talking about today are folks who lack the ability to protect themselves from both the virus and from the conditions. Social and otherwise that the virus is exacerbating. And so, you know, farm workers don't have the bargaining power to force their bosses to provide PPE and we're seeing that in Washington state. People in domestic violence situations don't have the ability to shelter in place with anyone but their abusive partner. Black communities are ignored and underserved by medical professionals who literally do not believe them when they show up in pain. And the population we're talking about today, people behind bars, they lack the most basic control over their lives. And people in prisons and jails and detention centers, they all have this in common. And so people have already said, somebody else gets to decide how much soap you got, how often you can wash your hands, how often you can change your clothes, how clean your clothes gets when they get washed, if they get washed, how many people you share a broom with. Someone else decides when you get sick, whether or not you're even going to be seen by a medical professional, someone else gets to decide whether you get sent to the hospital or not, whether you get any medical care at all. And so that loss of control I think is what we're talking about when we're talking about vulnerability for people behind bars. And I've heard prisons and detention centers described as basically like cruise ships on steroids, as far as this virus is concerned, and that for me was really helpful in trying to figure out how to understand what's happening. Except of course the difference there is that in the cruise ships, in this analogy, the staff actually leave every day and come back every day, while the passengers, the prisoners are trapped. And so there's even more porousness with staff bringing the virus in and out of their homes and back to their communities. So people in detention center themselves have been responding. And what we've really seen, you know, Professor Berger, Dan Berger at the University of Washington Bothell has been tracking the sort of uprising and protests and there have been at least 75 protests inside prisons, in London detention centers since March 17, the date that we know the first hunger strike in prisons in response to COVID-19. And of those 75 protests, 34 of them have been in immigration detention centers with people pushing back and basically asking to be released asking just for the most basic things. In response, we've seen ICE place people in solitary confinement and even tear gas them in the detention center here in Tacoma we've had a series of rolling hunger strikes. We've even seen people out in the yard using their bodies to spell out SOS just trying to get attention. A lot of that has been bringing attention to what's going on but I so far has refused to do anything about it basically. They've had some individual releases, but we also know that they're refusing to test of the tests that they have had a thousand people across the country 449 have tested positive so about 45% of people detained who have been tested and we know ICE is not wanting to test, have tested positive and ICE has told Congress that they don't want to release any more people because this could be giving the impression that they're being lax on immigration laws. And so as a result of ISIS in action as a result of people inside pushing and having uprisings lawyers, like the ones on this call today have been have been trying to use a lot to get people release. And there's been really mixed results. We have seen some lawsuits against us in other parts of the country results in federal judges ordering ICE to release people which is basically the only way that they've acted here in Washington State that we had a really disappointing decision despite really valiant efforts by the Northwest American Rights Project and the ACLU of Washington and others. We saw a federal judge say well I'm not going to order mass release of people or any release of people until I see a positive COVID case and we all know by the way this virus works that by then it's just too late. And because of that standard they put in place now the fight is to get people tested at all and ICE doesn't actually have, you know, they're less likely to want to test people knowing that a test, a positive test result could actually lead them to have to release folks. So I think the question becomes when I read all these different cases next to each other, you know, the Colvin case, the cases in Washington other places is are there legal mechanisms that can assure that people locked up actually survive. Or are we going to just see the courts kind of slowly regulating their deaths by COVID. So I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you, Professor Chaucero. And now I kind of hesitate to go there because I kind of want to move to what's next but I just want to acknowledge that we are in the midst of it now. The stories that you've all told, you're talking about what's currently happening right now in our state that people are at great risk. And yet at the same time we're hearing about flattening of the curve and what are we going to do next. So I do want to kind of talk about this crisis and a little bit about what the long term impact may be on these communities. And I want to start with you, LaRon, because you are the policy director for the largest public defender agency in the state. And are you seeing like legal or other advocacy opportunities that are possible now. COVID or now that we're in this crisis now we've seen what happens that were not possible before this crisis and are there any new conversations happening around how your clients are being treated. I do want to acknowledge that we are in the middle of this crisis and COVID will be here for quite some time. We've had good results in reducing the jail population here in King County. And we've also seen that in jurisdictions across the state, much more needs to be done to decrease the populations that are in our jails in order to keep people safe. There are people in the facility, the staffers who work there, and our communities in general. But in terms of sort of long term strategies around continuing to move towards decarceration and ensuring that people who are housed in jails are safe. So there is a unique and interesting opportunity that comes out of this crisis. And one of those is, you know, a continued discussion from work that had already been occurring prior to the COVID crisis. We've had across the country been seeing conversations about changes to pretrial release strategies and challenges to bail and secured bond practices. We saw changes in California and New York. There was work that was being done here. I think with what we've seen in terms of the booking criteria and the move to ensure that judges are actually releasing people and setting bonds and bails at a reasonable rate. That I believe will continue, I hope. It's really hard to justify detaining someone pretrial, preconviction for the purpose of community safety after we've released a number of people and seeing no significant change in, you know, sort of criminal activity or community safety. I think what we are seeing happening here really cuts against a lot of the justifications for pretrial detention. And I believe that attorneys when they're representing their clients will use that in the future. Sorry, my cat is coming by and attorneys when they're representing their clients will will use that information in the future to educate judges and to push for release of people more and advocates will be using sort of that that the data that is accumulated here to push for policy and legislative changes and may also actually support some litigation that that can move forward. I think we are likely getting ready to look at really significant budget shortfalls for jurisdictions. And we know from past recent economic crises the result of that has been a reduction in incarceration and a willingness for institutional partners who may not normally support reduced jail populations to come to the table and be a little more creative and more pro release and they they would be in the past and and I think we're likely to see that especially in King County where the Department of Adult and juvenile detention had already had significant problems with staffing and budgets and in maintaining a sufficient staff to keep people who are housed in their facilities safe. I think staffers who feel that the jails are, you know, public health crisis that they're unsafe will want to, you know, push their unions and push these entities to continue driving down and keeping down the populations. And we know that the public's concern is huge to the public has really just in general under come to understand jails as being a public health crisis that they are unsanitary and unsafe for people in the facilities, the staffers and our community at large. And I think that sort of awareness will drive people to advocate for policies that continue reducing and holding down the population that is incarcerated and and vigilance from all of us as part of that too so I do see the changes that have happened really sort of changing the way we think about pre trial incarceration and changing the way that we think about who needs to be incarcerated and what purpose jail is. And since COVID will be here for a while the need to keep the populations reduced is significant and so I think we will be able to use this crisis unfortunately as a way in which to ensure that people are, you know, who are involved in the criminal legal system are actually involved in a way that's safe for them and for our communities, which means keeping the populations down. Thank you, Laurent. I'm going to turn to you Nick and ask you sort of a similar question from your vantage point representing individuals that are in many of them serving very long sentences in prison. How do you see this crisis maybe leading us forward, if I could say that I know it's soon to be talking about that but are there new conversations happening now that you're thinking about. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that probably in the community at general these these conversations may appear to be new to those folks but you know these efforts around decarceration have been happening for years by, you know, dedicated forward thinking impacted individuals and groups who've really been on the like the front lines against the system of mass incarceration. Like I said, I think that this situation has helped raise awareness around these problems for better or worse to a more literal audience. And one of the things I think there's that these efforts really and the awareness has been community driven like I said the way we got involved in this really started with understanding where the circumstances of those who are incarcerated and that and hearing from community organizations and family members of those who are impacted. And I really think that moving forward, what COVID-19 has done is really show us how interconnected the prison system is with all of our systems in the community generally. An example that that that I think helps highlight that is really not looking at the access to protecting individuals who are most vulnerable in the community in talking with experts. And what, you know, we learned is that the, the, the impact is not just on the individual individuals and him or herself. When an individual is vulnerable in a congregate environment like a prison, and you have hundreds of thousands of individuals in that system who are at significant risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. Then what you have is when those people are exposed to the virus, the prisons are ill equipped to handle that they're not going to be able to handle that level of medical crisis inside the facilities. And so those individuals then have to be transferred outside of the hospital into what amounts to really rural communities. The prisons are not in, in our, in our urban communities, they are way out there. They're in your cold, they're in Aberdeen, they're in column Bay, they're in canal Washington places we oftentimes don't even know where they're at on a map, and that over burdens the health care systems that are already in place there. And oftentimes the average person doesn't even think about people in prisons, generally, and they don't think about how the system of mass incarceration has an impact on their own lives. And I think this has been an opportunity for that to to occur. And that's one that's some of the messaging that we tried to put out there is like this is not just impacting people in the prisons. The word that should be enough for action to be taken. But we also have to understand that all of this stuff is interconnected mass incarceration is not this thing that's out there on an island and only impacts, you know, a small percentage of people. It impacts all of us and I think the awareness around COVID-19, not only with Mark mass incarceration with all the other problems that are taking place in our society have been highlighted. And even when COVID-19 goes away, there's still those issues that are going to show that mass incarceration affects us all more generally. You know, we've looked into and I know a lot of other folks have looked into medical care generally within the context of mass incarceration. If you're getting poor medical care with or without COVID-19 in place, and you're sent back into the community, you're going to have to access resources in the community for emergency medical care on a more regular basis. You're going to come out in much more poor, much poorer medical condition than when you went in. That's going to act at implicate your access to housing to medical care to jobs in the community. So hopefully we're starting to see that because of a pandemic mass incarceration is tied into to everything that we do. And I think that another thing that was that's been highlighted through this is this concept of otherness. And I think that the governor did that through his own comments. When, you know, a few weeks ago after the lawsuit had been filed. There was a comment that he made saying, you know, I had seven other people, 7 million other people in Washington state to take care of before I could get around to prisons. And that was a telling statement, not surprising, because this is not uncommon, a community that is disproportionately people of color disproportionately come from low income backgrounds, and is kind of banished out to the outskirts of society, and not considered in the general community perspective. So it wasn't surprising, but I think bringing it to the forefront was, was something that came about as a result of the lawsuit being filed the push that communities have had on lawmakers on do see to push for these changes and there's a, there's a, you know, a million other things that that I think this highlights as well I know we don't have a time to go into that, but I would close by saying you know one of the briefs that was submitted. In the Colvin case one of the amicus briefs was from Washington Defender Association and they started off their brief using a Mandela quote, and it says you know no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. And a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but by its lowest ones. And I think that this is a perfect example of the state's response to that to that quote, and I hope it continues to raise awareness in that way. Thank you, Nick. So I will just finally turn to you and Helika you've been similarly working around this issue of immigration tension for a long, long time. Is something changing as a result of this. Are there new conversations happening or should they be happening. Thanks, Kim. Yeah, I think, you know, picking up on some of the themes that that Laurent Nick we're talking about I think this shows what we could always have been doing you know and so just what one of the primary ways that people end up in immigration detention is having some sort of criminal conviction and so I'm always tracking what's happening in the DOC world and the jail world as well because so many of the folks who end up in Tacoma are there because they were detained to begin with. So what we're seeing is actually the numbers of people in Tacoma and the detention center there have gone down tremendously. I mean I think it's the lowest the population has been, you know, basically since the facility was was expanded. And so right now the facility was 1500 people and we estimate of course I won't tell us but we estimate from talking to folks inside that there's about 700 folks currently detained and so that's a huge drop and so I think one of the possibilities at least for us is to finally be a state that gets rid of immigration detention altogether. And so if we can see these continuing lawsuits continue to pull people out of detention, we'll see some people release because their cases and and we're not seeing a lot of people coming into detention, then we could actually bring that population down to zero and then it will be irrelevant whether ice wants to have that facility there or not, if it's actually not filled with people from Washington state, or our surrounding states and so it will be a lot of coordination and so I think that's one of the possibilities of coordinating between the different states we've seen like the western state governor sort of make a pact to be, you know, smart about how they reopen the economies and not necessarily take their leave from Trump, I think we could similarly see and are seeing advocates and organizers and lawyers in the western states thinking about how to use this moment to really stop state governors from sending people for example into ice custody and so for me one of the possibilities right now is to push the state government and say okay, you're setting yourself in contrast up against the Trump administration in the way that you're handling this. But as Nick says you know you really will be judged by how the people in your prisons and detention centers are treated. So what are you doing to stop people from being transferred to ice attention. What the governor could do is stop transferring people from DOC custody to ice custody, which currently is the only exception that exists to the the state's law that prohibits people from state employees from from talking to or working with ice and so that could just be you know, you could do that today if you wanted to. The other thing I want to talk about is the risk of this time and I know you know I do want to end on a positive note here. But I do think we're at this moment where we could see a hardening of the line between deserving and undeserving and it's really important. As attorneys of law students as policy advocates that we don't fall for sort of going for the lowest hanging fruit. I think what that could do is harden the line between who deserves to be who deserves to survive this time and who doesn't. I think right now we have a special possibility to make legal arguments, policy arguments bring litigation to do organizing that really shows that prisons and jails kill and that people should not be defined by their court records or the records of convictions. We can't sort between those who live and die on the basis of who is arrested or who's convicted or what country you were born in and so I think we're, you know, I'm so impressed with the advocacy that CLS and others are doing that don't that is based on like a person's offense but is based rather on their on their basic human dignity and their right to be able to survive these times. Kim, do you see the Q&A that has developed? I do, I do. Thank you so much. And there are some great questions. This is a little bit off piece but I do think that Professor Chauceroy you did bring up farm workers that are not being adequately protected and someone had a question about, could you elaborate a little bit on that and explain what some of the intersectionality questions that are increasing their vulnerability. Sure. And so, you know, Washington State's immigrant population is spread all over the state but a large proportion of it is in the eastern part of the state which is also the part of the state that holds a lot of our farms in our agricultural areas. And what we're hearing from people who are working in those areas, one is that they don't feel like they can actually stop going to work because they depend on their survival for their work on just basically feeding their families. They have been named essential workers even though many of them are in fact undocumented. You know, there's already that going on. And then we also hear that the farms themselves are not providing the PPE or not providing the possibilities for distancing, whether it's at the packing plants or in the fields themselves to allow them to survive and also those folks are being left out of LNI protection. So if they do fall sick, if they do get injured, they're not being able to access what other essential workers in this time are able to access. And then of course, for them, the risk of coming forward and speaking up is that they're vulnerable to, especially for those who are undocumented, vulnerable to ICE actions and ICE enforcement. And that's even if those ICE workplace raids aren't currently happening. We know that ICE raids are happening on people's homes. And so the employers are able to hold that over folks if they even try to come forward. So there's a lot of advocacy happening right now around adding those workers to the protections the governor is extending to other workers. I guess I need to call on my Dean. It's just an immediate follow up to Angelica's last point is you might imagine that those farm workers are placed in a more difficult position when by presidential order, we've ordered meat packing and meat workers back to work against union foundation and against even plant owner sort of claims about the ability to provide safe working environments. And so I mean it seems that this, you know, has that we think about vulnerable populations now we might not just be talking about farm workers we're talking about union protected industrial workers who are experiencing similar kind of concerns and being told by the federal government that they have to stay at work. Thank you. There's, there are a couple of really great questions here I think that maybe one of the defenders might be able to answer. Are people awaiting trial what's going on with the people waiting for trial during this crisis and how is it affecting, you know, how these these proceedings are happening. Are we going to see video trials is that a good thing or bad thing. What's going on with trials and criminal defendants. So maybe I can jump in on this one. The Supreme Court just issued a new order yesterday extending speedy trial to September 1. So the soonest that someone can demand a speedy trial in the state of Washington right now is October 1, except in the rarest circumstance when you already had a trial after July 6. The jury trials have been suspended since I believe March 18 and will remain suspended until July 6. So if you were waiting trial on March 6, you're going to have to wait at least until July, July 6. Excuse me, if you were in trial on March 18, you'll have to wait till July 6. And that is not taking into account the huge backlog of cases. I think Superior Court said there's 400 pending jury trials right now. And that is cases that are not necessarily ready for trial, but just in the queue to go to trial eventually. And so with that number of cases, there are only 55 Superior Court judges. So if every Superior Court judge could go at once, you'd have you couldn't get through them in even three or four months. And that's extremely unlikely given the number of jurors were likely to get that doesn't take into account. So Seattle Municipal Court, District Court, all of those, all of those places end up having huge numbers of trials that are pending. And now speedy trial is out to the end of September. So if you're in jail right now, waiting for trial. I think that realistically, if I was advising a client, I would say the absolute soonest you will get a trial from the state is about six months. And that's people who may have been already waiting on very serious charges for a year. So the state is not good as far as the speedy trial goes. The real difficulty about that is the people that we would go to for help the Supreme Court are the ones that did that. So our avenues for advocacy are somewhat limited in terms of how we can address that but it's really bad in terms of what people can, when people can expect to go to trial. Thank you. There's another question here, which I think, Nick you raised is sort of this public health issue. And the prison. Somebody wants your more about how the prison system affects on surrounding healthcare systems that the questioner said, I typically think of health care issues and prison systems as being internal health system issues, and not something that is external to the prison itself. Can you talk a little bit of more about that. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think it goes to the points that I was making earlier. One, in regards to COVID-19 when you have insufficient internal medical care systems that can't handle the level of need within the prisons and those go external. And those oftentimes go external to medical care systems that also can't handle the level of capacity that's needed to treat both the individuals that live in the community at general, but then also people that are coming out from the prisons. And that was one of the main underlying reasons why a couple of the experts in our case said, you have to release people from institutions, because this isn't all isolated this isn't all internalized. This is going to affect not only the people that are in prisons, but it's also going to affect the individuals that live otherwise live in that community. The same applies generally. And this was going to the point that I was talking about earlier. For instance, one of the things we highlighted in this case in responding to the report that DOC and the governor had put out around their ability to provide health care to individuals as they have a history in DOC, particularly at Monroe Correctional Complex, which is kind of the center of health care within the DOC system of doing a horrendous job of people who are sick, ending up not getting treatment, ending up dying. But then generally, you know, 90, what is it 95% of people are going to be coming back into our communities. And so if you get poor health care or delayed health care, while you're in prison, that is only going to turn around and put those costs, put that those constraints on our communities in general. And so I don't think that we can ever look at it as this isolated prison system that's out there and there's internal work that's happening and let's just leave it out there. We always have to think about it more generally as a community because it not only like I said impacts the health care that's going to be needed. When somebody gets out, it's also going to drive up the cost of health care and the frequency which with health care is going to be needed, but also impacts other aspects of people's lives, particularly access to to employment. We've tried to highlight that over the last several years with regards to insufficient health care within Department of Corrections. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, no, that's great. And there are so many more questions in the queue that I think maybe I have time for a quick one. Constitutional challenges David are there going to be constitutional challenges to the speedy trial timelines. The problem with a constitutional challenge to the speedy trial timeline is the US Constitution. I mean if you look at that case law, it's like if you ask every week for six years that might be a speedy trial violation. And the court would decide if it was a speedy trial violation here is the one that decided that they're going to delay till September. When the people you would go ask to help you are the ones that are doing it, it makes it very difficult, but it's certainly something that we're thinking of really hard about how to do and really hard about how to get things moving and so that people aren't just sitting but it's a really hard question because the Washington Supreme Court is the court that extended the speed trial to September one, which then who do we ask because the US Supreme Court is not going to do anything for us, or I don't think they will. Okay, well thank you so much. I know there's more questions we could go on forever but we really appreciate the expertise and thank you for those of you who are out on the front lines to doing this work during this really difficult time. We'll be back next week with panelists talking about the role of law, the operation of courts and the role of law during this time of COVID-19. Thank you everyone.