A walk through Washington impaired driving procedure and the cost of defending one, assembled from district court calendars, published fee schedules and four consultations. Not legal advice, and the statutes cited get amended.
The decision usually gets made in the hallway, in the ten minutes between a first appearance and the next case being called, on the strength of a form somebody handed over and a number somebody said out loud. That is a bad setting for a choice that will shape the next eight months and several thousand dollars. Appointed counsel is not the fallback it is often assumed to be, and private counsel is not uniformly the upgrade, and the difference between the two turns on facts a careful reader can check in an afternoon.
1. Screening looks at the household, not at you
King County screens for indigency using a financial declaration that asks about income, dependents, assets and monthly obligations, and the screener is working from a standard tied to federal poverty guidelines rather than to what a defense retainer actually costs. That gap matters. A person earning too much to qualify outright may still be found indigent in part, or able to contribute, which is a distinct finding with its own paperwork. The declaration is signed under penalty of perjury, so the useful check is whether the numbers written on it match a recent pay stub, a bank statement and the actual rent.
2. Caseload limits changed what an appointment buys
Public defense in Washington operates under caseload standards, and the practical question for any one defendant is not whether the office is busy but how many open files the assigned attorney is carrying this month and what share are misdemeanors set for trial. An office at its limit is a different proposition from an office over it. The check is simple and rarely made: ask, at the first meeting, how many cases the attorney has, when the next trial date is, and whether the office employs its own investigator and has standing access to a breath test expert.
3. The license side sits outside the appointment
Appointment covers the criminal case. The Department of Licensing administrative action is a separate civil proceeding with its own short deadline to request a hearing, and in most arrangements it is not part of what the appointed attorney was assigned to do, though the good ones will tell you the deadline exists and where the form lives. That produces a common and expensive outcome: the criminal case is handled competently and the license is lost by default because nobody requested the hearing. Ask directly whether the appointment includes it, and if the answer is no, ask what a private attorney charges for that piece alone.
4. Some cases do not move, whoever is arguing them
Where the stop is clean, the video is unremarkable, the breath sample is well above the threshold and the machine's maintenance records are in order, the realistic range of outcomes narrows to something a prosecutor's filing standards largely determine in advance. Mandatory minimums do the rest. Deferred prosecution, where it is available, turns on a chemical dependency evaluation and a treatment plan, which is work the defendant and an assessor do rather than work advocacy produces. Paying five figures for a case shaped this way buys responsiveness and explanation, both real goods, but it does not usually buy a different sentence.
5. Where private counsel genuinely changes the arithmetic
The cases that reward paid representation are the ones with a live suppression issue, a contested refusal, a commercial license, an immigration consequence, a prior within seven years, or an out-of-state license that will be acted on by another state's motor vehicle agency on terms Washington does not control. Impaired driving countermeasures are overseen federally by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the standardized field sobriety protocols that flow from that framework are exactly the kind of technical ground where an attorney with time and an expert budget can find something. Ask a private attorney which of those factors applies to your file, and listen for whether the answer is specific.
6. The check that costs nothing
Take the appointment if it is offered, meet the assigned attorney, and evaluate the actual person rather than the category. Nothing prevents hiring privately later, and a few weeks of appointed representation costs nothing while producing the discovery packet, the police report and the breath test paperwork that any private consultation will be more useful for having in hand. If the appointed attorney returns calls, knows the machine, knows the prosecutor and flags the licensing deadline unprompted, the money stays in the account where it can pay for treatment, an ignition interlock and the insurance surcharge that follows.
The screening form, the caseload number, the licensing deadline and the short list of factors that make a case genuinely contestable are all knowable before any retainer is signed, and a reader who checks those four things will make a better decision than one who assumes price and quality track each other.