Attorneys Neil Anderson and Katie Kauffman were each honored March 11 for their excellence in the courtroom.
Anderson was awarded Trial Attorney of the Year by the Clark County Bar Association at its annual Barrister’s Ball at the AC Marriott Vancouver Waterfront.
Kauffman was given the Rising Star award at Lewis & Clark Law School’s Distinguished Honors Dinner at the Waverley Country Club in Portland.
Both Kauffman and Anderson have felony caseloads of court-appointed cases at Vancouver Defenders and represent retained clients as well.
Anderson, a 1996 graduate of Seattle University School of Law, has been practicing in Clark County since 1999. He was hired by Jeff Barrar, founder of Vancouver Defenders, in 2006.
“Last year, he had six felony jury trials,” said Christie Emrich, owner of Vancouver Defenders, who introduced Anderson at the Barrister’s Ball. “For those who don’t practice in criminal law, that’s a lot. Neil is a criminal defense attorney. We’re not supposed to win. He’s a public defender. We’re really not supposed to win. Neil had those six trials and he had five wins, essentially.” At three trials, juries found Anderson’s clients not guilty. One trial ended in a hung jury, and in another his client was acquitted of a high-level felony but found guilty of a misdemeanor. Only once was his client found guilty as charged.

Attorneys Neil Anderson and Katie Kauffman won a trial Nov. 28 for a client accused of first-degree assault in the February 2021 shooting of a Vancouver man in the parking lot of an apartment complex.

The client, who has been in custody since the incident on $300,000 bail, was acquitted on all charges and released from the Clark County Jail after Anderson and Kauffman successfully argued that the shooting was in self-defense.

A jury returned the verdicts after deliberating approximately three hours.

Jurors heard testimony last week before the Thanksgiving holiday, and then returned to court Nov. 28 for closing arguments and deliberations.

The client was initially charged with attempted murder. Prosecutors amended the charge down to first-degree assault, a class A felony, with a firearm enhancement less than a month before trial. He was also charged with drive-by shooting, a class B felony. If convicted he faced between 14 and 17 years in prison.

Attorney Matthew Swisher won a bench trial Oct. 27 for a client charged with physical control of a vehicle while under the influence, a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

Clark County District Court Judge Chad Sleight acquitted Swisher’s client of the charge, ruling that Swisher had proven his client had been safely off the roadway at the time of his arrest.

Swisher’s client was arrested in 2021 after a Cowlitz Tribal Police officer noticed a car in the parking lot of the Cowlitz Crossing convenience store that was not in a parking space. It was 4 a.m. and the officer saw a male asleep in the driver’s seat. The officer could also see empty bottles of alcohol in the front passenger seat. The officer knocked on the driver’s window and asked the client to step out of the vehicle. He said when the man got out of the vehicle and spoke to him he could smell the odor of intoxicants and observed the man’s bloodshot, watery eyes, flushed face and slurred speech.

The client admitted he had been drinking. He refused to perform field sobriety tests.

Isabelle Askanas got a back-to-back wins in Clark County District Court last week. On Sept. 8 she got a client acquitted of assault and malicious mischief and on Sept. 9 she won a quick not-guilty verdict for a client charged with racing.

Askanas and Eliza Haggerty represented a client who was cited last year by a Clark County sheriff’s deputy who had been parked near Northeast 55th Avenue and Northeast Padden Parkway. About 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 30, 2021, the deputy wrote that two vehicles passed him traveling east on Padden Parkway “at a high rate of speed.” Both vehicles stopped at a red light, with the deputy now behind them. The deputy wrote that when the light turned green, “both vehicles’ wheels squeeled and the vehicles accelerated in a speed contest.”

The deputy pulled over both drivers and cited each for racing, a type of reckless driving, which is a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

Isabelle Askanas and Matthew Swisher won a trial Sept. 8 for a client charged with misdemeanor assault and malicious mischief.

A Clark County District Court jury deliberated about 40 minutes before returning not-guilty verdicts on charges of fourth-degree assault and third-degree malicious mischief, both gross misdemeanors punishable by up to one year in jail.

At the time of his arrest, the client was living in the alleged victim’s house. She was upset that he had a friend over and went to his bedroom to ask him when he was going to move out. She said the client got upset and shoved her so hard she fell down and got hurt. She also said he broke off a door knob, which was why he was charged with malicious mischief.

At the time of the client’s arrest, the homeowner told police officers that she had wanted the client to move out of her house and she even hesitated acknowledging that he had been living there because she knew that if he had established residency it would be more difficult to get him to move out. One officer even noted that both the client and alleged victim appeared to be giving “self-serving” statements about what happened.

Attorneys Neil Anderson and Isabelle Askanas won a domestic violence trial this week in Clark County Superior Court for a client charged with felony harassment and misdemeanor assault.

The client was arrested last year after a woman he’d recently met called 911 and told responding Vancouver police officers that our client had forcefully shoved her and threatened to kill her with her own gun. 

A conviction would have carried a sentence of up to eight months in jail.

The client testified that he met the woman through an online dating site. About a week after they met she picked him up in Portland and brought him home to Vancouver. He said they had got into an argument because he wanted her to drive him home, and she wanted him to stay at her residence. He said it was late, and after she told him she wasn’t going to drive him home, she said she was going outside. It was a cold October evening and he said he didn’t want her to go outside because she was barefoot and wearing only a nightgown.

A video from an interior security camera, which a deputy prosecuting attorney told jurors showed our client pushing the alleged victim, was really him trying to keep her from going out in the cold, he said. He did not intend to hurt her.

The client also testified he never threatened to shoot her. He was calm on the stand, even when the deputy prosecutor sarcastically asked if his memory of events was clearer now than it was ten months ago.

“Yes, because I’m fighting for my freedom now,” he replied.

As Anderson told jurors during closing arguments on Aug. 9, they didn’t just have two versions of what happened that October night: they had three.

The first version was what the alleged victim testified to at trial. The second version was his client’s and the third was what the alleged victim told responding police officers.

A Clark County deputy prosecutor who was told by two different juries his case wasn’t strong enough to warrant a conviction finally dismissed a felony theft charge this month against our client, but only after his supervisor was notified of the flaws in his case.

Our client, a home health aide with no criminal history, was accused in March 2021 of stealing $6,750 from an elderly client. She was charged with one count of theft from a vulnerable adult in the first degree, a class B felony. She has been unable to work while the case was pending.

The case went to trial twice in Clark County Superior Court. Attorney Katie Kauffman and Marina Spencer handled the first trial, in September 2021. Spencer and attorney Owen Sutanto handled the second trial, which was in May.

Each trial lasted one week and was declared a mistrial after the juries failed to reach an unanimous decision.

The deputy prosecutor was preparing to take the case to trial a third time, but Spencer sent a lengthy email to one of the deputy prosecutor’s supervisors, detailing the negative feedback provided from jurors.

Attorneys Neil Anderson and Daniel Mellen were successful this week in getting a client acquitted of felony domestic violence charges in Clark County Superior Court.

Their client was found not guilty on June 14 of second-degree assault, a class B felony, and harassment, a class C felony. If convicted he faced a minimum of one year in prison.

The jury did find him guilty of fourth-degree assault domestic violence, a misdemeanor charge the defense attorneys convinced the judge should be given as an option for jurors to consider. The client will be sentenced next month. With credit for the time he spent in the Clark County Jail after his arrest, it’s unlikely he will receive additional jail time.

The client, 24, was accused of choking his girlfriend and threatening to kill her in 2019, when he was 21. His girlfriend, who was 19 at the time, told Vancouver police officers that she and her boyfriend were arguing and he was trying to provoke her by tapping her on the forehead and calling her names. She said she took a swing at him, and he grabbed her wrist and told her to stop. She said they did stop arguing and she left the room, but when she returned he grabbed her, threw her on the bed, straddled her and put his hands around her neck and started to squeeze. She said while he was squeezing her neck he threatened to kill her. She said two roommates came in and separated the couple.

When the client’s ex-girlfriend testified this week, however, she did not mention the threat, which had been the basis for the felony harassment charge. After she finished testifying Anderson asked the judge, outside the presence of the jury, for a directed verdict on the harassment charge since the state failed to introduce any evidence. The judge granted Anderson’s request.

Attorney Isabelle Askanas won a trial June 2 in Clark County District Court for a client charged with physical control, a gross misdemeanor.

A conviction for physical control carries the same penalty as a DUI, including a mandatory minimum two-day jail sentence.

Her client was cited by a Clark County Sheriff’s deputy about 3 a.m. on May 10, 2020. Her client had been on the way home from a friend’s house when he lost control of his vehicle and struck a curb, ending up in the middle of the road with a flat tire.

A responding officer said when he contacted Askanas’ client he was slurring his speech, had bloodshot watery eyes and smelled of intoxicants.

The client agreed to perform field sobriety tests and had difficulty keeping his balance, an officer wrote in his report. The client refused to take a preliminary breath test, admitted to drinking three or four beers earlier in the evening and told an officer, “I shouldn’t have drove drunk.”

Those facts were all heard by the jury during the one-day trial.