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Guest Contributor

Randy N. Kaplan

Deputy Public Defender, Los Angeles County

Randy N. Kaplan is a Deputy Public Defender in Los Angeles County. He has spent twenty-three years defending people who cannot afford to choose their own attorney, and over those years he has stood in the courtroom beside more clients than he can count, many of whom relied on an interpreter simply to be heard.

He contributes occasional first-person essays to Kaplan Interpreting Services on the role of language and interpretation in criminal proceedings, drawing from cases in his own practice.

Articles by Randy

1 guest essay on language and criminal defense

Every Word Matters: Two Cases That Changed How I Think About Interpreters
Jun 30, 2026

Every Word Matters: Two Cases That Changed How I Think About Interpreters

Two cases from a Los Angeles public defender's practice, a Watson murder turning on a Spanish word for a beer brand and a DUI turning on wobbling versus weaving, that show why credentialed interpretation alone is not enough in criminal proceedings.