Category: Courts

Courts, King County, Police

State Ruling Represents a Blow to Public Defense; Settlement In SPD Killing of 23-Year-Old Will Cost Taxpayers Millions

1. The state Public Employee Relations Commission ruled earlier this month that King County was not required to bargain with unionized staff for the county’s Department of Public Defense (DPD) before moving inmates from the King County jail in downtown Seattle to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a jail in Des Moines owned by several cities in South King County.

The decision to move people to SCORE, which the county argued was necessary to alleviate understaffing at the downtown jail, was controversial. Unionized staffers for the county’s Department of Public Defense, which represents indigent clients, argued that the move limited defendants’ access to attorneys and created logistical hurdles that made it harder for DPD to provide the best possible defense.

SEIU 925, the union that represents DPD employees, filed a demand to bargain over the proposal to move inmates to SCORE, arguing that the agreement creates changes to their members’ working conditions and was a mandatory subject of bargaining. A hearing examiner ruled in the union’s favor; PERC’s decision overturns that ruling.

The county’s contract with SCORE ended in 2023. But the PERC decision, which the union is appealing, has potentially serious implications for issues that remain ongoing, including caseloads and staffing levels at DPD and other local public defense agencies around the state attorneys and non-attorney DPD staff such as investigators, paralegals, and legal assistants.

According to public defense union president Molly Gilbert, “there has never been a decision like” the examiner’s initial ruling, which “would have required the county, and any other public defense office in that state, to negotiate with the union over caseloads and staffing.” In practice, Gilbert said, this could force the county to hire more staff, including paralegals and investigators, to lower caseloads make it easier for attorneys to handle the cases they have.

Public defender caseloads are an ongoing issue in Washington state; last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that jurisdictions like King County must reduce caseload standards dramatically over the next 10 years. According to Gilbert, a favorable outcome for the union wouldn’t necessarily result in a directive to hire dramatically more attorneys—a scenario that could set King County up for a consequential McLeary-style funding mandate to “lock in” complex caseload standards.

Instead, Gilbert said, the union has been making “proposals that are far cheaper than the bar standards that we could live with” by “having more staff support, which is cheaper than hiring all these attorneys. But they refuse to bargain with us on that.

The union is appealing PERC’s decision.

2. As PubliCola reported, the city settled with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student killed in a crosswalk by a speeding Seattle police officer, earlier this month for a total of $29,011,000—$29 million plus $11,000, the amount a Seattle Police Officers Guild leader “joked” that the city would pay her family, given her “limited value.”  The comment, made by officer Daniel Auderer to SPOG president Mike Solan and caught on Auderer’s body camera, caused international outrage and led to Auderer’s termination.

SPD officer Kevin Dave was driving 74 miles an hour down a 25-mile-per-hour street when he struck Kandula, who was in a crosswalk; he claimed he was racing to provide medical care to an overdose victim who turned out to be a a guy concerned he had used too much cocaine.

After we published, a number of people asked PubliCola what Dave’s reckless driving would cost the city—and who would pay. We asked the Office of City Finance, and learned from a spokesperson that although the city’s insurance will cover $20 million of the settlement. The city itself is liable for the first $10 million of “any covered loss,” including lawsuit settlements. That $10 million deductible also includes the cost to defend SPD against the lawsuit filed by Kandula’s family.

That $10 million will come out of the city’s Judgment and Claims fund, which is part of the city’s general fund.

According to OCF, $20 million is the “full amount of available insurance and the insurers’ policy limits.” The city, in other words, is on the hook for its deductible plus any settlement amount above $20 million.

As we’ve reported repeatedly, the city has had to increase the judgment and claims fund routinely for several years running, thanks in large part to growing settlements in lawsuits against SPD. In addition to this ever-increasing line item, large settlements raise the amount the city pays for insurance; as of 2023, when Kandula was killed, the city was paying just under $9 million a year for insurance, the OCF spokesperson said. In short: SPD does not pay directly for any of the lawsuits it loses or settles.

City Council, Courts, homelessness, housing, LGBTQ+, Police

This Week on PubliCola: February 14, 2026

 

Nine stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, February 9

Bill Targeting Sex Buyers Would No Longer Result in Immediate Felony Charges

State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex has been amended; under a version that passed narrowly out of committee, buying sex would be a gross misdemeanor and sex workers would get access to services in lieu of jail. Proponents of the original, harsher bill said the new version fails to crack down enough on the “demand” side of sex work, and suggested that lenient prostitution laws allowed traffickers to go unpunished.

Tuesday, February 10

Sex Worker Advocates Demand Action from the City After Prosecutors’ Dehumanizing Presentation

The changes to the state law we covered Monday came partly in response to a lurid presentation by local prosecutors at a city council meeting, which included photos of identifiable, brutalized women and graphic details of assaults. Advocates for sex workers, also appalled by the presentation, issued a list of demands for the city, including a separate panel on non-carceral, humane approaches to abuse and trafficking and the inclusion of people with direct experience in policy discussions about sex work.

ACLU Drops Lawsuit After City Attorney Evans Drops Blanket Affidavit Against Judge

City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington announced that the ACLU is dropping its lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.

City Council Gets New Central Staff Director

City hall veteran Ben Noble, who’s currently in his second stint as director of the city council’s policy-oriented central staff, is retiring in March after more than two decades at the city. His replacement, Lish Whitson, is another city old-timer who has worked on four comprehensive plan updates, including the upzone of Seattle’s former single-family enclaves last year.

Family of Jaahnavi Kandula, Pedestrian Killed by SPD Officer in 2023, Reaches $29,011,000 Settlement with City

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office settled for $29,011,000 with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old student who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour in 2023. The $11,000 is a pointed reference to a comment made by Daniel Auderer, then the vice president of the police union, that the city could just “write a check” for that amount because that’s all Kandula’s short life was worth.

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Wednesday, February 11

Tax For Social Housing Brought In Twice the Original Estimate, Mirroring Early JumpStart Results

Funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which the City Council approved in a 7-0 vote yesterday, is coming in significantly higher than anticipated: In its first year, the developer will receive an estimated $115 million to acquire existing apartment buildings and develop new ones. The revenues mirror early returns from the JumpStart payroll tax, which is also a tax on large companies that pay high wages.

Thursday, February 12

Review Finds Multiple Police Failures Preceded Violent Response to Counterprotests During Anti-LGBTQ Event in May

The city’s Office of the Inspector General released a report today finding that the Seattle Police Department’s actions during the anti-trans “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” rally, held by an extremist group called Mayday USA, showed a bias against counter-protesters who showed up to demonstrate against the right-wing event. After chatting amiably with security for the anti-trans group, officers began referring to protesters as “transtifa.”

Friday, February 13

New Councilmember Dionne Foster Tells Seattle Nice: Police Cameras “Should Be Turned Off and Come Down.”

On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, David, Sandeep, and I interviewed new City Councilmember Dionne Foster. Our conversation touched on encampment removals, police surveillance cameras, the upcoming library levy, and the

Homelessness Authority Rescinds Tiny House Village Grant, Gives Money to Salvation Army Instead

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time. The money, which LIHI secured in last year’s city of Seattle budget, will now go to the Salvation Army to convert 35 of its existing transitional housing units into shelter.

Courts, Police

Family of Jaahnavi Kandula, Pedestrian Killed by SPD Officer in 2023, Reaches $29,011,000 Settlement with City

photo of Jaahnavi Kandula

In an incident that sparked widespread outrage, police guild leader Daniel Auderer joked that the 23-year-old student was only worth $11,000.

By Andrew Engelson

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office reached a settlement last week with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk in January 2023 by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour. In September 2024, the family brought a lawsuit against the City of Seattle and SPD officer Kevin Dave for $110 million, plus an additional $11,000. 

The settlement, obtained by PubliCola on Thursday, is for $29 million plus $11,000.

The added figure is a reference to callous remarks made by SPD officer Daniel Auderer, vice chairman of the Seattle Police Officers Guild at the time, who had been called to the scene to investigate Dave for signs of intoxication. Caught on body cam video in conversation with police union leader Mike Solan, Auderer joked and laughed about Kandula’s death, saying, “Just write a check. $11,000. She was 26, anyway. She had limited value.”

“Jaahnavi Kandula’s death was heartbreaking, and the city hopes this financial settlement brings some sense of closure to the Kandula family,” city attorney Erika Evans said. “We also recognize that her loss has left unimaginable pain. Jaahnavi Kandula’s life mattered. It mattered to her family, to her friends, and to our community.”

In their claim, filed in King County Superior Court, attorneys wrote that Kandula “experienced terror, severe emotional distress, and severe pain and suffering before dying.”

Kandula, a 23-year-old engineering student from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, was crossing Dexter Avenue at Thomas Street when she was killed on the evening of January 23, 2023. The legal complaint was filed by Kandula’s mother and father, Vijaya Laksmi Gundapuneedi and Sreekanth Kandula, who both live in India. 

Interim police chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in July 2024. In response, he filed a $20 million tort claim against the city for “wrongful termination,” and added an addition five million dollars to the claim, which is currently in King County courts.

Rahr fired Dave in January 2025 after the Office of Police Accountability issued a report finding Dave failed to drive with “with due regard for the safety of all persons.” The report also noted that Dave had been involved in a separate “preventable collision” as an SPD officer, and—as PubliCola first reported—did not have a valid Washington driver’s license when he struck Kandula.

Before joining SPD, Dave was fired by the Tucson Police Department; SPD was aware of what one sergeant flagged as his “checkered history” in Tucson before SPD hired him in 2019.

Tucson fired Dave in 2013 after numerous investigations, including one involving a “preventable collision” for which he was suspended being fired. 

In a troubling incident that occurred shortly after he was fired, an officer pulled him over for speeding and observed Dave acting erratically. According to a police report on that incident, the investigating officer filing suspected Dave was “possibly on some type of narcotic.”

Many of the details from PubliCola’s reporting were included in the Kandula family’s claim against officer Dave and the city. “He should have never been hired,” Vonda Sargent, an attorney for the family, told PubliCola shortly before the lawsuit was filed in 2024. “You can’t take just all comers. Everyone is not suited or fit to be a law enforcement officer.” 

Sargent did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. PubliCola will update this post if we hear back.

In November, 2024, in response to community outrage over the collision, SPD released new policies on emergency driving which direct officers to “drive no faster than their skill and training allows and [what] is reasonably necessary to safely arrive at the scene.” 

King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion declined to file felony charges against Dave, and City Attorney Ann Davison issued him a negligent driving traffic ticket with a $5,000 fine.

City Council, Courts

ACLU Drops Lawsuit After City Attorney Evans Drops Blanket Affidavit Against Judge; Council Gets New Central Staff Director

 

City Attorney Erika Evans

1. City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington jointly announced this week that the ACLU is dropping their lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified an independently elected judge from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.

In 2024, Davison disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, an independently elected judge, from hearing any criminal cases for the rest of Davison’s term through a procedure known as a blanket affidavit of prejudice. Davison justified her decision by claiming Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing unspecified past cases in which they alleged Vaddadi had demonstrated “a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

As one of her first official acts in office, Evans issued an order to her criminal division banning all blanket affidavits of prejudice and requiring attorneys to request such affidavits individually, on a case-by-case basis, returning to standard practice for every modern city attorney prior to Davison.

The move by Davison and her deputy, Natalie Walton-Anderson was widely viewed as political—Vaddadi is progressive—and further investigations by Vaddadi’s legal team and independent advocates made it clear that Davison’s office misrepresented the cases they cited in the memo denouncing Vaddadi.

In a statement on Thursday, Evans said, “As an experienced prosecutor, I believe in litigating cases—not attempting to ban judges we do not like. Under my leadership, the only time a Seattle prosecutor will seek to disqualify a judge from a case is in the rare instance where there’s a clear, strong, reason that the individual prosecutor believes the case will not receive a fair hearing.”

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2. City Council President Joy Hollingsworth just announced that Lish Whitson, a member of the Seattle City Council’s Central Staff for the past 13 years (and a 20-year City Hall veteran) will take over as head of Central Staff in March, when Ben Noble retires from the city. Central staffers are the council’s policy shop; unlike legislative aides, they provide policy advice and write legislation for the entire council.

The council president is nominally in charge of central staff, and picks their boss; former council president Sara Nelson fired central staff director Esther Handy and replaced her with Noble. Under Nelson, who took an atypically active role overseeing central staff, a large number of veteran council staffers left for other positions, creating a brain drain (particularly among women) at the council’s primary source of institutional knowledge.

Noble led Central Staff for about 14 years before heading up the City Budget Office and Office of Revenue Forecasts and returning as Central Staff director in 2024. A PhD economist who (unlike certain other city staffers) never made a point of his credentials, Noble was a budget expert and diplomat, one reason he was able to last in high-level city positions as council members and mayors came and went.

Whitson, similarly, is part of the deep state (complimentary) that keeps the city running. He oversaw the adoption of Phase 1 of former mayor Harrell’s “One Seattle” comprehensive plan update, and has worked on all four of the city’s comp plan updates since the original plan was adopted in 1994. His new deputy director, Calvin Chow, led the council’s budget process last year. Former central staff deputy director Aly Penucci left after more than 11 years at the city to become deputy Whatcom County executive in 2024; she returned as Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget director this year.

City Council, Courts, King County

Sex Worker Advocates Demand Action from the City After Prosecutors’ Dehumanizing Presentation

 

Amber, from Green Light Project, and Emi Koyoma, from the Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, testify at City Council Tuesday.

By Erica C. Barnett

Advocates for sex workers, activated by a brutal, dehumanizing presentation the King County Prosecutor’s Office delivered to the city council’s public safety committee about sex trafficking, are demanding action from the city and county to rectify the harm done by past actions and statements about sex work and trafficking.

As PubliCola reported, the prosecutors, who were trying to drum up support for a proposed state law that would make it a felony to pay another person for sex. The presentation included identifiable photos of tortured, brutalized women; a lurid recitation of the objects an anonymous victim said had been inserted into her by force; misogynistic quotes about sex workers from an unidentified online forum; and graphic descriptions of rape and violence against women.

The prosecutors also claimed that every sex worker who opposed further criminalizing sex work had been a victim of childhood abuse, and was therefore speaking against their own true interests because of trauma.

In a letter to the council, which three advocates read aloud at Tuesday’s council meeting, a group of advocates for sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade made five demands:

• An acknowledgement from the city of the “selective and exploitative uses of survivor stories, voices, and images” by the committee and the prosecutor’s office.

• An examination of the city and county’s policies and trainings, if any, on “trauma-informed, and non-exploitative uses of survivor voices and stories.”

• An analysis by the city’s Office of Civil Rights on “existing and potential policy approaches to reducing violence and exploitation in the sex trade as well as a review of best practices for incorporating diverse voices of survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade while minimizing re-traumatization.”

• Strategies to include more perspectives from people with lived experience of sex work in future policy conversations, and to fund peer-led groups that provide services to survivors and sex workers without requiring that they collaborate with law enforcement

• A public safety committee meeting “dedicated to a presentation about human rights-based, noncarceral, pro-sex worker approach to empower survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade and combat violence, abuse, and exploitation within the sex trade.”

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The organization also provide a list of several quotes from council members during the presentation along with the derogatory messages they communicated. One was a comment from committee chair Bob Kettle aimed at people who criticize the city’s purely punitive response to the sex trade.

Kettle said that “so many women in our city,” as well as “the chattering classes,” are hypocrites because they criticize Jeffrey Epstein but don’t support carceral strategies like sending sex buyers to prison. “These people, the people come in here and yell at us because when we’re trying to go in after the men, but we’re the target. We as a city need to stop, take a deep breath, and think about that,” Kettle said.

On Monday, the Seattle Women’s Commission sent a letter to the city’s Office of Civil Rights with a list of their own requests, including a public statement from OCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith calling on the city to “honor and include diverse perspectives in all Civil Rights Work,” including work on behalf of sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade.

As we reported on Monday, the prosecutors’ presentation contributed to efforts in the state legislature to roll back the legislation the two county prosecutors were advocating for, removing the first-strike felony provision and incorporating more humanizing language into the proposal. The changes led supporters of the original bill to mutiny, calling the new version—which still increases paying for sex to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, and a felony for the third—inadequate to deter people from paying for sex.

Courts, Police, public disclosure

Police Department Reverses Course on Public Records After Lawsuit Loss

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last month, a King County Superior Court judge ruled that the Seattle Police Department’s policy of considering no more than one public disclosure request from the same person at a time, leaving subsequent requests in an indefinite “inactive” status, violates the state Public Disclosure Act.

The policy, called “grouping,” has been allowed in Seattle since 2017, when then-mayor Ed Murray and the City Council passed legislation aimed at preventing people from using bots to file dozens or hundreds of requests at a time.

In practice, SPD has been the only city department to deploy grouping on a mass scale, allowing the police to delay or deny disclosure for years by responding to every request by the same requester, in full, before even starting on subsequent requests. The Seattle Times sued to stop the practice, secured an agreement from SPD that they wouldn’t group requests from any requester that were more than eight weeks apart, and sued again when SPD failed to abide by their agreement. (PubliCola filed a declaration in support of the Times’ position).

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This week, SPD finally took action to comply with Superior Court Judge Sandra Widian’s ruling, sending notices with actual dates when the first (or next) installments of records will be available. PubliCola has nine outstanding requests with SPD, including some that SPD had been working on before they stopped responding to all our requests but one in November 2024; on Tuesday, SPD sent us new dates for all of our stalled requests. Each response said that SPD was providing these estimates “pursuant to a court order.”

SPD, of course, can push back these dates individually in the future, delaying disclosure in a way that appears more transparent than its previous practice of providing end-of-year “placeholder” dates for every request that move forward at the end of every year.

And in PubliCola’s case at least, SPD’s responses will still be far from timely: SPD now says they’ll provide new records for our oldest outstanding request, from June 2023, by July 2026, and we won’t see a single document from our most recent request, from December 2024, until June at the earliest. (That request, appropriately enough, is for correspondence between the public disclosure office and other records requesters about “grouping” in 2024). But perhaps it’s a sign of progress that SPD appears to be complying with this court order, so far. We’ll let you know in June.