Tag: Seattle Municipal Court

City Council, Courts, Mayor Harrell

City’s Plan to Jail Misdemeanor Offenders at SCORE in Des Moines Moves Forward Despite Concerns

 By Erica C. Barnett

The city council’s public safety committee will consider a contract with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) this week; the agreement would grant the city “the use of at least 20 beds” at SCORE for Seattle misdemeanor offenders, at an estimated cost of around $2 million a year, not counting transportation to and from the Des Moines jail, which is owned by six south King County cities. The legislation anticipates moving people to SCORE as soon as September, and would use an underspend of $600,000 to pay for the beds in 2024.

The beds at SCORE would be in addition to those at the downtown Seattle jail, where King County just agreed to begin booking people for minor misdemeanors committed in downtown Seattle, after a long period of booking restrictions imposed during the COVID pandemic.

Due to an ongoing shortage of jail guards, the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) has limited bookings to people accused of serious misdemeanors, like domestic violence and DUI, along with frequent offenders and people who commit lower-level offenses in “hot spots” identified by the city. The new policy has no end date and there are no specific limitations on how many jail beds the city can use.

A shortage of corrections officers can lead to dangerous and inhumane conditions, including a lack of access to health care and basic hygiene for people incarcerated at the jail. Staffing at the downtown jail has improved, but there are still about 70 vacant guard positions, according to the DAJD.

Seattle elected officials, including Mayor Bruce Harrell, City Attorney Ann Davison, and a supermajority of the City Council, have argued that the proliferation of drug use and other criminal activity in Seattle is partly the result of a lack of penalties that would otherwise deter people from committing crimes.

According to a memo from the mayor’s office, failing to approve the contract with SCORE will lead to “continuing public safety concerns” in Seattle. “Without an immediate ability for law enforcement to respond and disrupt the harmful impacts crime can have on our property and injury victims, we leave the community no option for respite for repeated criminal behavior,” the memo says.

The city council’s public safety committee—whose chair, Bob Kettle, frequently decries what he calls a “permissive environment” toward crime in Seattle—will consider the contract with SCORE on Wednesday.

Critics have pointed out a number of logistical and legal concerns with any potential contract.

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In a memo to Harrell’s office last month, the SMC court administrator, Josh Sattler laid out some of the impacts a contract with SCORE would have on the court.

Transferring misdemeanor defendants to SCORE would also require a new data exchange linking SCORE, the municipal court, SPD, and the city attorney’s office, Sattler wrote—a “sizeable technology project” that would “introduce a high level of risk as this information is critical to ensure defendants have timely hearings, access to counsel, transport is arranged, and release is timely.”

“Establishing a new data exchange with a new jail is one of SMC’s greatest concerns with a secondary jail,” the memo said.

There are also more immediate, practical concerns.

Driving to SCORE to meet with a client and back to Seattle would use up more than an hour of an attorney’s work day—one of the issues the union raised in the Unfair Labor Practice complaint it filed last year with the Public Employment Relations Commission, which noted that having to drive to SCORE would “add multiple dead hours” to attorneys’ workdays, which already involve rushing back and forth between a county jail (either the downtown Seattle King County Correctional Facility or the Maleng Regional Justice Center and Kent) and nearby courts.

The city says that it would be a simple matter for the court to conduct hearings remotely with people jailed at SCORE, and for defense attorneys to meet with clients using tablets and the jail’s wifi connection.

But Molly Gilbert, the president of the union that represents King County Department of Public Defense employees, said that during brief, aborted pilot to house King County inmates at the Des Moines jail, the wifi would frequently “just shut off, and [the clients] were never in confidential areas.” It’s unclear whether people with severe mental health conditions would be expected to attend hearings at mental health court via iPad; the mayor’s office said the city will create guidelines about who can be detained at SCORE at some point in the future.

“The City feels comfortable that they have addressed these previous issues around Wi-Fi effectively and will continue to monitor and assess performance through the ongoing workgroup,” a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said.

Currently, the municipal court requires in-person appearances for every hearing after a person’s first appearance—and the interlocal agreement makes the city responsible for transportation. This means the city would have to pay, and arrange a ride, for every inmate held at SCORE every time they need to appear before a judge. The court owns a small van that it sometimes uses to transport a handful of defendants at a time, but “If SMC Marshals will be expected to handle defendant transport, this could be a sizeable cost for the City of Seattle,” Sattler’s memo says.

“What we experienced [during the county’s pilot with SCORE] was, it was frequently the wrong people” being transported, “people were not showing up when they were supposed to be there, and people were left behind when they were supposed to be transferred back,” Gilbert said.

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said the city  “will be transporting clients from jail to SMC for hearing and back throughout the day. We are still working through operational requirements for transport and will not begin booking people into SCORE until these details are worked out.” The city doesn’t have any cost estimate for transportation.

Nor is there any plan yet for where to hold people who are jailed at SCORE while they await their hearings; there’s a small holding cell at the courthouse building where people detained at the downtown jail can be held immediately before their appearances, but the cell wasn’t meant to hold a large number of inmates or to detain people all day. “How long are we leaving people in a holding cell? Who’s feeding them? Is it even humane to even keep them there for that long?” These are questions, according to Gilbert, that the city and SCORE have not addressed.

According to Sattler’s memo, the court doesn’t have the capacity to take on the number of cases they would need to hear if the city adds jail beds at SCORE. By law, first appearances have to happen within 48 hours of an arrest, and adding more hearings to the court’s six-day-a-week calendar would probably require adding another judge to the court—something the mayor and council would have to change the law to accommodate. An eighth courtroom, of course, would add more expenses to the city budget, which is currently facing a shortfall of around $260 million a year.

As PubliCola has reported, at least six people have died in custody at SCORE in the past year and a half, including a woman who died of severe malnutrition and a 21-year-old who died of unknown causes. The mayor’s spokesperson noted that SCORE completed an accreditation program “that certifies it is operating under best practices and standards for law enforcement” earlier this year, and “also has accreditation with the National Commission on Correctional Healthcare (NCCHC), among others. NCCHC’s stated mission is to improve the quality of health care in jails.”

The mayor’s spokesperson also said people will have access to mental health services and drug treatment at SCORE. This is inconsistent with what judges and defenders have told us about services at SCORE, and Sattler’s’ memo notes that  the “seven independently elected Judges will likely have concerns or objections related to access to medical facilities, treatment and release planning services at a secondary jail.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this post characterized the court administrator’s memo as a reflection of the seven municipal court judges’ views, rather than those of the court administrator. We have edited the post to correct this error.

 

City Council, Courts, Drugs, Health, Police

Six Months In, Seattle’s New Drug Law Has Had Little Direct Impact on Public Drug Use or Diversion
After police cracked down on people hanging out and using drugs at the corner of 12th and Jackson, they moved a block away. Photo: Andrew Engelson

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include additional quotes from Lisa Daugaard, the director of Purpose Dignity Action, which runs the city’s largest diversion program, LEAD.

By Andrew Engelson

In the six months since Seattle enacted a controversial law making public drug use and possession a gross misdemeanor, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office has filed charges against 17 people for violations of the law, which criminalizes the use or possession of drugs other than cannabis. That’s a tiny percentage of about 300 arrests police have made since the new law went into effect in October.

And while advocates for diversion—a strategythat involves enrolling people in services  in lieu of charges—say the low charging rate is a good thing, the city’s main diversion program is perpetually underfunded and has had to shift strategies to take on so many new clients from arrests.

SPD has been arresting hundreds of people under the new law, though the number of monthly arrests has recently been on a steady decline.According to Seattle Police Department data, arrests spiked during a highly-publicized series of stings in October and peaked in January. The number of monthly misdemeanor drug arrests has dropped significantly since then, with just 20 arrests in March and six in the first 11 days of April. 

City Council President Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison touted the new law as a way to reduce public use of fentanyl and meth. But so far, it doesn’t seem to have made more than superficial changes to the level of drug use in two of the most visible hot spots in the city: Third Avenue downtown, and 12th and Jackson in the International District. According to SPD data, about two-thirds of arrests under the law were in SPD beats that encompass those two areas of the city.

Of the 17 people the city attorney’s office has charged, about half failed to appear for court hearings–a strong indicator that they were living without shelter. People who are homeless or struggle with mental illness often have trouble making court appearances, and this can result in a reinforcing cycle of interaction with the criminal justice system and lack of shelter. 

Davison’s office has motioned to remove municipal judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing eight of the 17 drug cases. Since March, Davison has directed city attorneys to challenge judge Vaddadi from hearing any criminal cases, charging that the judge, a former public defender, has a “regular pattern of biased rulings.”

Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid told PubliCola he’s seen about a dozen cases in his court related to the new drug law. “Anecdotally, from my own courtroom, I can tell you that I have a zero percent appearance rate so far for people charged under the new drug statute,” he said. 

According to municipal court records, the average time between an arrest under the new drug law and when the city attorney files charges is about 70 days; more than half of the people charged under the new law waited 90 days or more for Davison’s office to file charges. This is in sharp contrast to Davison’s promise, in 2022, to decide whether to file charges in all criminal cases within five business days after her office receives a referral from the police department.

“If charges aren’t filed right away, then it is very difficult to find a homeless person and get them to come to court,” Shadid said. “My suspicion is that the vast majority of people charged with [possession or public use] are homeless and that’s why we’re seeing such a low appearance rate in court.”

In about half the arrests under the new drug law, police referred drug users to the LEAD diversion program, which connects people with case management, harm reduction, and other services. 

Lisa Daugaard, the director of Purpose Dignity Action, which runs LEAD, says she welcomes the emphasis on diversion. “It’s completely appropriate for the city attorney to defer filing while LEAD case managers are working with people to complete diversion intake, and that’s what the ordinance calls for,” Daugaard said. “No one should criticize prosecutors for actively encouraging pre-filing diversion efforts, when those are demonstrated to be the most effective response to severe substance use disorder.”

However, taking on post-arrest referrals has required LEAD to stop taking referrals from other sources—effectively shifting its referral strategy away from community-based referrals, which don’t require an arrest, to post-arrest referrals for people caught violating the new law. Although LEAD has received more funding from state and federal sources in the meantime, that funding is not related to the new law and the city itself did not increase LEAD funding as part of its shift to arrest-based diversion. Over the past several years, LEAD (which used to stand for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) has moved toward community referrals, which don’t require people to choose diversion while in handcuffs.

The increase in SPD interactions put a strain on LEAD’s limited resources. To address this, during the recent legislative session, the supplemental budget included a $2.5 million boost to Seattle and King county’s LEAD program, in budget line items sponsored by Rep. Darya Farivar and Sen. Rebecca Saldaña. Combined with another $3.5 million in one-time funds, that’s enough to enable LEAD to do some community referrals, in addition to referrals resulting from arrests, this year. However, Daugaard said, the PDA is “reluctant to overextend on community referrals until there is a more sustainable plan for scaling beyond this year.”

“We are one of numerous community-based case management providers,” Daugaard said. “So it’s a collective response but it needs to have a stable, sustained funding stream. It’s an approach that almost everyone knows is the right approach. But you can’t go year to year, constantly on the verge of cutting it off.”

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Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said the time it takes to review a case and file charges “is dependent on many factors, one of which is waiting for toxicology lab results.” The State Patrol’s toxicology lab has been plagued with delays (usually associated with DUI cases) but opened a new center last year to address the backlog.

Robinson said the city attorney’s office has a backlog of about 800 cases for all criminal cases awaiting a decision to file, including drug use, theft, DUI, domestic violence, and other misdemeanors. He said the city attorney’s office is currently reviewing whether to charge in 81 cases and 14 cases are awaiting toxicology reports. 

In the 17 cases the city attorney has charged, arrest reports show that they almost universally involve suspected fentanyl or meth use, and include descriptions such as one in an officer’s report that mentions “lighters, foil, and pipes, tubular objects that they were holding near the foil.”

Currently, no one arrested under the drug law is being booked into jail. King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention still has in place a pandemic-era moratorium on booking most people accused of non-violent misdemeanors. Robinson said that while those arrested aren’t able to be booked, “They may be booked into jail if they have also committed a companion crime (e.g. burglary while possessing drugs, etc.).”

According to data on SPD’s arrest dashboard, arrests (which include charge-by-officer, a process in which cases are sent directly to the city attorney’s office) for violations of the law peaked in December at 86, and declined to 20 in March.  Continue reading “Six Months In, Seattle’s New Drug Law Has Had Little Direct Impact on Public Drug Use or Diversion” →

Courts, Elections, Morning Fizz, Police, public safety

City Attorney Disqualifies Judge from Criminal Cases, Issues Traffic Ticket to Officer Who Killed Student With His SUV

1. City attorney Ann Davison made two significant announcements via late-afternoon press release on Friday. First, she announced that the city’s criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson—whose last day was Friday—has issued a “standing affidavit of prejudice” against Seattle Municipal Judge Pooja Vaddadi disqualifying her from hearing criminal cases brought by the city attorney’s office.

The affidavit is a kind of peremptory challenge, similar to the challenges attorneys can make to disqualify jurors at at trial; in addition to the standing order, the city attorney’s office has to file an individual challenge in every case they want removed from Vaddadi’s courtroom.

In an internal memo about Vaddadi, Walton-Anderson said she often reversed other judges’ findings of probable cause or failed to find probable cause “in situations where, clearly, probable cause exists,” releasing people accused of DUI and domestic violence without considering their criminal history or the severity of the offense.

Additionally, Walton-Anderson said in a statement, “The resounding input from attorneys that have appeared in her courtroom is that her decisions demonstrate a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

Vaddadi worked as a public defender for 10 months before challenging then-presiding judge Adam Eisenberg in 2022.

Filing a blanket affidavit of prejudice against a sitting judge is essentially the nuclear option, which is one reason the city attorney’s office hasn’t exercised it in recent memory. Pete Holmes, the former city attorney, considered filing one against Ed McKenna, a politically conservative former judge whom Holmes accused of violating the rules of judicial conduct, but didn’t—reportedly because it would be an extraordinary act against a separately elected official. The King County Department of Public Defense, however, did, arguing that McKenna was biased against defendants and disqualifying him from cases repeatedly during his final two years in office.

The blanket affidavit isn’t technically permanent, since the city attorney’s office could just stop filing individual affidavits, but it will force the court to move Vaddadi to an assignment that doesn’t involve deciding criminal cases, like hearing challenges to traffic infractions. We have reached out to Vaddadi, the city attorney’s office, and municipal court presiding Judge Faye Chess, and will post an update when there’s more to report.

2. Also on Friday evening, Davison announced that her office will be issuing a traffic ticket to Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour—three times the speed limit. The infraction, second-degree negligent driving, carries a fine of up to $5,000. The city attorney will not file criminal misdemeanor charges against Dave.

Last week, as PubliCola reported, the King County Prosecutor’s Office announced that it would not file vehicular homicide charges against Dave because he was responding to a “legitimate, life-threatening call” as he sped down Dexter Avenue. That call was an “overdose” to which the police later said Dave was responding “as a paramedic,” suggesting he had to get there right away. However, as we reported last year, the caller was awake, lucid, and standing outside his apartment building as he told 911 operators he was afraid he had taken too much cocaine.

County prosecutors also said the fact that Kandula stepped into the crosswalk while Dave gunned his SUV in her direction could serve as a defense at trial, where Dave’s attorneys could argue it was a “superseding cause” that contributed to Kandula’s death. In its legal analysis, the county prosecutor’s office noted that the standard of proof for reckless driving—”willful or wanton disregard” for safety—is higher than the requirement for vehicular homicide, which only requires that a person is driving in a “reckless manner.”

Courts, Crime, Mayor Harrell, Police

Despite Public Opinion, Seattle Cops and Prosecutors Still Prioritize Cracking Down on Sex Work

 

Last year, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office pursued charges against 30 men accused of “sexual exploitation,” or patronizing a sex worker. Most people charged with this misdemeanor are men of color, and many are immigrants; of the 30 prosecuted la required a court interpreter.

By Erica C. Barnett

Shortly before dark one evening last April, a young woman stood outside the Lowe’s hardware store at the corner of 125th and Aurora, looking for customers. Clutching a silver fanny pack, she stood alone near the entrance to the parking lot, dressed in eye-catching moon boots, a reddish cropped tank top, and a black skirt she later described as “a very, very short skirt that barely covered my rear.”

According to her later account, a young man driving a decades-old sedan honked his horn, made a U-turn, and pulled into the driveway of the parking lot, blocking traffic in his haste. After a quick negotiation, the woman later testified, the man said he would give her $80 for “quick sex,” prompting the woman—Seattle police officer Kortney North—to give a signal.

Within moments, the parking lot became a blur of activity, as teams of uniformed officers swooped in. Simultaneously, a detective driving a vehicle filled with other “decoys”—more female officers, also dressed up as sex workers—arrived to whisk North away. Four surveillance officers remained just out of sight, as did a second surveillance vehicle nearby. Once police had the man—we’ll call him James— in handcuffs, an officer drove him a nearby precinct, where still more officers awaited to process and release him.

A few weeks later, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office charged him with one misdemeanor count for soliciting a sex worker—a crime that carries a maximum of 90 days in jail, plus fines that can add up to several thousand dollars..

Most men charged with sexual exploitation—the city’s official term for soliciting a sex worker—end up agreeing to a deal with prosecutors. Last year, according to the Seattle Municipal Court, the city attorney’s office brought sexual exploitation charges against 30 individuals. Only one, James, insisted on his innocence.

And so, late last month, North found herself testifying before a jury as a witness for the prosecution in a courtroom on the 11th floor of the Seattle Municipal Court building in downtown Seattle.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this.”—Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham

Because undercover officers don’t wear video cameras or carry recording devices—and don’t collect money from the men they target—the outcome of prostitution cases depends almost entirely on whose story the jury believes. Without tangible evidence proving that James was guilty, the prosecutors tried to tell a story about a hypothetical woman forced into sex work by circumstances beyond her control.

“Eighty dollars. That’s how much [he] thought sex with Officer North was worth that day,” assistant city prosecutor Alisa Smith said in her closing argument. “There is no question about what [was] going on. [He] was out to buy sex with … someone whose life circumstances had brought her to a place where she needed some quick cash.”

The jury took four hours to find James not guilty.

Criminalizing sex work is broadly unpopular; during jury selection, echoing national sentiment, 23 of 25 potential jurors said they didn’t think sex work should be illegal. But the city remains deeply invested in penalizing the practice—and pouring resources into prosecuting men who patronize sex workers.

Like James, most of the people prosecuted for patronizing prostitutes are men of color, and defense attorneys say many are immigrants—mostly Latino—who don’t speak English fluently or at all.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this,” Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham, the supervising attorney on James’ case, said. “Often, with clients who are charged with [sexual exploitation], English is not their first language and they often have immigration issues, so this charge is not a good one for a client of be convicted of.”

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Publicly available police reports don’t usually indicate defendants’ race or immigration status, but it’s suggestive that a large majority of the men prosecuted for sexual exploitation last year had Hispanic, African, or Asian surnames, and that half requested an interpreter from the court. Because solicitation stings are based entirely on an officer’s claim that she made a verbal agreement to exchange sex for money, a defendant’s ability to understand what an officer is saying could be a strong argument against a guilty verdict—if any of those cases ever went to trial.

To understand why the city puts so much energy, effort, and money into chasing down men for a low-level misdemeanor that most people think should be legal, it’s helpful to know that under city law and SPD policy, sex work is virtually synonymous with human trafficking—one police source described women being sent around the country on a circuit, which—police argue—prevents women from developing ties or getting help.

This view is reflected in the language of the law itself; in 2015, then-city council member Bruce Harrell sponsored a bill, which passed unanimously, changing the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation.”

The idea, backed strongly by then-city attorney Pete Holmes (who later vacated all outstanding charges against sex workers) was to focus on the demand side of the equation by focusing on the men buying sex rather than the people, mostly women, selling it. As Harrell  summarized in 2015, “we will now refer to [solicitation] as a crime relative to sexual exploitation [because] that’s what actually occurs when people are being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution.”

In about eight years of representing defendants in such cases,” Branham countered, “I’ve never seen a case where there has been any link to sex trafficking.”

A spokesman for the city attorney’s office said there has not been any “greater emphasis on sex work” since Davison took office in 2022. “However, the City Attorney is very aware of the continuing problem and the tragic impact on women and girls who are preyed upon by criminals engaged in human trafficking,” he said.

Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.

Pursuing men who buy sex is time-consuming and expensive, although it’s surprisingly difficult to determine just how time-consuming and how expensive. SPD did not respond to questions about what its sting operations cost and how they operate, and a spokesman for Davison’s office said “there is not a cost tracking system in place for criminal trials.”

But with the median SPD employee making well over $150,000 —and with a three-day trial that required, at minimum, dozens of hours of preparation for both prosecutors and defense attorneys—it’s easy to see how the costs can add up. According to data from the city, in 2022, SPD arrested 28 people for “purchasing prostitution” on Aurora over the course of five operations. In 2023, that number was 41, in six operations. Those numbers were down significantly from 2019, when police arrested 87 people, and up dramatically compared to earlier in the decade, when SPD stings were aimed at sex workers, not their customers.

Testimony at the trial provided a closer look at the scale of these stings, which can involve as many as 20 officers. In addition, before going undercover, officers have to go through “decoy school”—a two-day training where they learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios they might encounter, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to make an arrest.

“There was probably 10 pages of acronyms that we went over, just so that we would be familiar with those kinds of terms and not be thrown off if somebody approached us,” North said.

“The trial really highlighted the immense expense involved in these stings and the resources that are thrown at them, and I just can’t see what value they are getting,” said Branham, who, along with lead attorney Claire Beckett, worked on James’ defense over several months and appeared in court during all three days of his trial..

Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.

Last week, for example, the domestic violence arraignment calendar included six assault cases—cases in which women described being punched, beaten, and strangled by intimate partners—that sat around for 60 days or longer before Davison’s office filed charges. According to a 2017 report by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the longer it takes to file charges in a domestic violence case, the less likely a victim is to cooperate with prosecutors, and the harder it becomes to track down witnesses; delay also “diminishes the quality of DV cases as its sends a message to victims and courts that the case is not a priority.”

DUI cases are also stacking up. Out of 14 cases on the docket for the first week of February, 11 involved cases from early 2022 for which the two-year statute of limitations was about to run out. Delays at the state toxicology lab, which examines blood samples in DUI cases, are only responsible for about half of this two-year delay, which has been consistent for much of the last year. With two years’ lag time, successful prosecutions are rare; in 10 of the 11 cases on last week’s docket, court records indicate the defendant could no longer be found.

Should the city be spending time, money, and court resources prosecuting men who pay for sex? The question is especially relevant at a time when both the police department and the city attorney’s office say they’re short-staffed and stretched thin.

At a time when SPD claims it doesn’t have enough officers to respond to 911 calls promptly, it’s worth looking at the sheer quantity of resources they pour into apprehending sex buyers on Aurora. At a time when the city attorney’s office says it’s having trouble staffing its criminal division with qualified attorneys, it’s worth questioning why they have chosen to use those scarce attorneys prosecuting men for buying sex, rather than the “serious” misdemeanors, like DUIs and domestic violence, that Davison has said are among her top priorities.

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Courts

Municipal Court Excludes Judge-Elect Vaddadi from Important Leadership Vote

By Erica C. Barnett

Incoming Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, who defeated incumbent Adam Eisenberg in November, was not allowed to participate in the court’s election of a new presiding judge, which took place earlier this month while Eisenberg was still on the bench.

However, Vaddadi will be allowed to attend an upcoming judicial retreat that will take place just days before she takes office.

The presiding judge sets the court’s agendas, hands out courtroom assignments, and serves as the public face of the court.

According to local court rule 10.2, the municipal court judges are supposed to elect a new presiding judge “within 30 days after [a] vacancy occurs.” Because Eisenberg will not vacate his position until next January, Vaddadi told PubliCola, “this action… was not appropriate, nor was it in line with [the local rule] for a minority of the judges to hold a secret vote to elect a presiding and assistant presiding judge.”

Six judges voted to elect Judge Faye Chess as presiding judge and Andrea Chin as the assistant presiding judge. The vote reportedly took place after it was clear that a four-judge majority—Eisenberg, Chess, Chin, and Catherine McDowall—could unilaterally push the appointments through. Votes for internal court positions are not public, and a simple majority of the judges can vote in a new presiding and assistant presiding judge without other judges present.

“I believe this action speaks to the culture of this bench. It was not appropriate, nor was it in line with [court rules] for a minority of the judges to hold a secret vote to elect a presiding and assistant presiding judge.”—Seattle Municipal Court Judge-Elect Pooja Vaddadi

Judge Damon Shadid, who was out of town during the vote, said, “Seattle voters elected Judge-Elect Vaddadi by a wide margin”—62 to 38 percent— “on a platform of reform. I was therefore disappointed that my colleagues decided to elect a new presiding and assistant presiding judge without allowing either me or Judge-Elect Vaddadi to have input. The election took place without notice while I was out of town. Judge-Elect Vaddadi was also not consulted.”

“I believe this action speaks to the culture of this bench,” Vaddadi said.

The presiding judge sets the agenda for the court and serves as its public face; they also oversee all employees in the court and can fire court employees at will. In recent years, the presiding judge has played a prominent role in shaping local policy.

When Willie Gregory was the presiding judge, for example, he focused the court on race and social justice; during his tenure, the court made it easier for people to resolve outstanding warrants and eliminated most probation-related fees. In June 2020, amid nationwide protests against police violence, Gregory wrote a heartfelt open letter about the court system’s culpability in racial injustice.

In contrast, Gregory’s predecessor, Ed McKenna, openly urged prosecutors to seek longer sentences for low-level misdemeanors and frequently prescribed long jail sentences, rather than treatment, for mentally ill defendants; since retiring early amid a scandal in which he invited media and a activist to witness his sentencing of a homeless man who had gotten significant press coverage, he became a citizen activist whose endorsement signifies a candidate will take a law-and-order approach to crime and justice.

The court’s annual retreat will take place the weekend that begins January 5; Vaddadi will be sworn in the following week. It’s unclear if Eisenberg, who did not return a call seeking comment, will attend.

Courts, criminal justice, Elections, King County

So Much for That Backlash: Voters Saying “Yes” to Progressive Local Candidates

By Erica C. Barnett

Anyone hoping for a continuation of 2021’s local backlash election, when Seattle voters chose a slate of candidates who promised to crack down on crime and visible homelessness, should have been disappointed by Tuesday’s early election results, which showed progressive and left-leaning local candidates defeating their more conservative opponents by solid margins.

As of Tuesday night, public defender Pooja Vaddadi was defeating incumbent Seattle Municipal Court judge Adam Eisenberg by a margin of 56 to 43 percent; embattled progressive municipal court Judge Damon Shadid was beating assistant city attorney Nyjat Rose-Akins 69 to 30 percent; and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg’s chief of staff, Leesa Manion, was defeating Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell 55 to 44 percent.

In fairness, it’s tough to directly compare the results of an odd-year (“off-year”) local election to those of an even-year midterm when progressive voters, in particular, are keyed up and perhaps unusually attuned to electoral politics. (Creeping fascism and the imposition of forced-birth laws tend to inspire a renewed interest in democracy).

And there is a major dropoff between high-profile, ballot-topping national races and those lower down the ballot—people simply vote in the national races and ignore the local ones. For example, in King County, nearly 50,000 people voted in the US Senate race between incumbent Patty Murray and Republican Tiffany Smiley (which Murray, defying some polls, was winning handily) and then chose not to cast a vote for King County Prosecutor—a dropoff of about 10 percent. In Seattle, King County Elections has counted about 218,000 ballots; yet fewer than 130,000 of those voters bothered choosing a candidate in either of the competitive Seattle Municipal Court races.

Still, those voters who did bother to vote in local races behaved differently than last year’s electorate, choosing more progressive candidates, and by larger margins, than many (including me) predicted. Conventional wisdom before the election was that Manion would face a tough challenge, if not outright Election-Night defeat, from Ferrell, a tough-on-crime former prosecutor who had the backing of local police guilds, suburban mayors, and the Seattle Times.

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Manion, though no lefty crusader, supports alternatives to prosecution and incarceration, including the Restorative Community Pathways diversion program for young people accused of first-time felonies; Ferrell called RCP a “look-the-other-way program” that lets kids off without consequences and criticized the entire concept of pre-filing diversion.

The municipal court races offer clearer ideological splits, along with margins that are unlikely to close enough to reverse the outcome after more votes are counted.

Vaddadi, who has to bring a public defender’s perspective to the bench, has accused Eisenberg of being excessively punitive toward some defendants and inflexible in his approach to domestic violence cases. Although Eisenberg has touted his work establishing the Domestic Violence Intervention Program for DV offenders who want to change, he belongs to a faction of the court that leans toward conventional, punishment-based approaches to crime, while Vaddadi represents a sharp left turn.

Shadid, meanwhile, faced what initially looked like a daunting challenge from Rose-Akins, whose primary campaign issue was the incumbent’s management of community court—a therapeutic program that enrolls qualifying misdemeanor defendants in services, including health care and case management, instead of jailing them. The city attorney’s office office battled with Shadid earlier this year when he declined to exclude Davison’s list of about 120 “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system from community court, and Rose-Akins announced her candidacy shortly after Davison won that battle.

At the state level, Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs was narrowly defeating nonpartisan challenger Julie Anderson in a race that is still too close to call.

One wild card this year is the vote to decide whether Seattle will adopt a new election system; as of Tuesday, Seattle voters were almost evenly split on this question, with slightly more saying we should keep our existing system than those saying we should adopt either ranked-choice voting or approval voting. (The ballot measure splits voting reform into two questions, asking voters whether they support changing the system and, in a separate question, whether they prefer ranked-choice voting or approval voting, regardless of how they voted on the first question.)

Seattle could end up rejecting both potential new systems by voting “no” on the first part of the ballot measure, but even if they do, the results for the second half of the question show overwhelming support for ranked-choice voting—the option supported by most local progressive groups, including all of Seattle’s Democratic legislative districts.

King County will release the next batch of ballots around 4:00 tomorrow afternoon.