Category: Courts

Courts, criminal justice, King County

Amid Lawsuit Over Jail Conditions, County Moves Forward With Controversial Inmate Transfer Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

A King County Council committee tentatively moved forward on an agreement to move up to 150 men currently incarcerated at the downtown King County Correctional Facility to the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a jail owned jointly by six south King County cities. The contract, which will cost the county around $3.5 million over two years, is supposed to “help King County mitigate the impact of the unprecedented levels of employee vacancies on staff in the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention,” according to a letter from King County Executive Dow Constantine that accompanied the legislation. Under the agreement, DAJD would initially transfer about 50 men to SCORE starting in April.

PubliCola first reported on the county’s decision to fund the SCORE contract last year.

The county council’s Law, Justice, Health and Human Services Committee moved the agreement forward without recommendation, citing the need to balance concerns raised by attorneys who represent incarcerated people with the abbreviated timeline laid out by Constantine and the county’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, which runs the jail. The council plans to work out the details over the next two to three weeks and adopt the agreement by the end of March.

The union that represents employees at King County’s Department of Public Defense, SEIU 925, believes the proposed agreement fails to address their concerns that moving defendants to SCORE will impede attorneys’ access to their clients and put them at a disadvantage during court proceedings; the union sent a letter to the council laying out their concerns with the contract last night.

Currently, SCORE only allows inmates to access court hearings virtually, and has just one booth where attorneys can talk to their clients and pass documents back and forth, along with several booths where one member of an inmate’s defense team (which might include investigators, paralegals, and mitigation specialists) can communicate with them at a time.

“We frequently have to get documents signed; we frequently have to work through documentation; we frequently need interpreters. Trying to do this over video will be impossible.”—Department of Public Defense union president Molly Gilbert

SCORE also has video visitation booths where visitors can speak with incarcerated people virtually; the jail, unlike those operated by King County, has no in-person visitation.

“Once you get above the misdemeanor level and start talking about felonies, you’re talking about really convoluted court hearings and legal concepts that are difficult to explain,” DPD union president Molly Gilbert told PubliCola. “We frequently have to get documents signed; we frequently have to work through documentation; we frequently need interpreters. Trying to do this over video will be impossible.”

Last November, the union filed a demand to bargain over the proposal to move inmates to SCORE, arguing that the agreement creates changes to their members’ working conditions; the county has not agreed to negotiate with the union.

“I don’t want to be an alarmist here, but we are at a critical stage. Delaying simply creates one more day, one more moment where the opportunities for people in our custody won’t get met.”—Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention director Allen Nance

At Tuesday’s meeting, interim DAJD administrative division director Diana Joy said SCORE had assured the department that it would transfer defendants to court and that attorneys as well as other DPD staff, such as investigators and paralegals, will have direct access to clients.

However, the contract itself says only that “SCORE will provide a minimum of one transport to a King County designated facility every twelve hours for King County inmates newly booked at SCORE or housed at SCORE and requested by King County to be returned.” It says almost nothing about defendants’ access to attorneys and others working on their cases; the sole reference to these rights in the contract is a line stipulating that “confidential telephones or visitation rooms shall be available to a Contract Agency Inmate to communicate with his or her legal counsel.

At Tuesday’s meeting, DAJD director Allen Nance said it was important for the county to move forward on the contract quickly because conditions at the jail have continued to deteriorate amid an ongoing staffing shortage.

“I don’t want to be an alarmist here,” Nance said, “but we are at a critical stage … Delaying simply creates one more day, one more moment where the opportunities for people in our custody won’t get met.”

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Understaffing at the jail reached unprecedented levels during the pandemic, as the jail struggled to hire and retain applicants for high-stress jobs that pay less than other law enforcement positions and lately have required frequent mandatory overtime. Currently, according to King County Corrections Guild president Dennis Folk, the jail is 111 guards short of its staffing target—an improvement since last year, when the shortage reached 129 absent guards.

“This is [DAJD’s] way of trying to decrease our numbers [of people] that are in custody, which ultimately results in us having less posts that we need to fill,” Folk said. Removing 50 people from the jail, for example, could eliminate the need to staff one floor of the jail, for example. “I don’t think it will make that big of a dent, but they seem to think it will.”

Guard shortages, combined with a dramatic increase in the number of people housed at the downtown jail, have led to untenable and sometimes dangerous conditions in the jail. In February, the ACLU of Washington filed a lawsuit against the county, alleging that conditions at the jail violate an agreement known as the Hammer settlement, which requires the jail to meet minimal health and safety standards, including adequate access to behavioral and physical health care.

The contract says the inmates who will be transferred to SCORE will be men accused of Class C and “non-violent B level” felonies, such as burglary, auto theft, and  stalking. “SCORE would not be used for people doing service work in King County jails, who have frequent court appearances, or who have significant medical or mental health needs,” the agreement says. Gilbert says a stable group of inmates without “frequent court appearances” doesn’t really exist; everyone in the jail, except people waiting to go to Western State Hospital for competency evaluations, has to appear in court. “We don’t understand what population it is they’re talking about,” she said.

“Yes, it’s challenging, yes, there are tradeoffs, but I think we owe it to the folks who are trying to make the best of a very dangerous situation, to take up their request … and give the best answer we can within the timeline they have asked for.”—King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci

King County Councilmember and committee chair Girmay Zahilay said Tuesday that while “on the one hand, we want to be able to relieve pressure on… the downtown jail,” which is facing “crisis” conditions, “on the other hand, we’ve heard some some downsides,” including the need for defense attorneys to travel to a third jail, on top of the downtown jail and the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent (which has suspended new bookings) , in order to meet with clients.

Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who worked for DAJD for 15 years and directed the department from 2011 to early 2014, countered that both DPD and the jail itself have asked the county to do something to improve conditions inside the facility. “So yes, it’s challenging, yes, there are tradeoffs, but I think we owe it to the folks who are trying to make the best of a very dangerous situation, to take up their request … and give an answer the best answer we can within the timeline they have asked for.”

Folk, from the jail guards’ union, said that once the jail has 473 guards on staff—the point at which guards who volunteer for extra shifts are no longer eligible for overtime pay at 2.5 times their regular wages—”I want that contract canceled.” Hiring more than 100 new guards presents challenges that go beyond recruitment. One issue, Folk said, is that many new recruits can’t pass the state law enforcement academy’s physical fitness test; in a recent batch of 13 new guards, he said, “over half failed” and had to be let go. Still, he said, the jail has 19 new hires coming on board this month.

In July 2020, King County Executive Dow Constantine pledged to close the downtown jail “in phases” after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the intervening years, the county’s overall jail population has rebounded, reaching about 1,600 (compared to a pre-pandemic average of around 1,900) last year.

Courts, homelessness, housing

Former Tiny House Village Resident Sues Nonprofit, Alleging Unlawful Eviction
Plum Street Tiny House Village in Olympia. Image via LIHI

By Erica C. Barnett

A former resident of the Low-Income Housing Institute’s Plum Street Tiny House Village in Olympia has sued the nonprofit shelter and housing provider in Thurston County Superior Court, claiming they unlawfully evicted him from his unit—an argument that, if it prevails, could reclassify tiny houses as a form of housing and give residents of tiny houses, and possibly other types of shelter, protection from eviction under state landlord-tenant laws. The lawsuit also names the city of Olympia as a defendant.

The former resident, Ryan Taal, was kicked out of his unit at the Olympia tiny house shelter after a verbal altercation with a staffer in March that, in LIHI’s telling, amounted to a threat. Taal, who had lived in his tiny house since October 2020, acknowledges that he told the staffer “you don’t know who you’re messing with right now” during an argument over the condition of his unit, but said he was referring to his struggles with bipolar disorder and anxiety attacks, not threatening her.

“I needed case management and help getting my prescriptions,” Taal said. “[The staffer] called the cops and lied to them and told them I was threatening her.” Shelter staff left a note on his door saying he had to be out within 48 hours or they would call the police, but Taal said he was gone by the following morning.

For the next two months, Taal lived in his car with his dog, using a nearby public restroom at night. At times, he couldn’t make it to the restroom, or found it occupied by people smoking fentanyl and meth. Taal says the food at the Plum Street Village was never great—the outdoor kitchen reminded him of “a refugee camp”—but his diet got worse when he was living in his car, and he developed gout.

“I’ve worked on a lot of tenancies that don’t look like a typical tenancy. However you look at these relationships, there needs to be a court process [for eviction].”—Carrie Graf, Northwest Justice Project

Taal’s Northwest Justice Project attorney, Carrie Graf, says that even though Taal didn’t have a formal lease, kicking him out with 48 hours’ notice and a threat to call the police is “kind of the definition of a wrongful eviction” under the state’s Residential Landlord Tenant Act (RLTA).

“I’ve worked on a lot of tenancies that don’t look like a typical tenancy. However you look at these relationships, there needs to be a court process [for eviction],” Graf said.

The RLTA defines a tenant as anyone “entitled to occupy a dwelling unit primarily for living or dwelling purposes under a rental agreement.” Taal’s lawsuit argues that the three-page intake form he signed as a condition of living at the village constitutes a rental agreement that entitled him to his unit, and that tiny houses are a form of transitional housing under state law.

Legislators only incorporated a formal definition of transitional housing into the RLTA in 2021, so this case—if it goes forward—could be a test of that definition.

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LIHI executive director Sharon Lee says that although the agency operates its own permanent and transitional housing programs, tiny houses are a form of emergency shelter, not housing—an argument she says is backed up by a court order in another recent case against LIHI, in which a King County Superior Court commissioner refused to grant a restraining order on behalf of a former resident of a Seattle tiny house village, finding that tiny house villages are “transitional encampments,” not housing. (That determination raises a whole other set of questions that, as much as I’m tempted to dive into them, are outside the scope of this article.)

“We take people who are being swept from parks and public places… and we don’t do a criminal background check, we don’t do a credit check, we don’t ask for references,” Lee said. “The moment you say ‘all shelters are going to be covered through the Landlord-Tenant Act’—which means you would have to go through this very extensive process of eviction—then I think you’re going to change the very nature of what a shelter is.” (Of course, if tiny house villages aren’t really shelter but “transitional encampments,” they would be subject to a number of restrictions that could force many of them to shut down—but, again, that’s outside the scope of this piece!).

LIHI staff pointed PubliCola to a 2008 case in which a resident at a YouthCare transitional housing program called ISIS House claimed YouthCare wrongfully evicted him for allegedly failing to follow rules and refusing to sign a behavioral contract.

In that case, US District Court Judge Robert Lasnik found that ISIS House was exempt from tenant protections because Youthcare counted as an “institution” where “residence is merely incidental” to another purpose, such as providing “social services and life skills support.” Lasnik also wrote that the existence of strict rules, such as a prohibition on any sexual conduct, made YouthCare’s rental agreements different than a traditional lease.

“If there are significant cases—violence, assaults, dangerous behavior, weapons— you would have to go through this very long, expensive eviction process. I think the sponsors of shelters would then say, ‘Well, we’re not going to take in all these people.'” —LIHI Director Sharon Lee

Similarly, Lee says, LIHI’s tiny house villages require residents to sign a code of conduct, participate in communal chores, and allow staffers inside their units at any time—all things a traditional landlord doesn’t do. Although some of LIHI’s tiny house villages are low-barrier, meaning people can use drugs or alcohol inside their units, Plum Street Village is not; the contract tenants sign bar them from using drugs or alcohol within a mile of the village property.

If tiny house villages were defined as housing, Lee said, it could lead to fewer low-barrier shelters that serve people with addiction and behavioral health needs, because shelter providers won’t want to take on the risk.

“If there are significant cases—violence, assaults, dangerous behavior, weapons— you would have to go through this very long, expensive eviction process,” Lee said. “I think the sponsors of shelters would then say, ‘Well, we’re not going to take in all these people. We’re not going to open our doors and have everybody claim they have a right [to tenant protections] under the Landlord Tenant Act.”

Graf believes tiny house village residents do have a right to those protections, including those who—like Taal—are accused of violating their contracts. The Landlord-Tenant Act, she said, “is just establishing a pretty bare-minimum set of rights for the person living there, like: you get three days’ notice before you have to leave, and if you want to contest that you’re entitled to a court process. If someone is committing criminal acts within the tiny house village, they can always be arrested.”

Since his ejection from Plum Street Village, Taal moved into an apartment across town—his first real apartment after years of being homeless in Oregon and Washington state. He’s also gotten help with medical care and prescriptions from his case manager with Familiar Faces, a program run by the city of Olympia that provides support for people who have frequent encounters with police. “I’m still worried about what if I become homeless again, but the majority of the days are good days,” he said.

His personal turn of fortune hasn’t shaken Taal’s commitment to his case. “I’m not the only victim,” Taal said. “What they did was super wrong, and I feel like they should rewrite their policies on how they properly exit people—get them the right case managers, the right therapy, not ignore them … or kick them out. Give them some hope.”

Courts, criminal justice, King County, Police

King County Plans to Move Up to 150 Inmates to Address Capacity Issues at Downtown Jail

By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this year, King County Executive Dow Constantine quietly added $3.5 million to the county’s budget for “potential contracted services to address jail capacity issues”—a reference to understaffing at the King County Correctional Facility in downtown Seattle, which is currently facing a shortage of about 120 officers. Despite offering bonuses of up to $15,000, the county Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DAJD) has found it challenging to hire and retain jail guards, thanks in large part to long shifts and poor working conditions; the more guards leave, the worse the problem becomes.

Last month, DAJD director Allen Nance provided more details about what that $3.5 million would pay for. In a memo to all DAJD staff, Nance explained that the department is “pursuing a contract with the South Correctional Entity (SCORE),” a misdemeanor jail in Des Moines, to house some of the 1,250 or so people currently incarcerated at the downtown Seattle jail. SCORE is a public development authority, a type of government-funded nonprofit, that was established to provide jail services to seven South King County cities. The department plans to start in January by moving about 50 people to the jail about 15 miles south of Seattle, a number that could grow to 150 later on. SCORE, which provides jail services for six south King County cities, has a capacity of 802.

“The partnership with SCORE is being piloted to see if it might ease the workload on our staff and prevent a need to expand booking at the [Maleng Regional Justice Center (RJC) in Kent], given the Department’s limited resources and our current reliance on overtime to cover shifts,” Nance continued. About 260 people are currently incarcerated at the RJC, which is only accepting bookings by appointment. “At the same time, we will continue to explore other strategies to run our two jails more efficiently.”

Noah Haglund, a spokesman for DAJD, said that “if we finalize an agreement with SCORE, we would prioritize people with extended time between court dates or those who are serving jail sentences.” King County’s jails would “continue to house people with greater medical needs and those deemed to pose a higher security risk,” he said.

Most of those housed in the downtown jail face felony charges; about 9 percent have been charged with misdemeanors. Although SCORE is currently a misdemeanor jail, its director, Devon Schrum, said the facility is “constructed and staffed to hold any classification of arrestee, including those accused of felony-level offenses.”

Defense attorneys and the jail guards’ union—odd bedfellows that have increasingly found themselves on the same side of issues related to crowding and understaffing at the jail—oppose the move. “We’re already facing a staffing crisis,” said Dennis Folk, head of the King County Corrections Guild. “Let’s say we’re housing 50 or 100 inmates down there, and now they need to go to the hospital—who’s going to be responsible for taking them? How are they supposed to get to the court if that work falls back on us?”

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Haglund said the department has not worked out an agreement with SCORE to transport residents from Des Moines to Seattle; according to a rate sheet provided by Schrum, the jail charges $75 an hour for transportation by an officer.

The union that represents King County Department of Public Defense employees, SEIU 925, has similar concerns. Molly Gilbert, the the president of the SEIU 925 chapter that represents DPD staffers, said SCORE’s location and hours of operation could make it hard for attorneys to meet with clients and for clients to get to the downtown Seattle courthouse for in-person hearings. Bonnie Linville, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services,

In a recent survey of public defenders, many attorneys said moving downtown jail inmates to SCORE would make it more challenging for them to manage their caseloads, because they would have to drive between three jails instead of two; others, however, said SCORE has more reliable video visitation than either King County jail. The union has filed a demand to bargain over the change—the first time the union has ever moved to challenge a management decision through bargaining outside the regular contract negotiation process, Gilbert said.

Schrum says SCORE —unlike the King County system—is fully staffed and has had little trouble recruiting “highly trained” guards and staff. But some who oppose relocating inmates point to previous evidence of poor conditions at the jail, including a highly publicized 2018 case in which a woman experiencing a mental health crisis died in her cell later spending four days consuming huge amounts of water.

In 2016, Disability Rights Washington’s AVID (Amplifying Voices of Inmates with Disabilities) Jail Project released a report outlining significant problems with SCORE’s treatment of inmates with mental illness, including excessive use of solitary confinement and lack of access to psychiatric care. The report also outlined steps SCORE had taken to address some of the issues AVID raised; a spokesman for DRW said he could not speak to current conditions in the jail.

Many advocates say relocating 50 (or even 150) people from the downtown jail to SCORE will do little to address deteriorating conditions in the jail. For months, people in the jail have limited access to medical care, showers, laundry, and recreation outside their cells.

“There are requirements that people be provided adequate medical and mental health care, be taken to outside medical appointments and be allowed a certain amount of out of cell time per day and it is clear that the jail is not meeting those requirements. Pursuant to the Hammer settlement agreement, the jail is required to meet certain benchmarks regarding each of these issues.”—La Rond Baker, legal director, ACLU of Washington

“We’re hearing routinely from folks that they’re sending [requests for physical or mental health care] that aren’t getting answered, or the answer is, ‘sorry, we’re understaffed,'” said Bonnie Linville, an attorney for Columbia Legal Services, which provides legal aid to low-income clients. “We’re also hearing about fewer transfers and delays in transferring people to Harborview [Medical Center] for necessary care, which is really concerning.” Suicide has become such a problem in the jail that the department has removed bedsheets from all cells. The county’s 2023-2024 budget includes $1 million for “jump protection panels” at the jail.

With conditions inside the jail at a breaking point, advocates say the county may be in violation of an agreement it signed almost 25 years ago called the Hammer settlement. In 1988, the ACLU of Washington represented a man named Calvin Hammer who said he was denied medical care after an assault at the jail left him with a badly fractured skull. Eventually, the ACLU and King County reached a settlement that required the county to increase staffing and improve conditions at the downtown jail. Now, the ACLU believes the county may be in violation of the Hammer settlement, and could challenge the county’s compliance with the agreement.

La Rond Baker, the legal director for the ACLU-WA, declined to get into the details of any potential legal challenge. However, she said, “many of the conditions at the jail show that the jail is out of compliance with the Hammer settlement.” For example, “there are requirements that people be provided adequate medical and mental health care, be taken to outside medical appointments and be allowed a certain amount of out of cell time per day and it is clear that the jail is not meeting those requirements. … Pursuant to the Hammer settlement agreement, the jail is required to meet certain benchmarks regarding each of these issues.”

Continue reading “King County Plans to Move Up to 150 Inmates to Address Capacity Issues at Downtown Jail” →

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.

City Hall, Courts, Equity, Morning Fizz, race

Former City Employee Sues for “Reverse Racism,” Rufo Tells Tall Tales to Bellevue Audience

1. A former Seattle Human Services Department employee is suing the city for alleged discrimination based on his race (white) and his gender (male).

The lawsuit, filed by a California-based libertarian group called the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of ex-city employee Joshua Diemert, claims that HSD failed to promote Diemert and provide him with the significant raises he was “promised” while promoting less-qualified women of color. The suit also alleges that Diemert’s immediate supervisor, a woman of color, engaged in “unrelenting coercion and racial harassment,” forcing him to quit his job instead of accommodating an unspecified medical condition that Diemert claims was exacerbated by people constantly talking about white privilege around him.

Many of the examples of “racial harassment” listed in the lawsuit appear to involve Diemert inserting himself into other people’s conversations to make comments his colleagues perceived as racist, such as an incident where he claims he was chastised for “joining” his coworkers’ lunchroom conversations about white privilege, which occurred while he was “trying to cook his food.” In another example, Diemert claims a supervisor “berated” him for “attempting to correct [a coworker’s] discriminatory behavior toward a white applicant.” In a third, he accuses the city of forcing employees to participate in “critical race theory” during a training at El Centro De La Raza, where his comments led a coworker to call him an “asshole” in an email to another person.

In addition to $300,000 in damages, the lawsuit asks the court to find that the city’s anti-racist policies violate the 14th Amendment (equal protection) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act (protection from discrimination on the basis of race or sex). The suit also claims that the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative “aims to end American culture because it was created by ‘white, wealthy, Christian, cis-gender, straight, non-disabled men coming from Europe who wanted to protect their place within hierarchy and empire.'” That quote comes from a city document called “Building a Relational Culture,” which says nothing about “ending American culture,” but does provide a broad framework for undoing structural racism at the city—the actual project of RSJI.

Diemert’s lawsuit, which has gotten some coverage on FOX and various right-wing websites, is one of many recent lawsuits attempting to reframe racism as something that primarily happens to white people. The Pacific Legal Foundation is responsible for many of these anti-affirmative action claims, including a lawsuit challenging Women and Minority-Owned Business (WMBE) contracting goals in California; a case accusing the University of Minnesota of discriminating against men when it cut the men’s gymnastics program; and a case alleging that elite public schools in Boston discriminate against white and Asian kids.

The city’s Human Services Department did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, and a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office said the city has not been served with the lawsuit yet and could not comment.

2. “Critical race theory,” unsurprisingly, was also among the topics professional troll Chris Rufo brought up at a talk last month to support the Washington Policy Center. (PubliCola reviewed a recording of the event). If you aren’t familiar with WPC, it’s the libertarian think tank that was responsible for all those confusing pro-capitalism billboards you saw around town a couple years ago. (“Free markets destroy climate change,” one read, with a Tesla logo as the “T” in “climate.”) The event, which was emceed by conservative podcaster and Project 42 “brand ambassador” Brandi Kruse, also featured former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

Rufo, a onetime Seattle City Council candidate who spun off a job at the right-wing Discovery Institute into a career as the nation’s leading purveyor of disinformation about CRT, has since turned his attention to vilifying trans women, drag queens, and LGBTQ+ people in general. Rufo’s work is part of nationwide efforts to drive LGBTQ+ people out of public life through both legal methods—such as Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law—and violence, including increasingly violent protests against LGBTQ+ events, including drag shows).

Kids are not being taught “fisting” in schools—but, as Rufo noted, it’s the kind of “salacious” story that gets attention from people like Tucker Carlson.

Speaking to a group of “young professionals,” Rufo bragged about his efforts to spur people to act by speaking to their emotions, even when that means ignoring “data” and facts. “I had been doing this campaign on critical race theory, doing the reports, working with the Trump White House,” Rufo said. “And all of a sudden I see something really incredible happen. I started seeing all these videos of parents at school board meetings going nuts. And that’s what you want to see.”

As an example, Rufo continued, he was pushing out stories about “the teachers union—they’re the villains, right?”—he paused for boos—”which was promoting a guide book, a kind of recipe book that was in cartoon format designed for kids, that had a guide to BDSM, sadomasochism, [and] fisting.” In reality, the “cartoon guide” is a document aimed at teenagers seeking information about queer sex, produced by a Toronto Planned Parenthood affiliate and the United Way of Greater Toronto that was linked, among many other documents, on the website of an internal NEA LGBTA+ caucus. Kids are not being taught “fisting” in schools—but, as Rufo noted, it’s the kind of “salacious” story that gets attention from people like Tucker Carlson.

Rufo also claimed a victory closer to home: The reversal of calls to “defund the police” by members of the Seattle City Council. In taking credit for this change, he claimed that Nordstrom’s flagship store in downtown Seattle, he said was “burned down” to “ashes.”  Nordstrom, which is located just a few miles from the Bellevue hotel where Rufo was speaking, remains fully intact and was bustling with holiday shoppers earlier this week.

Courts, Transit, Transportation

Unpaid Tickets from West Seattle Bridge Violations Add Up to Millions
West Seattle and Spokane Street Bridges
Unauthorized drivers who used the lower Spokane Street Bridge (right) when the West Seattle Bridge was closed for repairs racked up more than 130,000 traffic citations in 2021 and 2022. Photo by Lizz Giordano.

By Lizz Giordano

A windfall from traffic tickets during the closure of the West Seattle Bridge could soon reach the Seattle Department of Transportation, as more than 74,000 citations from traffic cameras on the Spokane Street bridge, also known as the “lower” West Seattle Bridge, head to collections next year. 

When the West Seattle Bridge closed for repairs in 2020, the city banned most drivers from using the lower bridge except between late night and early morning to give buses and emergency vehicles a clear path between West Seattle and downtown. The city first relied on police officers to catch scofflaws, then installed automated cameras to issue citations in early 2021. 

As of the end of this October, more than half of those citations remain unpaid. At $75 per citation, that adds up to more than $5.5 million in potential revenue, half of which goes to the city.

Most people used the First Avenue Bridge, located two and half miles south of the high bridge, as their detour route.

City Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who represents West Seattle, noted that most commuters didn’t break the rules during the bridge closure.

However, she added, “It’s sad that over 500 drivers … had such a large number of tickets, [disobeying] policies that were created for everyone’s safety. While an occasional violation is perhaps understandable, this quantity suggests disregard for the need to keep the bridge use at a level that allowed for unimpeded emergency vehicle access.”

The Spokane Street traffic cameras have an unusually low compliance rate. Overall, drivers paid about 61 percent of tickets issued by other automated traffic cameras, including red light cameras and cameras at school zones, in 2021, about twice the payment rate for Spokane Street Bridge violations.

In 2021, photo enforcement cameras along the Spokane Street Bridge issued 89,041 citations to unauthorized drivers on the low bridge. This accounted for nearly half—46 percent—of the 192,432 camera citations issued citywide that year. In 2022, before the West Seattle Bridge reopened in September, drivers using the lower bridge racked up another 41,535 citations, for a total of more than 130,000 tickets on the bridge.

According to Seattle Municipal Court data, drivers have paid just 32 percent of these tickets. The court suspended late fees and stopped sending outstanding tickets to collections at the beginning of the pandemic. But starting at the end of January, drivers who have failed to pay their fines will be subject to late fees.

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The court also plans to start sending unpaid fines to a collections agency, which tacks on a 15 percent fee on each ticket, as soon as the end of April.

“People with unpaid tickets from 2020-2022 should plan to respond to their tickets by January 30, 2023,” said Laura Bet, a spokeswoman for the court. “People can respond to their tickets by setting up a payment plan, setting up a community service plan if they are low-income, or scheduling a hearing.”

A handful of drivers could face some particularly hefty invoices. Two vehicles racked up more than 300 citations for crossing the Spokane Street Bridge without authorization in 2021 alone, according to the data. Another 35 drivers amassed more than 100 tickets each and more than 500 accumulated more than 20 citations that year. 

The city was able to deploy the cameras on the low bridge as part of a pilot program after the state legislature expanded the city’s authority to use automated cameras to enforce traffic laws. The new law also allows camera enforcement when drivers ”block the box” by stopping in intersections at red lights.

State law dictates that half of the revenue for the pilot goes to the Washington Traffic Safety Commission to fund bicycle, pedestrian and non-motorized safety projects. SDOT is using its half of the money to add accessible signals that vibrate and chirp to some pedestrian crossings.

The Spokane Street traffic cameras have an unusually low compliance rate. Overall, drivers paid about 61 percent of tickets issued by other automated traffic cameras, including red light cameras and cameras at school zones, in 2021, about twice the payment rate for Spokane Street Bridge violations.

Before the pandemic, drivers paid 74 percent of citations from photo enforcement cameras issued in 2018 and 2019, according to data from the court.

A spokesperson for SDOT declined to comment on the large number of tickets drivers racked up on the Spokane St. Bridge.

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.

Courts, Elections

PubliCola Questions: Seattle Municipal Court Candidate Pooja Vaddadi

Candidate Pooja Vaddadi for JudgeBy Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Municipal Court races tend to fly under the radar at election time, buried under higher-profile campaigns for statewide and local legislative offices. Not this year. Two seats on the court are currently up for grabs (along with five other races where incumbents are uncontested) and the people running for each seat could hardly come from more different perspectives.

In the race for judicial Position 3, public defender Pooja Vaddadi is challenging incumbent Judge Adam Eisenberg, who has served on the bench six years. Vaddadi is running against Eisenberg from the left, calling his decisions in some cases excessively punitive and vowing to take a more compassionate approach to sentencing.

Eisenberg, who just became presiding judge this year, spent years hearing domestic violence cases and helped establish the Domestic Violence Intervention Project, a treatment program for domestic violence offenders. Prior to his appointment in 2017, he was a municipal court commissioner and, before that, a criminal prosecutor, making this a race between an ex-prosecutor and a current defense attorney.

PubliCola sat down (virtually) with Seattle Municipal Court candidates during September and October.

PubliCola (ECB): Tell me a little bit about your background and why you want this position.

Pooja Vaddadi (PV): I started working in [Seattle Municipal Court] in August 2021. And it was that 10-month stint before I announced my candidacy that made me feel that the time had to be now. I was not planning on doing this. I was actually hoping to practice in as a public defender for a lot longer. I really, really liked it. It was my dream job to work at King County DPD. But it was painful to practice in that court. And I don’t mean because of the caseload or anything like that. I mean, I would have a genuinely innocent client, and both my client and I were forced to fight for that innocence, rather than having a city attorney understand that the client was innocent, or having a judge understand that. And just kind of having every roadblock in front of me to try to defend my client.

The really defining moment, the last straw that kind of broke the camel’s back for me, was this moment I had in the jail calendar at SMC. I had this client who had been struggling for most of his life, and he got picked up on a community court warrant, which was only $25. That was the only thing keeping him in jail. The city attorney was not objecting to his release, nor were they objecting to him participating in community court. And as you may know, you have to be out of custody to participate in community court. And the judge had just seen his record of failures to appear and decided that he needed to, quote, “have some skin in the game.”

Meanwhile, my client is begging on his knees for this judge to release him. I’ve highlighted that he had temporary respite housing, the kind of housing that you have to check in every 24 to 48 hours or risk losing your bed. He had a job interview lined up for the following week. He was getting his life back together, because this respite housing had given him the chance to focus on something other than survival. But just that 24 hours in jail rendered him homeless again.

“I think the court is really lacking my perspective, being in the trenches, interacting with Seattle’s most vulnerable populations, interacting with people that are victims of crimes that my clients have committed.”

And that was it for me. I couldn’t believe the lack of compassion that judges in this court had for the struggles that people go through in Seattle. I think they lack perspective. I think they don’t understand that failures to appear are a lot of the time unintentional and due to circumstances, whether it’s because somebody’s very mentally ill, or whether someone is living in the most desperate conditions and court is just not a priority, survival is. I think the court is really lacking my perspective, being in the trenches, interacting with Seattle’s most vulnerable populations, interacting with people that are victims of crimes that my clients have committed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had victims of domestic violence crimes actually contact me, asking me to figure out how to get the charges dropped against their partner, and just feeling the roadblocks that were there to even listening to victims of crimes. Now was the time. It was not getting better.

ECB: Why did you decide to run against Judge Eisenberg, in particular, and what are some of the issues you have with how he runs his court?

PV: The reason I initially chose Judge Eisenberg was mainly driven by the perspective at the public defender’s office and the attorneys that I had spoken with about the culture of SMC. The general consensus was that it needed to start with Judge Eisenberg. A lot of my colleagues had had experiences with him where he acted very punitively, and acted in such a way that he very much was a second prosecutor in the courtroom.

A lot of my female colleagues also expressed that they felt their treatment in front of him was very different from how he treated men in that courtroom. They felt that he had some bias against them because they were women defense attorneys. And although I have not had extensive experience appearing in front of him, I had seen him act very unprofessionally to a few of my female colleagues, to the point of raising voices and chastising them in front of their clients. That kind of behavior is unacceptable.

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He’s also been in a position of leadership. And I’ve seen the court get worse and worse. I’ll admit it was only just 10 months that I was in this particular court, but people talk. People tell me that it used to be different at some point. And I felt that he was the he was a main driver behind why the court is acting the way it is. I’m here to tell you that he does not treat women well. He does not treat his employees well. And he’s a danger to the people of Seattle if he remains on that court.

I’ve seen that he has routinely administratively denied petitions to rescind or modify no-contact orders made by the protected party. I’ve read those petitions, they’re typically handwritten and not by an attorney, and they’re by the protected party who wants her partner home and is desperate to do that. And I’m honestly not even sure if they get notice that the petition has been denied.

ECB: Do you think the Domestic Violence Intervention Program that Judge Eisenberg started is working, and how would you improve or replace it?

PV: It’s not working. I mean, let’s be honest, it’s hard to get data on it. Judge Eisenberg calls it a pilot program still, even though it’s been operational for four years, and I am unclear if there’s any data. What I can tell you is that practicing in that court, I didn’t see that it worked for people that were represented by the public defender’s office. The program is only for straight cisgender men. The DVIP program has its benefits, if you’re able to actually participate in it, but it’s time-consuming. They sometimes require that you engage with therapy through DVIP, but also go out on your own and get a substance abuse evaluation and engage in that treatment. Sometimes mental health treatment will go along with that as well.

And so it becomes a very, very involved treatment regimen. You might be living in your own home or whatever. But it’s almost equivalent to being in an inpatient facility, in terms of the level of involvement that the individual needs to engage in. It’s not conducive to people who need to support families or are single parents, for example. It’s not conducive to people who are living paycheck to paycheck and struggling with housing. I think it ends up becoming really, really selective and only benefiting those who are in a [higher] economic bracket.

It’s a waste of money, because it only helps a very small percentage of people that come in and out of that court.

“Jail is not conducive at all to people getting healthier. It destabilizes people. When people get released from jail, they go back to the environment that they came from.”

ECB: Judge Eisenberg mentioned that he supported in principle the idea of providing treatment inside the jail itself rather than sending people to inpatient treatment since it’s a place people can’t abandon treatment. What do you think of this idea, and what are the pitfalls?

PV: I don’t like using jail as a tool for therapy or anything like that. Jail is not conducive at all to people getting healthier. Treatment within the community is what works. Jail is a very controlled environment, as is inpatient treatment, let’s be honest. And the thing that jail does, I think even worse than an inpatient facility, is it destabilizes people. When people get released from jail, they go back to the environment that they came from.

You can get clean and sober in jail just fine. You can do the treatment, you can do the 12 step program, you can do all of that. But it’s an institution, and the second they’re released back into the community, there’s no guarantee that they’re not going to go back to their problems that they dealt with before. They’re suddenly bombarded with all the stressors of what society has put on them previously, coupled with the stigma that comes with being previously incarcerated. They struggle to get jobs, they struggle to find proper housing, they struggle to interact with the community at all in any meaningful way, because they were separated from them. That is stressful and anxiety inducing. They’re probably going to go back to whatever substance abuse issue that they had, unless the court is willing to help them along the way. And so I don’t think SMC should be moving toward trying to push treatment within the jail. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: Seattle Municipal Court Candidate Pooja Vaddadi” →

Courts, Elections

PubliCola Questions: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Adam Eisenberg

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Municipal Court races tend to fly under the radar at election time, buried under higher-profile campaigns for statewide and local legislative offices. Not this year. Two seats on the court are currently up for grabs (along with five other races where incumbents are uncontested) and the people running for each seat could hardly come from more different perspectives.

In the race for judicial Position 3, public defender Pooja Vaddadi is challenging incumbent Judge Adam Eisenberg, who has served on the bench six years. Vaddadi is running against Eisenberg from the left, calling his decisions in some cases excessively punitive and vowing to take a more compassionate approach to sentencing. On Saturday, October 22, Vaddadi released the first of what she said would be several statements from women who worked at the court in some capacity accusing Eisenberg of misogyny and discriminatory treatment of women.

Eisenberg, who just became presiding judge this year, spent years hearing domestic violence cases and helped establish the Domestic Violence Intervention Project, a treatment program for domestic violence offenders. Prior to his appointment in 2017, he was a municipal court commissioner and, before that, a criminal prosecutor, making this a race between an ex-prosecutor and a current defense attorney.

PubliCola sat down (virtually) with Seattle Municipal Court candidates during September and October.

PubliCola (ECB): You piloted a program called the Domestic Violence Intervention Program, which provides counseling, treatment, and other services to people who commit domestic violence and want to change. You’ve touted this program as a success, but is it evidence-based? What can you point to, in terms of research on this or similar programs, to demonstrate that DVIP is more effective than other approaches, including jail?

Adam Eisenberg (AE): : Most one-size-fits-all DV treatment programs aren’t that effective. We believe we’re adopting the best practices in the county. When we started the program in 2018, we knew we wanted to make it a research-based project. Two researchers at the University of Nebraska Omaha came on in 2019 to help us make sure it’s effective, or determine whether it is or isn’t effective. We’re up to almost 400 people, and the people who have been in the program [so far] have a lower recidivism rate for domestic violence—like 15 percent lower than folks who didn’t complete the program. It’s very preliminary, and recidivism isn’t the only thing we’re looking at, but the bottom line is we’re actually looking at this the program through a research lens.

The difference between us and drug court is we do have regular hearings, but we stretch them out farther and give them more time. It’s not as intensive as drug court, where you show up every two weeks. The multidisciplinary team meets on a fairly regular basis and they might massage the intervention without the court necessarily pulling the person out of the program. We review at the half-year mark and another six months later, which is partly for data. And one of the things people are told when they enter DVIP is, “We want your feedback. We want to know what works and doesn’t work, so give us honest feedback,” and a lot of people actually do.

I’m trying to get another program off the ground. This is something I learned about when I was in a conference in 2019, four months before COVID hit. I met a judge in Brooklyn who was doing a juvenile court really low-level juvenile DV, like throwing a phone and smashing it. They would send them to a 12-week class to teach them how to have empathy, how to communicate. We don’t do juveniles, but we do 18 to 24 years, and I started talking to attorney general’s office about something that might even be prefiling diversion, or it could be pretrial [for that group].

The new city attorney [Ann Davison] and [criminal division head] Natalie Walton-Anderson are very interested in figuring out if we can get this off the ground. If there’s someone out in the community that might be able to put these classes on, that could be a huge game changer for very low-level DV where someone does not have an extensive history.

“Community court is meant to be a triage court—get them in and get them into services and get them on their way. There are some people who are not good candidates for it, and figuring out how to help them is an ongoing challenge.”

ECB: Speaking of Davison, her office pushed for, and won, the exclusion of so-called high utilizers of the criminal legal system from community court, a therapeutic court that’s aimed at addressing the root causes that lead people to commit low-level crimes. Did you support Davison’s efforts?

AE: This whole conversation happened before I became presiding judge. But the thing to understand is the prosecutor has discretion. They can walk away. This is a voluntarily cooperation between the parties. And so when the prosecutor said we want to ID this list of people that are not going to be eligible for community court—there are people who don’t belong in community court. It’s meant to be a triage court—get them in and get them into services and get them on their way. There are some people who are not good candidates for it, and figuring out how to help them is an ongoing challenge for the court. As a judge I recognize that she does have discretion. Whether that list is the right way to do it, I don’t know.

ECB: Many people fail to show up for their first appearance, and appearing physically in court can be a significant barrier to people who are homeless, lack phones, or are struggling with basic needs. Do you support efforts to make court more accessible, either to people facing charges or their case managers?

AE: There’s an argument if you make them come to court, you’re holding them accountable [but] if you make them come to court twice, you’re infringing on their lives. There’s this pushback about, if you make them come to court to take a class on life skills, if you make them come to court to get a phone, if you make them come to court to get hooked up with health care, you’re infringing on them. You’ve given them too many responsibilities. What happens if they fail to show up? I can tell you in the last five or six years, we have not been putting people in jail for failing to show up. We’re just not doing the model anymore that we did in the 1990s where if someone doesn’t show up, you put them in jail for 90 days.

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The cases that I’m most concerned about are ones where people are getting hurt, like DV and DUI. Offering interventions for these folks is critical and interventions are alternatives to jail. Over time, we have held people in jail less and less. But there are folks where, for various reasons, there doesn’t seem to be any other remedy to keep the streets safe or keep the victims safe.

[Former] Judge [Ed] McKenna said, if we’re holding people in jail for various reasons, why aren’t we giving them drug treatment while they’re in jail? There are so many people who go to treatment and walk away from treatment. I think if you’re concerned about trying to give people treatment In a way that they can’t walk away, doing it in jail might be one solution.

Judge McKenna got into a kerfuffle after the city and defense recommended that the person give [a frequent defendant] mental health treatment or drug treatment, and he gave them a year in jail. A year in jail is really 270 days, because the King County Jail gives a third off for good time. So the person got out within 270 days, and within 72 hours, he threw a coffee on the two-year-old outside of Old Navy.

So that case came in front of me. I knew the defense was going to come forward with a request to release him to inpatient treatment, and sure enough, they did. And the family was very much in favor of this person not being held in jail. They were very much on the side of treatment. The prosecutor objected, but the defendant came into court and said he’s tired of being in the court system. He’s in his 50s, he wants opportunity to do this. I agreed to release him to treatment, and he said he would go to treatment the next day. He walked away from treatment within 8 hours and got arrested on the warrant. But it might have worked, it might had changed him. So that’s the kind of decisions you have to make in this job—do I take the risk or not?

[If there was treatment inside the jail], it would have a better chance of succeeding, because he would have been able to stay in treatment and get the actual treatment. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Adam Eisenberg” →

Courts, Elections

PubliCola Questions: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Municipal Court races tend to fly under the radar at election time, buried under higher-profile campaigns for statewide and local legislative offices. Not this year. Two seats on the court are currently up for grabs (along with five other races where incumbents are uncontested) and the people running for each seat could hardly come from more different perspectives.

In Position 9, assistant city attorney Nyjat Rose-Akins is challenging incumbent Judge Damon Shadid, who got crosswise with City Attorney Ann Davison after she demanded that he exclude a list of so-called “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system from community court, which he oversees. When Shadid asked for more time to discuss Davison’s proposal with his colleagues, Davison went around him and got the full court to agree to her request; not long after that, Rose-Akins jumped into the race. Rose-Akins has focused on community court, arguing that the court should stop automatically releasing people from jail when they enroll and suggesting that therapeutic courts should be restricted to people accused of only the lowest-level crimes.

Shadid has overseen the SMC’s three therapeutic courts, which provide alternatives to the mainstream court system for some veterans, people with mental illness, and low-level offenders who agree to participate in a program that might include classes, treatment, or enrollment in health care.

PubliCola (ECB): Talk to me a little bit about some of your accomplishments and what you hope to do with another term.

Damon Shadid (DS): I started out in the court doing first appearances in the jail. Every time a new charge is filed and a person was booked into jail, they would come before me for a release decision. And I really saw firsthand the disproportional treatment of poor and BIPOC people in the jail, especially when setting bail. And it was that first year in jail that really set the tone for me and wanting to reform the criminal legal system.

Early on, the judges decided to abolish the [then-]current iteration of community court. And I thought that that was a huge mistake, along with Judge Willie Gregory. I knew that the system had to be reformed. I knew that we needed bail reform. And I knew that we needed to have a better way of handling low level nonviolent property crimes. And without a community court, that was very difficult.

So first, I tried to make reforms without consulting the city attorney’s office and the Department of Public Defense. That did not work out as well as I had hoped. And so once we got a couple of new judges on the bench, who I thought would be favorable to a new community court, I tried again. And this time I brought together at the Department of Public Defense, the city attorney’s office, and the court, and I was able to create a new community court fixed the errors of the past iterations.

“As we all know, BIPOC communities get policed heavier than white communities, and therefore have a larger criminal history and are discriminated against when it comes to therapeutic courts. We therefore made the decision not to include criminal history in your eligibility for community court.”

First, we made it a release-first model. This is what the city attorney’s office and my opponent are attacking me for—they don’t like the idea of a release-first model. However, what we’re doing here is on low-level property crimes, we are individually making assessments of what that person needs, as far as services, to get them out of the criminal legal system, and then we release them while trying to connect them to those services.

The second thing we addressed was racial disproportionality. As we all know, BIPOC communities get policed heavier than white communities, and therefore have a larger criminal history and are discriminated against when it comes to therapeutic courts. We therefore made the decision not to include criminal history in your eligibility for community court. If you were charged with certain kinds of crimes, then you were eligible, and only the judge would make the decision on whether or not you could enter, not the prosecutor. So we’re very, very proud of that. The community court has been a huge success. Ninety percent of people who show up for court enter the community court when given the opportunity, and 75 percent of those who enter graduate. That’s a big deal for us.

ECB: Your opponent has argued that the release-first policy has created a revolving door where people get arrested, automatically get sent to community court, and automatically get released to go commit the same crimes again. How do you respond to that?

DS: My opponent works for [City Attorney] Ann Davison. My opponent has not stepped foot in Seattle Municipal Court in six years—she has never come to community court to view it, either virtually or in person. Neither has Ann Davison. Neither has [deputy city attorney] Scott Lindsay. The only person who has ever come from the city attorney’s office is [criminal division director] Natalie Walton Anderson. And that was one time. And yet they have insisted that community court is a certain way, when it very clearly is not. And it’s been very frustrating.

The only thing that community court changed was that the prosecutor was no longer the gatekeeper of who was able to enter community court. However, and every single case, a judge makes a decision about whether or not that person is appropriate for community court. And a judge can screen out the person if they don’t think that that person or that crime is appropriate. However, if the judge agrees to it, then it is an automatic release.

ECB: What is the measure of success for you in community court? How do you know if it’s working with an individual?

DS: The way that I know that it’s working is people come before me every day, making transformative changes in their lives, that make me confident that they’re going to exit the criminal legal system. We have been able to hook people up with housing, with inpatient treatment, with mental health services, with Apple Care [Medicaid] insurance, right there at the court. And it’s these connections to services that the court needs to concentrate on. I just think this way is proven to have more positive effects for our community than putting people in jail, destabilizing them, making them lose their services, and then releasing them back into the community with less connections to services than they had when they entered.

ECB: We’ve talked a lot about community court. Are there other programs that you’ve worked on that you’d like to highlight?

DS: The next program that I really wanted to address was mental health court. I volunteered for mental health court four years ago, and I stayed for four years because I really felt like I needed to finish the job I started. The city attorney’s office was making these recommendations that were just unreasonable considering the amount of work the person was doing. They were demanding convictions. They were demanding jail time instead of doing a diversionary route. And after much discussion, we were able to negotiate with the city attorney’s office to get them to come way down on those recommendations to make the option much, much more attractive to defense attorneys. So we’ve tripled the number of people doing mental health court programming.

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ECB: There was a lot of talk early on, before the primary, that other municipal court were going to have challengers from the right. Why do you think you’re the only one? Did it start with the clash over Davison’s proposal to ban high utilizers from your court?

DS: It all started with the high utilizers, certainly. When [deputy city attorney] Scott Lindsay and Ann Davison came in, they demanded certain changes, and I had a lot of questions about it. And they were unable to answer the questions regarding racial disproportionality, regarding how many people were (potentially mentally incompetent), but most importantly to me, how they were going to handle the people if they barred them from community court. They couldn’t answer the questions. But without the court’s permission, they went and reserved beds in the jail and got the jail to change booking policies for their high utilizers.

So I told them, “Listen, it sounds like you’re just trying to jail these people. You haven’t given me any other plan.” I said, “let’s wait for a couple of months before you take them out of community court, and let’s figure out how we can handle them together.” But they refused. I told them, I would take their proposal to the judges. And within 24 hours, Ann Davison went public with a press release, stating that I was refusing to negotiate in good faith with them. I didn’t want to battle this out in the press. But it was just false. I told them, “I’ve had 24 hours—I haven’t had a chance to talk to the judges yet about their opinions.”

After that, things went downhill. And I drew a challenger from Ann Davison’s office, who was using the same consultant that Ann Davison used, and who has made her singular issue the same misinformation about community court as Ms. Davidson was spreading. Now, did miss Davidson put her up to running I don’t know. I have no proof of that. What I do know is that she is using Ann Davison’s erroneous talking points in her campaign against me.

ECB: Let’s turn away from community court and talk about a related issue—bail. To what extent do you believe cash bail is necessary, and would you support eliminating it?

DS: Well, let me say off the bat that all cash bail discriminates against poor people. And therefore, it has to be reformed—you can’t have a system that discriminates disproportionately against one group of people and call it a justice system. That is not just. And when the original community court was abolished, jail bookings went up significantly. I already told you about how we tried to reform the cash bail system through a release-first model in community court. I would venture to say it is the largest and most effective bail reform that Seattle Municipal Court has ever implemented. And I would like to expand that.

People who come into mental health court suffer many more barriers than some of the other  defendants who come into the court. Many times, they’re violent or dangerous, and holding them in jail for too long exacerbates that problem for them. And so we’ve really beefed up our release planning with a new court clinician that allows us to have much more structured releases for people who might be a real threat to community safety.

“I will be the first to admit that I impose cash bail on defendants who I think are an imminent risk to community safety. And if I cannot structure a release plan that is satisfactory to protect the community, I will not release that person. However, I am very liberal about allowing defendants’ attorneys to add those cases back onto my calendar once they have a plan.”

My new project is to create what’s called a jail release toolkit that will be available to all judges. This toolkit will break down silos in the community, and will get more active partners and more centralized planning, to really hook people up with services instead of holding them in jail. The next logical step for Seattle Municipal Court is to really double down on all these planning efforts to avoid holding people on cash bail.

ECB: Are you opposed to cash bail in general?

DS: I will be the first to admit that I impose cash bail on defendants who I think are an imminent risk to community safety. And if I cannot structure a release plan that is satisfactory to protect the community, I will not release that person. However, I am very liberal about allowing defendants’ attorneys to add those cases back onto my calendar once they have a plan and to hear out a new argument for release. Many of my colleagues are reluctant to do that on a regular basis. But I have an open-door policy to re-argue release at any time. And many times we are able to come up with a satisfactory plan for release. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid” →