City Attorney Erika Evans at her swearing-in on Tuesday.
By Erica C. Barnett
Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Joy Hollingsworth and Dionne Foster were the first two out gay/queer Black women to serve on the Seattle City Council. I incorrectly omitted Sherry Harris (1991-1995). I regret the error.-ECB)
A week of inaugurations wrapped up in city council chambers on Tuesday with the swearing-in of new Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster, along with reelected Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, and the selection (which we previewed in a Fizz item in November) of District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth as the new city council president. (District 2 Councilmember Eddie Lin, elected along with Foster last year, took office in November because he was replacing an appointed councilmember, Mark Solomon).
Only District 5 Councilmember Maritza Rivera (who misspelled both Rinck’s and Foster’s names in a newsletter congratulating them on their wins) was absent from the room; she attended remotely.
Several city hall staffers we’ve spoken to this week described a new feeling of “lightness” at City Hall since the new cohort of elected officials, including Mayor Katie Wilson, took office.
One day earlier, new City Attorney Erika Evans was sworn in at the Bertha Knight Landes Room at City Hall, by US District Court Judge Richard A. Jones. Invoking the example set by her grandfather, Lee Evans—who, as an Olympic gold medalist, made history as one of several Black athletes who raised their fists in a Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympic games—Evans said, “When we were seeing clear rollbacks in civil rights, I knew I needed to make a decision, just like my grandfather did, to stand up and fight back what was happening. That is the vision I’m bringing [to] this office.”
Councilmember Foster—the third openly queer Black woman to serve on the council, after Hollingsworth and Sherry Harris—had a huge cohort of fans in the audience, as did Hollingsworth, who will be the first Black woman to ever serve as council president. The council president is in charge of central staff, committee assignments, and administrative decisions about the council; she also appoints the council’s labor committee. That committee’s members serve on the Labor Relations Policy Committee, which negotiates city contracts, including police contracts.
Historically, it’s been a pretty low-key position; Sara Nelson, the most recent council president, politicized it, firing a widely liked council central staff director and enforcing a strict return-to-office policy for staffers while she herself attended many council meetings remotely.
Hollingsworth. the consensus pick after brief internal campaigns by Councilmembers Dan Strauss and Bob Kettle, seems likely to return the presidency to its less-partisan past. The first indication of this, on Monday, was the fact that the council approved her new role unanimously, with no other nominees. Hollingsworth praised each of her colleagues in turn, including the absent Rivera: “There’s due diligence, and then there’s Councilmember Rivera diligence,” Hollingsworth said. (Rivera is known for asking questions about policies she opposes long after they’ve been thoroughly answered).
The second indication of the council’s more progressive makeup was the new committee assignments that the council also approved on Tuesday. While some committees will remain largely the same (Bob “permissive environment” Kettle will continue to lead the public safety committee, while Rob “Pothole King” Saka will continue to head up transportation), others are led by, and stacked with, the council’s progressives—Foster, Rinck, and Lin.
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Rinck, who previously headed up the Sustainability, City Light, Arts and Culture Committee, will now lead a new Human Services, Labor and Economic Development committee, with Foster as her co-chair. Housing, once lumped in with human services under the Debora Juarez- (and before her, Cathy Moore-) led Housing and Human Services Committee, will be part of a new Housing, Arts and Civil Rights Committee led by Foster, with Lin as her cochair. Lin will head up a reconstituted Land Use and Sustainability committee, with Strauss as vice chair and Foster and Rinck as members.
And the progressive triumvirate of Foster, Lin, and Rinck will all serve on two committees headed up by two of the council’s centrists—Saka’s transportation committee and Rivera’s Libraries, Education, and Neighborhoods committee. (See all the new committee assignments here).
On top of those changes—all standard after any election—the council is also going through a total staff reorganization, starting with the creation of a new executive administrator to oversee all council staff and serve as a kind of buffer between the council president and legislative staff, who include not just central staff but the city clerk, public disclosure officers, and IT and communications staff). Ex-council president Nelson announced the changes in late December, including the news that “as recommended by HR,” her own chief of staff, Jeremy Mohn, will fill the role on at least an interim basis.
According to a December 19 email from Nelson, the new administrator will “ensure continuity of departmental operations across CP administrations and allow for the Council President to better focus on governance and policymaking”; she added that council HR recommended appointing Mohn to the position “given his extensive familiarity with departmental processes and issues.”
Police Chief Shon Barnes speaks at a press conference last year.
Chief Shon Barnes apparently didn’t consult with LEAD or the city attorney’s office before telling police they should start referring every drug arrest to LEAD.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes sent a memo to officers last week directing them to refer most people caught using or possessing drugs in public to LEAD, the pre-booking diversion program that provides case management and other services to people accused of low-level criminal activity.
“Effective immediately, all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use will be diverted from prosecution to the LEAD program,” Barnes told officers in an internal email. “All instances of drug use or possession will be referred to Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD)—a program designed to redirect low-level offenders in King County from the criminal justice system into supportive social services.”
The announcement by Barnes appears to have been a dramatic overstatement of an internal memo from City Attorney Erika Evans directing her prosecutors to refer drug use and possession cases to an internal team to determine if they are eligible for LEAD. This represents a shift from the policy established by Evans’ predecessor, Ann Davison, who allowed people charged with misdemeanor possession or drug use to avoid charges by getting an addiction assessment and not getting arrested again for six months—the opposite of a therapeutic approach.
“The LEAD Liaison Team will assess previous attempts at engagement with the referred individual in consultation with LEAD,” Evans’ memo, which PubliCola received from her office, said. “If the referred individual has failed to demonstrate a sustained level or engagement with the LEAD program or has refused to engage with a LEAD case manager, the LEAD Liaison will assess the most suitable subsequent action in consultation with the Criminal Division Chief.”
Barnes responded to Evans’ memo by sending an email blast to all SPD officers saying that “Effective immediately, all charges related to drug possession and/or drug use will be diverted from prosecution to the LEAD program,” an inaccurate description of Evans’ directive to her staff. Barnes continued:
If an individual fails to comply with the LEAD program, traditional prosecutorial measures will apply. As you know, LEAD is a familiar alternative-to-arrest program that we have been utilizing for some time. This change aligns with Seattle City Ordinance 126896. Please note that this diversion does not apply to individuals who are ineligible for LEAD or to those arrested for selling or delivering controlled substances. User-quantity cases may be diverted; sell-and-deliver cases will not.
My expectation is that officers will continue to charge individuals for drug use or possession when appropriate-for example, when the activity occurs in public view or when probable cause for arrest is established.
The announcement quickly blew up thanks to an inaccurate story by KOMO, which reported—apparently without speaking to LEAD, Wilson’s office, Barnes, or Evans—that Wilson herself had “ordered officers to stop arresting people for open drug use.” (The origin of the accusation: Bombastic police union leader Mike Solan, who recently announced he won’t run for reelection). Right-wing social media accounts ran wild with the fake version of the story, forcing Wilson to issue a statement: “You’ll know when I announce a policy change, because I’ll announce a policy change.” (Apparently, it didn’t help: Wilson was mobbed by TV cameras after Evans’ inauguration Monday afternoon at City Hall.)
In her statement, Wilson affirmed that her public safety policy includes “enforcement of the possession and public use ordinance in priority situations and ensuring that the LEAD framework and other effective responses to neighborhood hot spots are implemented with an appropriate level of urgency, sufficient resources, and a commitment to results.”
This, in effect, is what the city’s policy toward low-level drug crime was prior to 2023, when Davison and then-mayor Bruce Harrell pushed to change city law to empower SPD to start arresting people for simple drug possession and public use.
Although Barnes insisted that the policy hasn’t changed, he didn’t do himself any favors by issuing what read to many officers as a directive to no longer arrest people for drug use and simple possession but instead refer them straight to LEAD.
Apparently, the police chief didn’t bother seeking information or feedback from the organization that runs LEAD, Purpose Dignity Action, before emailing officers about the change in policy, and he exaggerated the policy change by portraying as a kind of blanket amnesty for misdemeanor drug crime. LEAD has criteria for eligibility; it wouldn’t make sense for them to take on every single person ever arrested for using or possessing drugs, nor is it something the PDA could easily afford; LEAD had to stop taking on non-arrest-related “community” referrals in 2024 due to budget constraints.
Barnes also misstated the criteria for LEAD eligibility, saying people arrested for selling or delivering drugs are ineligible for the program; in fact, LEAD began as an effort to benefit this specific group of people, who were cycling through courts and jail without getting any assistance for the underlying issues that were causing them to earn a living through illegal means. LEAD still serves people accused of selling up to 7 grams of drugs, which means almost anyone involved in low-level drug sales is eligible for the program.
Finally, Barnes’ description of the conditions in which “officers will charge” people for public drug use are confusing and ambiguous: “Probable cause” is supposed to exist before officers make any arrest, and it’s unclear what distinction Barnes is making between “public drug use” and drug use that “occurs in public view.”
SPD did not respond to questions sent last week attempting to clarify what Barnes meant by these distinctions. However, they did send out an email to media in response to the right-wing blowback on Monday. “To be clear, nothing has changed when it comes to police continuing to make drug-related arrests in Seattle,” Barnes said in the statement (emphasis in original), adding that police will “continue to make arrests for drug-related charges if they have probable cause.”
We’ve reached out to the PDA for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
If you’re still undecided about the Seattle City Attorney’s race, Seattle Nice has just the thing for you—an election debate, moderated by your three co-hosts, between incumbent Ann Davison and challenger Erika Evans!.The live debate was hosted by the Urban Community Councils of Seattle a couple of weeks ago and we’re bringing it to everyone in podcast form.
Some highlights:
City Attorney Davison thinks her “high utilizers” list of people who commit multiple misdemeanors is working to reduce crime; Evans disagrees. “We really are not seeing the people that we started the initiative with, people who had sometimes 40 referrals for theft, sometimes in one location multiple times a day.”
Evans disagrees, but says she’d maintain the list as a way of directing services to frequent offenders: “The people who are on this list are folks that are not competent to stand trial, folks that are dealing with substance use disorder, folks that are unhoused.”
Evans said she would file fewer cases against people for misdemeanor graffiti and theft charges and re-focus the city attorney’s office on more serious misdemeanors, like domestic violence and DUI. Last year, “60 percent of all cases set for jury trial were dismissed. And to be clear, as a prosecutor, your role sometimes is to dismiss cases if, if it’s an improper case, or if there’s issues with it, but 60 percent means that way too many cases are just being filed to get the numbers up.”
Davison said her focus on prosecuting offenses issues like graffiti and shoplifting contributes to a better climate for businesses. “We want to foster economic vitality. We need anchor tenants. We need small business, but we [also] need large anchor tenants to create that neighborhood of fostering of a small business environment.”
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Davison defended her decision to eliminate community court, a low-barrier therapeutic alternative that allowed participants to avoid charges if they took part in required services, including a life-skills class. Davison instituted a new “drug prosecution alternative” that is more stick than carrot, allowing people to escape charges if they take a substance abuse assessment and don’t get arrested again for 60 days. Community court, Davison said, “increased recidivism. It actually encouraged people to commit crime. So I pulled out from that.”
Evans countered that the new drug alternative doesn’t help people with addiction to recover. “Someone that’s smoking fentanyl, they have to go get an assessment …to tell them whether they have a fentanyl addiction or not. No treatment. It’s wasting resources, and it’s cycling folks in and out, and it’s not addressing what we’re seeing on our streets.”
Two notes about the recording: As we recorded, the Mariners were losing to the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, tying the two teams on the way to the World Series—hence the baseball talk. And due to a production error at the venue, Ann Davison’s voice is harder to hear than everyone else’s; please excuse the poor sound quality.
Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, flanked by council members, Mayor Bruce Harrell, and department directors at City Hall earlier this month.
By Andrew Engelson
A PubliCola analysis of Seattle Municipal Court data reveals that, in the three and half years Ann Davison has served as Seattle City Attorney, her office has failed to live up to promises she made in her campaign in 2021, when she criticized former city attorney Pete Holmes for waiting too long to file cases and failing to prosecute serious misdemeanors aggressively.
Under Davison, a greater percentage of cases have been dismissed or ended in no conviction than when Holmes was city attorney. And while she has sped up the time it takes to file non-traffic misdemeanors, she’s taking more than twice as long as her predecessor, Pete Holmes, to file domestic violence cases.
Davison, a Republican who took office in 2022 after defeating abolitionist public defender Nicole Thomas Kennedy, is currently trailing challenger Erika Evans by a wide margin in her race for reelection. As of Friday, August 8, Davison had 33.8 percent of the vote to Evans’ 55.3 percent.
During her first campaign, Davison promised to more effectively prosecute people for misdemeanor offenses, crack down on repeat offenders, and critically examine community court, a therapeutic court she single-handedly dismantled in 2023. After winning the 2021 primary, Davison told KIRO NewsRadio, “We must address crimes at the misdemeanor level because otherwise it invites an increase in severity and frequency.” The city attorney’s office prosecutes misdemeanors, not felonies, and also serves as the city’s law firm.
“[The city attorney’s office] can talk a big game about wanting to get tough, but they’re not really willing to devote the resources necessary to take a tougher approach, because everybody understands that that would be too expensive and time-consuming to be worth it,” said Austin Field, political action coordinator for the chapter of SEIU 925 that represents King County public defenders.
The COVID pandemic profoundly altered how Seattle’s criminal justice system functioned. The number of cases SPD referred and the number of charges the city attorney’s office filed fell dramatically. In addition, in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the King County Jail stopped booking people on misdemeanor charges.
Both before and during this period, Holmes’ office was widely criticized for slow filing times – the period between when someone is arrested by SPD and when the city attorney decides whether to charge them with a crime. According to Davison’s office, delays under Holmes increased to a median of 162 days in late 2021. Since Davison’s election, the office has dropped the median time to file charges to 19 days.
In 2022, Davison’s office cleared a huge backlog of cases left over from the pandemic era out of the system, declining to file charges in 3,790 old cases. These cases are not included in our analysis of Davison’s record.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action and the founder of the LEAD diversion program, said decreasing those delays improves things for people who are arrested. “The time to a decision about whether or not a case is going to be filed is a clear improvement. They said they were going to do that, and they did that,” Daugaard said.
But data from the Seattle Municipal Court also show that Davison is performing far more poorly than her predecessor on many metrics she promised to address.
One of Davison’s biggest supporters, Scott Lindsay—a former city public safety advisor who now serves as Davison’s deputy—wrote two reports in 2019 that heaped criticism on Holmes for filing cases slowly or declining to file charges for serious misdemeanors. In the second of those reports, Lindsay criticized Holmes for declining to file nearly half of all non-traffic misdemeanor cases, claiming that only one in three cases reached what Lindsay called “meaningful resolution.”
“[D]eclining to file almost half of all cases for multiple consecutive years leads to a significant waste of police time and effort and has significant consequences for victims,” Lindsay wrote.
However, data from the Seattle Municipal Court indicates that Davison’s office also declines to file cases about half the time.
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Lindsay also faulted Holmes for failing to reach “meaningful resolution” in 42 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases, including cases dismissed for incomplete or missing evidence, cases that were still pending two years or more after an arrest, cases dismissed because the defendant was not mentally competent to stand trial, or a dismissal in the “interest of justice”—usually a judge using discretion to toss a case they believe is without merit.
Since taking office, however, Davison’s record on this measure has been nearly identical to Holmes’, with about 38 percent of non-traffic misdemeanor cases between February 2022 and April 2025 failing to meet Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard— 2,218 of 5,804 cases that were resolved during that period. In April, there were an additional 2,358 cases still pending.
According to Daugaard, the similarity between Davison’s and Holmes’ record shows that Lindsay’s “meaningful resolution” standard is a faulty metric. “A lot of cases have always been dismissed in Seattle Municipal Court, whether under Mark Sidran, Tom Carr, Pete Holmes or Davison,” she said. “That’s just in the nature of the work.”
In his report, Lindsay also claimed that Holmes declined to file charges too often after arrests, letting people who should have been prosecuted off the hook. At the lowest point for filing during Holmes’ tenure, in 2016 and 2017, the city attorney’s office declined to file charges 46 percent of the time.
But data from Davison’s most recent quarterly report indicates that the rate of declines under Davison has been similar, and at times higher, than under Holmes, hovering between 40 and 50 percent. In the first quarter of 2025, Davison’s decline rate was 48 percent—two percent higher than what Lindsay called the “worst” years under Holmes.
In addition, Davison’s office declined to file charges in an increasingly large number of those cases because city attorneys believed they were unable to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the past two years, according to the city attorney office’s first quarter 2025 criminal division report, that figure has climbed to 38 percent of all declines. This compares to an average of 27 percent in 2018, when Holmes was city attorney.
Daugaard says a high decline rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There is no absolute right percentage or right number of filings,” she said. “Declining a large number of cases may be completely appropriate and the absolute right level of filings to be pursuing.”
Field says that because Davison is declining so many cases due to lack of decisive evidence, many of his public defender colleagues are now more willing to take cases to trial. “[The city attorney’s] goal has really been to try to scoop people up and impose just enough bail so that they get held until they plead,” said Field. “For them it’s really not about taking cases to trial. So the best way to ensure a good outcome for our clients is to try to aggressively litigate.”
In its 2024 annual report, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) noted that when the city attorney’s office takes cases to trial, it often fails to get convictions. “The [city attorney’s] own data for 2024 show that they were more likely to have their case dismissed than receive a conviction,” the report said.
Despite improving filing times, Davison’s office is taking much longer than her predecessor to decide whether to file charges in domestic violence cases. According to data provided by the Seattle Municipal Court, the average time to file in DV cases more than doubled during Davison’s term—from 25 days in 2018, under Holmes, to 58 days in 2023.
Kennedy, who ran against Davison on a progressive platform, said that figure is deeply disturbing. “In cases of domestic violence, there are times when someone does need to be incarcerated, or something of that nature, for someone to be safe,” she said. “And if the time to file goes from 25 days to 58 days, that’s not really doing anything for the victim. In fact, it’s potentially putting them in more danger.”
Many of the people Davison is choosing to prosecute are homeless, dealing with substance use disorder, or experiencing mental illness. Last year, Davison’s criminal division prosecuted nearly 5,400 total non-traffic misdemeanor cases—well above the pandemic low of 3,500 set in 2021, but actually down from a high of more than 7,300 set in 2018 under Holmes.
In its 2024 report, DPD criticized Davin’s strategy, saying that her office was “reviving failed policies and a renewed focus on jailing people accused of low-level, non-violent offenses.”
“Our clients experiencing housing instability or a behavioral health disorder routinely see their needs unmet and their challenges exacerbated when they are prosecuted for nonviolent misdemeanor charges,” said Matt Sanders, Director of the King County Department of Public Defense.
“What these clients need, and what would ultimately reduce their likelihood of future involvement in the increasingly costly criminal legal system, is access to supportive housing and effective treatment options.”
A review of cases Davison show that many of the people she charges are accused of minor offenses that often result from poverty, drug use, or mental health issues.
For example, a woman was arrested in May 2023 and later charged by the CAO for shoplifting $30 worth of merchandise—several rolls of paper towels and some wine—from the Walgreens at 23rd and Jackson. Court records show that the woman was likely homeless and had a chronic history of minor shoplifting, including a 2022 conviction for stealing a pack of toilet paper and a bottle of laundry detergent. Another case, also in 2023, involved accusations that she shoplifted frozen shrimp, Lysol cleaner, a bag of frozen lima beans, and several other items from a Safeway.
The woman, who pled guilty to charges of theft and criminal trespass in the 2023 case last year, has not served her 364-day jail sentence after failing to appear at multiple court hearings, most likely because she’s homeless and can’t be located.
Another “high utilizer” of the court system identified by Davison’s office, according to municipal court records, was a woman charged with several counts of theft after a 2023 incident in which she allegedly shoplifted small items, including a pair of earrings and a hoodie, from several Pike Place Market merchants. Later that year, a competency evaluation found that the woman’s mental health prevented her from understanding the court proceedings, and her case was dismissed.
Field says Davison’s performative “tough on crime” approach to incidents like these doesn’t address underlying issues like homelessness and poverty. “Poverty is actually a political choice,” he said. “It’s something we’re imposing on folks, and one of the ways that we are keeping people poor is by prosecuting them for behavior that’s inevitably associated with having been born poor and having grown up poor.”
Before she become city attorney in 2022, Davison ran for and lost a race against Debora Juarez for Seattle city council. Then, in 2020, during the first Trump administration, she ran for lieutenant governor on the Republican Party ticket headed up by Loren Culp, losing in the primary.
Vaddadi says City Attorney Ann Davison’s office made “counterfactual, false, and defamatory” statements to justify a decision to prohibit the judge from hearing misdemeanor cases last year.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi has filed a formal complaint with the Washington State Bar Association against City Attorney Ann Davison and her former criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson, over their decision last year to preemptively disqualify her from hearing any criminal cases by filing a Affidavit of Prejudice in every case that lands in Vaddadi’s courtroom, disqualifying Vaddadi from hearing these cases.
The bar association has the authority to take disciplinary action against any state-licensed attorney, up to and including disbarment.
By prohibiting Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases, Davison effectively overturned the 2023 election in which voters elected her to the bench. Davison announced her decision in a memo and press release last year.
Davison’s decision prompted the Seattle Times to publish a contemptuous editorial excoriating the “uninformed voters” who elected Vaddadi and calling her a biased ideologue—a term they never used to describe conservative firebrand Judge Ed McKenna, whom the editorial board described as a victim when progressive city attorney Pete Holmes called him out for blatantly political rulings and public statements.
For more than a year, Vaddadi’s job has consisted primarily of reviewing traffic tickets. That changed somewhat in February, when the City Attorney’s Office stopped disqualifying her automatically from cases that don’t involve allegations of domestic violence or DUIs. When these cases come up, a pro tem judge or magistrate usually has to sit in, at the city’s expense. “It’s almost like paying an eighth judge to preside in criminal court,” Vaddadi said.
Davison and Walton-Anderson—who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief public safety advisor—claimed last year that Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing several cases in which, they alleged, Vaddadi had improperly released a defendant, failed to find probable cause when probable cause existed, and showed what they described as “a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”
Vaddadi’s complaint eviscerates those claims, calling them “counterfactual, false, and defamatory.”
“Thestatementswereuntetheredtoaspecificproceedingandpublishedinparttoprovidepoliticalcoverforafar-reachingblanket[Affidavit of Prejudice]policyofunprecedentedscope,” Vaddadi wrote. “Theeffectofthepolicywastoexcludemefromhearingallmisdemeanorcasesformostof2024,whichstrainedcourtresourcesandresultedinlitigationagainsttheCityofSeattle.”
The Washington Community Alliance and three Seattle voters sued the city for disenfranchising voters by disqualifying Vaddadi last year.
“It was a tough year,” Vaddadi told PubliCola on Thursday. “There’s this scathing piece of writing that’s published [and repeated] in the media, to my colleagues and the people I respect, and I know it’s full of lies. And what is awful is, because she’s the city attorney, and Natalie Walton-Anderson is now head of public safety at the mayor’s office, they have a powerful voice. And they’ve used it to spread these lies about me, and people believe them—and that’s really hard.”
Vaddadi said that, contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, no one from the city attorney’s office ever reached out to her to discuss their concerns, or took any of the other other avenues that were available to them before announcing she would be disqualified from all misdemeanor cases.
Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, speaking on his own behalf and not as a representative of the court, said the decision to completely exclude Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases appears to be unprecedented. “In the history of the state of Washington, no prosecuting attorney has ever used the affidavit of prejudice to this decree—not even close,” Shadid said. “This blows every other blanket AOP situation out of the water. And it’s worse, because they never came to Judge Vaddadi with their concerns.”
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“This feels to me like they are exploiting a loophole in the democratic process and the legal process in general,” Vaddadi said. “There are avenues to complain about judicial conduct,” such as the Commission on Judicial Conduct and the court process itself. But “they’ve only appealed one case that I’ve ruled on”—a case in which Vaddadi disqualified an assistant city attorney, Victoria Pugh, from prosecuting a case in which she was also a witness. (The city attorney’s office appealed that decision and a Superior Court judge sided with Vaddadi.)
It was that case, Vaddadi believes, that made Davison and Walton-Anderson come gunning for her. “Such retaliation is improper use of the City Attorney’s authority and was calculated to damage my reputation and to chill judicial independence and integrity,” she wrote in her complaint.
A spokesman for Davison’s office said they had not yet seen Vaddadi’s complaint and therefore could not respond to it before publication.
A key claim in Vaddadi’s complaint is that Davison and Walton-Anderson fabricated or misrepresented cases Vaddadi heard in order to make her sound incompetent, then refused to provide case numbers in response to requests, including media requests. (The city attorney’s office did not provide these case numbers when PubliCola asked for them last year).
This made it hard for her to prove she did not do the things the city attorney’s office accused her of doing, Vaddadi said, such as as improperly dismissing a DUI case, allowing someone who had committed domestic violence to go free, and dismissing a case against someone who failed to comply with treatment—claims Vaddadi says are inaccurate or misleading.
Shadid confirmed that the city attorney’s office “refused to produce the case numbers to me” when he asked on three separate occasions.
Vaddadi disputes the city attorney’s characterization of several cases Davison and Walton-Anderson described in their memo, something she said she was unable to do until members of the public managed to figure out which cases Davison was describing and show that the facts didn’t match the city attorney’s descriptions.
“I knew from the moment they filed [the blanket affidavit of prejudice] that everything in that statement was false, but at this point, I’ve got the cases that they described, with the actual case numbers, and nothing really matches up,” Vaddadi said.
“By comparing the actual records to the summaries in the Memo, it is a trivial exercise to demonstrate that the Memo’s description of my record contains factual statements that Ms. Walton-Anderson and Ms. Davison knew were false at the time the Memo was published,” her compalint says.
Vaddadi said “the most egregious fabrication” of several “directly falsifiable” cases was a case in which, according to the city attorney’s memo, she dismissed a domestic violence case “even though it was clear that the defendant never got on the transport van to [American Behavioral Health Services] to fulfill his residential treatment requirement that was part of dispositional continuance.”
According to Vaddadi’s complaint, almost everything about this description was false or misleading, including the gender of the defendant (she’s a woman), the reason she “never got on the transport van” (she was in a wheelchair and the van driver “refused” to take her), and the disposition of the case (it was continued, not dismissed, and Judge Faye Chess later dismissed it.)
In a letter responding to a bar complaint by Seattle resident Bennett Haselton, an outside attorney for Walton-Anderson said the original order didn’t rest on any specific cases, but acknowledged that the city attorney’s office had some of their facts wrong in the van case. Shadid said the city attorney’s office should have corrected their original memo and redacted their claim that Vaddadi mishandled this case, but they have not done so.
Reiterating the arguments she made in a statement published by the Stranger last year, Vaddadi wrote that contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, they never met with her to discuss any concerns about her rulings or purported bias toward defendants.
Vaddadi said Davison and Walton-Anderson’s statements closely resemble the “actual malice” standard required to prove libel against a public official—a high bar that requires proof that someone made a false statement, knowing it was false or with “reckless disregard” for the truth, in a way that harmed the person the statement was about.
According to Vaddadi, the city attorney’s statements didn’t just damage her reputation, making it harder for her to be reelected or get other jobs in the future; they also made her the target for “a barrage of vile, racist, and threatening communications directed personally to me,” forcing her to take steps to protect herself and her family from threats.
Presiding Municipal Court Judge Anita Crawford-Willis declined to comment on Vaddadi’s bar complaint. “Judge Vaddadi is a duly elected judge and valued member of the Seattle Municipal Court bench,” she said.
Shadid, who has picked up some of Vaddadi’s cases and administrative work, said that seeing “a promising young judge, a woman of color, being attacked in this way has really affected other women of color and other people in our court.”
Vaddadi said she wants more than just the ability to preside over cases as an elected judge; she wants to fix the damage to her reputation Davison’s office has caused over the past year.
“I’m looking for the truth to come out and for my reputation to be restored … and I’m looking to do my job that I was elected to do,” Vaddadi said. “I have never filed a bar complaint in my life, and I would hope that I don’t ever have to do it again … but at some point, bad conduct needs to be addressed.”
City Attorney Ann Davison, who unilaterally ended the city’s therapeutic community court two years ago, announced yesterday that she’s rolling out a new option for people accused of drug misdemeanors, such as the recently adopted laws against using or possessing drugs in public spaces. The office announced the new “drug prosecution alternative” in a press release after the Seattle Times posted a story about it yesterday morning.
According to the announcement, “The Drug Prosecution Alternative will provide an incentive for defendants arrested for drug use and possession to connect with services and commit no new law violations to have their drug cases dismissed.”
The new alternative will include a “warm hand-off” from the court to the city’s Community Resource Center, where they will be able to access resources directly. After that, if they don’t violate the law for 60 days, their charges will be dismissed. This process will, in theory, free up the city attorney’s office to focus on other cases instead of going through a discovery process for every drug case they pursue.
If most of that sounds awfully familiar, it should. The structure of the new “drug prosecution alternative” is identical to the community court Davison shut down two years ago as the fentanyl epidemic raged. Put another way, what Davison is proposing is effectively a restoration of the old community court.
When Davison’s office announced it was ending community court two years ago, they derided the court as as ineffective and soft, in part, because defendants retained their right to trial and were not required to do community services as a condition for receiving services.
At the time, the office called this work requirement a non-negotiable “central component” of community court. “Community service was an essential and fundamental component of the original conception of Community Court, then-criminal division chief Natalie Walton-Anderson (who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s public safety director) wrote.
The new drug prosecution alternative has no community service requirements. Nor does it require defendants to give up their right to trial.
Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, who ran the old community court, wrote a proposal for a revamped version of community court back in 2023 in response to Davison’s concerns. Among other concessions to Davison, Shadid proposed eliminating a “level 1” track that allowed people to attend a life-skills class and get their charges dismissed and starting defendants at Level 2—going to an appointment at the service center.
Davison’s new proposal is substantively identical to what Shadid recommended in 2023.
Shadid said he was glad that Davison had come around on community court, retaining the elements he said were essential to its success when he tried to save a version of the court two years ago.
“I am pleased that the city attorney has adopted the Seattle Municipal Court Community Court structure for Drug Diversion Court,” Shadid said. “Ensuring defendants don’t have to give up rights to receive services allows us to start connecting defendants to services on their first court appearance.”
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Advocates generally agree that existing services are inadequate, particularly for unhoused people with severe substance use disorders.
Although the new adjudication process will be almost identical to the old community court, some of the details are new. The court will require participants to go through an initial urinalysis and a substance use disorder assessment, which will likely require the city to pay for a new staffer to do this arguably unnecessary task. (Assessments determine the severity of a person’s substance use disorder; someone arrested for using fentanyl on a sidewalk probably doesn’t need a test to know that he’s using drugs problematically.)
According to Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office, “Substance abuse assessment assists in determining the level of care necessary.” As for the new drug test requirement, Robinson said, “a clean UA can lead to an expedited successful completion in the program. A dirty UA would not provide that same expedited pathway, but the individual could end up successfully completing the program and having their charges dropped.”
The new version of community court also gives the city attorney, not the court, sole authority to determine who is and isn’t eligible—another concession Shadid included in his2023 proposal. Davison’s office said they didn’t plan to apply any specific criteria to cases, but would instead decide on a “case by case” basis. “It is a complex endeavor,” Robinson said.
Previously, Davison excluded everyone on her list of frequent misdemeanor offenders (so-called “high utilizers”) from community court. This was problematic, even arbitrary, at the time; it may be even more so now that drug use is itself a misdemeanor, because the rule would explicitly exclude frequent drug offenders from services designed to help them out of addiction.
