Tag: Election 2022

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.

Elections, Guest Contributor

Passing Ranked Choice Voting Requires a “Yes” Vote on Question 1

By George Cheung

The ballots of Seattle voters will pose a very important question: Do we want to change our democracy? To put it simply: Yes. Of course. Unequivocally. American democracy is falling apart. To save it—at least here at home, which would create a domino effect—we have to vote yes on this first question.

Public trust in our government and institutions has never been lower. And it’s no surprise. Just look at the other Washington, mired in January 6th insurrectionist hearings, bipartisan gridlock, and Russian interference. Things aren’t looking good.

Here in our Washington, though, everyday people have an opportunity to make a meaningful difference to improve and strengthen our democracy. The stakes have never been higher. Right now, the winner-take-all system always leads to voter dissatisfaction writ large. How many times have you been excited about a primary candidate only to be completely deflated with your options during the general election?

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is a simple, effective, and proven alternative. It’s the only viable path forward, and it is the logical next step to our democracy’s evolution. But for Seattle to see the benefits of RCV—which voters and endorsers alike clearly favor—then we must also vote yes on the first question that asks for change. RCV will not happen without both yes votes. It’s silly to vote “yes” on 1B, or RCV, and then prevent it from happening in the first place by saying no to the first half of the question. It’s like saying you want to eat cereal but refuse to use a bowl. If we want RCV, we do in fact want to change our democracy.

Ranked-choice voting is a necessary step in the unsexy but critical work of crash-proofing our democracy.

At the end of the day, RCV is a straightforward voting system that would ensure the Pacific Northwest becomes a stronghold against the rapid crumbling of our nation’s democracy. We can be a bulwark against fascism and eroding social cohesion. And as we’ve done with marriage equality, minimum wage, and marijuana legalization, we can lead the country toward a better path.

Ranked-choice voting delivers accurate voter representation even before a necessary, separate-but-connected movement gets to tackling campaign finance issues. There are critics of RCV who suggest lax campaign finance laws are the real issue. But let’s use a parallel analogy for a second: Reducing the risk of dying while operating a vehicle. When drivers’ deaths were at an all-time high, we passed a whole slate of laws, policies, and standards that made driving safer. It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t now, to oppose airbags because you think steering wheels need to look the same, or because you think seat belts got it covered.

This includes, as PubliCola’s editorial board rightfully points out, stronger campaign finance laws. But more importantly, it will require many policy changes. To pull American democracy back from the brink of pseudo-fascist authoritarianism is a daunting task that requires every tool in our toolbox. That starts with the choices we have right now: Voting yes on Question 1 to improve our democracy and voting yes on 1b, RCV.

RCV is a necessary step in the unsexy but critical work of crash-proofing our democracy. We know it’s simple because voters themselves have said so in overwhelming majorities. We know that RCV is effective at preventing democratic manipulation because it delivers the actual will of voters, making elected officials truly representative of the votes cast. We know that RCV is proven thanks to the more than 50 jurisdictions where it has reduced polarization and attack ads, allowing third-party candidates to run competitive races.

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RCV makes voters feel heard by making every vote count. In crowded races, much like Seattle’s mayoral elections, candidates who advance to the general election often have as little as 32-34 percent of voter support. RCV allows voters to designate a first, second, and third choice for run-off rounds, ensuring that the candidates who advance actually have a majority of votes behind them—not just a plurality of die-hard, uncompromising supporters. This, in turn, improves voter satisfaction and boosts participation. Time and time again, RCV has led to increased voter turnout! And of course it did: When people know their vote matters, they show up.

This is precisely why RCV has the endorsements of every Democratic Party legislative district in Seattle, the King County Democrats, the League of Women Voters, and nearly 30 more grassroots organizations. These organizations include those who represent workers, communities of color, and advocates from all sorts of backgrounds and issue areas. It’s the same ecosystem of partners who advocated for mail-in ballots, democracy vouchers, and campaign finance laws that voters have overwhelmingly supported over the years. I know, because I’ve been working on these solutions to our weakening democracy since they were simply ideas.

I’m proud of the democracy we’ve built here in Seattle. But the work is far from done. Read the news. Our democracy can be better. And we have a moral obligation to make it better.

Democracy only works if we all agree to it. Protecting our local democracy against the ugly patterns to demolish it nationwide and improving our local voting system, too, only happen if we all agree to it. When you’re filling out your ballot: make sure you vote yes to the first question, yes to improving our democracy, if you want your yes on 1B to go into action.

George Cheung is the Director of More Equitable Democracy and the former Program Director for the Joyce Foundation’s Democracy Program and Co-Chair of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation. Cheung was also executive director of the Win/Win Network and founder/executive director of Equal Rights Washington, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization.

criminal justice, Elections, King County

PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Jim Ferrell

By Erica C. Barnett

Current King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a former Republican who embraced a rehabilitative approach to public safety unusual among prosecutors, will retire next year after more than two decades in office. His longtime chief of staff, Leesa Manion, played a critical role in his office, helping to set and implement the policies for which Satterberg was known, including the decision to stop charging people for low-level drug possession and the creation of a number of alternatives to incarceration, including Restorative Community Pathways, which allows young people to avoid charges for first-time felonies by connecting to community-based groups and enrolling in their diversion programs.

Manion’s support for RCP and other Satterberg initiatives has made her a target for a number of tough-on-crime officials, including a group of South King County mayors who issued a statement in August demanding “improved and timely juvenile and adult felony criminal accountability at the County level,” including more prosecutions and a greater reliance on incarceration as a response to “the rising tide of crime and violence in our communities.”

Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell, who’s also running for prosecutor, signed this statement, as well as a letter calling on legislators to adopt harsher penalties for drug use in response to the Blake decision, which effectively decriminalized simple drug possession. Ferrell has made Restorative Community Pathways a centerpiece of his campaign, calling it a “look-the-other-way” program because participants don’t have to face charges as part of their participation in the program. As mayor, Ferrell has used similar language to describe unsheltered people, supporting his city’s ban on encampments in public spaces and accusing people who live in encampments of embracing a “lack-of-accountability lifestyle.”

PubliCola sat down (virtually) with both candidates for King County Prosecutor in September.

PubliCola (ECB): Understaffing is a major issue at the King County Jail: People can’t visit with their families or meet with defense attorneys and incarcerated people are often locked in their cells for 23 hours a day. Do you support any policies that will reduce the jail population, like releasing people who are not being held for violent offenses?

Jim Ferrell (JF): When I was seeking the the endorsement of the King County Corrections guild, I actually got to hear about a lot of these issues that are just really very difficult for them. First of all, they’re about 100 officers down, according to the guild, so they’ve got to get aggressive about filling those positions.

So, to your question, what I would say is, you can’t say “we’re just going to reduce the population of the jail” in a vacuum. What people are concerned about in the region is this sort of revolving door, where people get brought over and over and over for property crimes. So where it makes sense for community safety and where you don’t have a chronic offenders getting booked multiple times, I can see exploring that. But when people get booked for an offense, and then they’re out that later that day, that really erodes the confidence of the community that something’s actually happening.

“[Keeping the youth jail open] isn’t about jailing kids, it’s about making sure that if you committed a violent offense in King County, you’re going to be held accountable. And you can’t eliminate that.”

ECB: You’ve been very critical of Restorative Community Pathways, the county’s pre-filing juvenile diversion program. One of your criticisms is essentially that it’s a pre-filing program, which means that there isn’t a case and it doesn’t go before a judge. Do you oppose pre-filing diversion in general, and would you want to institute a different kind of juvenile diversion program? What’s the evidence that RCP isn’t working?

JF: One of the things I’ve said over and over is, I could fix RCP in a day. You take about five or six crimes off the list and add a judicial component at the beginning.

I don’t think for felonies, certain types of felonies, that you should have a pre-filing diversion. If you bring a gun to school, if you’re in somebody else’s living room in a residential burglary, if you’ve committed a robbery or a felony assault, I don’t think you should be eligible for a pre-filing diversion. And at a minimum, you’ve got to have a judicial piece of this and a check back. I don’t think it’s asking too much to say, did the person show up? Did they do what they were asked to do? And that has been consistently my concern with RCP.

And it just needs to be recalibrated. I’m not against diversions—clearly, the idea is to get people get young people back on track. But when you’re talking about felons, and these felonies that I just rattled off the top of my head are not nonviolent, you’ve got very serious crimes that are part of this. They’re just not appropriate. So that’s my position.

And this was launched with zero notice to the communities. These are cases coming out of our cities. No notice of this huge change. There is no case number, no judge, no plan, no check back. We don’t have any idea of what happens [with these cases]. This isn’t a diversion program. This is a look-the-other-way program, literally.

My concern about RCP is, ultimately if you try to sort of coax young people in the right direction, you could be creating a different type of offender. I always say comfort is the enemy of change. And if somebody has made that mistake, you don’t want to extinguish someone’s hopes or dreams, and you also want to make sure that they’re not unemployable moving forward. But you also need to make sure that you have created some just some level of discomfort, so they won’t do it again, or at least are incentivized not to.

ECB: King County Executive Dow Constantine has set the goal of closing down the juvenile jail by 2025. Do you think the goal of zero youth detention is realistic?

JF: That policy is not tethered to reality. It just isn’t. What do you do with a juvenile who pulls a trigger and shoots somebody? What do you do with the juveniles that are committing violent offenses? Where are they going to go? I mean, in fact, actually, we had the two juveniles that committed a robbery here at a pawn store, in Federal Way this year. They got electronic home detention after they held everybody in this pawn store captive for a while. And then they go out and kill somebody in Pierce County.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of the juvenile population that commits violent gun-related crimes, and you need a place to hold these individuals to protect the public, victims, and even themselves before they commit offenses that they just are never going to be able to take back. So this isn’t about jailing kids, it’s about making sure that if you committed a violent offense in King County, you’re going to be held accountable. And you can’t eliminate that.

And they just need to get serious about hiring people. And it is hard. You’ve got to incentivize and you’ve got to just get the job done. And that needs to happen. But it’s not all about locking people up. I mean, I’ve got a 15-year-old son, I would never want him locked up, ever. And I think, really, we’re talking about where you find an offender, or a juvenile, or even an adult criminal defendant on the spectrum of seriousness of the offense, priors, and danger to the community.

“Sometimes, with people that are in crisis and decompensating, you can get them back on a regimen of the medication that they need. It just depends on where you find people, where they’re at in the process, and what kind of support they had with family and friends.”

ECB: The King County Jail is not known as being a particularly therapeutic place. And a lot of people are currently in a cycle where they’re in jail for a couple days and released, only to get arrested again and repeat the cycle. Do you support keeping people in jail for short periods of time on minor offenses, even if it means they might lose their job, health care, or housing?

JF: Well, they used to say that the seventh floor of the King County Jail was the second largest mental health ward in all of Western Washington. And it’s certainly not a way to treat mental illness. Oftentimes, at the end of the month, when people would run out of their medication, whether they’re bipolar or have some sort of co-occurring mental health issue, they would essentially decompensate and end up in custody. And you don’t make these decisions in a vacuum—it’s individualized in regard to the decision to hold somebody or not hold somebody. But sometimes, with people that are in crisis and decompensating, you can get them back on a regimen of the medication that they need. It just depends on where you find people, where they’re at in the process, and what kind of support they had with family and friends.

ECB: What about situations where people are held in jail for no other reason than that they can’t afford bail?

JF: My last assignment at the prosecutor’s office was in CTI, the car theft initiative. And some of these guys would go from stolen car to stolen car to stolen car, and dump it in a parking lot, and then grab the one right one to it. So those high-impact offenders do constitute a lot of the caseload. And they do have impact. I mean, if my car gets stolen, I couldn’t have this meeting with you right now. I couldn’t get to work, I couldn’t take my son to school. It has a huge impact on people.

I think that somehow or another, we got this idea that property crimes, nonviolent offenses, we’re going to allow that. But if you’re committing a felony crime, you’re going to be impacting other people. And when I talk to people, they really feel like the systematic response has been inadequate, because the community is getting victimized repeatedly. There should be some punishment for that—reasonable punishment based on a person’s prior record, but there should be some punishment.

ECB: Seattle Municipal Court recently agreed to restrict so-called high utilizers from accessing community court. I’m curious what you thought of that decision and if you think the county’s therapeutic courts, like drug court and mental health court, are doing a good job, particularly with people who may not be ready or able to comply with the conditions established by the court.

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JF: I think drug court, mental health court, all of those type of courts are really the model for alternative dispositions. And it’s not zero tolerance—they really do want people to succeed. I talk a lot about drug court, because I think drug court is really the model for how to do this. It’s just so difficult for people to get off drugs and alcohol. They mask other issues that are that are also present. So we’ve got to get to the root causes. And you need to give people enough latitude, where if they have some sort of relapse, as long as it’s not flagrant, if they’re still willing to try, you don’t give up on them. But ultimately, what’s critically important about drug and mental health court is there’s a checkbox, there are accountability steps, and you can see whether somebody is going in the right direction or wrong direction.

ECB: You’ve talked about the case backlog at the prosecutor’s office, which has been largely due to cases piling up during COVID and the fact that the courts are still not operating at full capacity. What policies would you propose to get through that backlog more quickly?

JF: The first thing is, if you think of it like a pipeline, you’ve got a capacity issue. And there’s only a certain number of judges. And you’ve got speedy trial concerns. So you’ve got to expand the pipeline. And the way to do that is you got to hire more pro tem [judges].  And the prosecutor’s office has got to come up with a discernible plan. And the homicides and sexual assault cases, those absolutely have to go first. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Jim Ferrell” →

criminal justice, Elections

PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Leesa Manion

King County Prosecutor Candidate Leesa ManionBy Erica C. Barnett

Current King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a former Republican who embraced a rehabilitative approach to public safety unusual among prosecutors, will retire next year after more than two decades in office. His longtime chief of staff, Leesa Manion, played a critical role in his office, helping to set and implement the policies for which Satterberg was known, including the decision to stop charging people for low-level drug possession and the creation of a number of alternatives to incarceration, including Restorative Community Pathways, which allows young people to avoid charges for first-time felonies by connecting to community-based groups and enrolling in their diversion programs.

Manion’s support for RCP and other Satterberg initiatives has made her a target for a number of tough-on-crime officials, including a group of South King County mayors who issued a statement in August demanding “improved and timely juvenile and adult felony criminal accountability at the County level,” including more prosecutions and a greater reliance on incarceration as a response to “the rising tide of crime and violence in our communities.”

Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell, who’s also running for prosecutor, signed this statement, as well as a letter calling on legislators to adopt harsher penalties for drug use in response to the Blake decision, which effectively decriminalized simple drug possession. Ferrell has made Restorative Community Pathways a centerpiece of his campaign, calling it a “look-the-other-way” program because participants don’t have to face charges as part of their participation in the program. As mayor, Ferrell has used similar language to describe unsheltered people, supporting his city’s ban on encampments in public spaces and accusing people who live in encampments of embracing a “lack-of-accountability lifestyle.”

PubliCola sat down (virtually) with both candidates for King County Prosecutor in September.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola (ECB): I want to start by asking about the situation at the King County Jail. Among lots of other problems, understaffing is making it harder for public defenders to meet with clients. Do you support policies that will reduce the population at the jail, such as releasing people whose crimes aren’t violent? If not, why not?

Leesa Manion (LM): An important principle of our criminal legal system is that people have a right to counsel and that means they have to be able to meet with them. And also, if I’m thinking about the backlog of felony cases, we also want charged individuals to be able to meet with their attorneys, because we want to be able to resolve cases. And that’s in everyone’s interest—having people languish while they’re waiting to have their case heard is not helpful to anyone.

Second, I do believe in lowering populations for the right cases. I’ll be really honest with you, individuals who’ve committed violent crimes, sexual assaults, gun crimes, homicides—it’s really hard to argue for their release as individuals, and they’ve created great harm to an actual individual person, victim, family member. I don’t think we have enough robust, meaningful alternatives to detention in King County. We know from research that things like community housing, electronic home monitoring, text reminders, all have an impact, and they can protect public safety and secure the release of an individual and also help guarantee their return to court. We just don’t have enough of those.

ECB: Tell me a little bit about the adult diversion program that the county is planning to launch this year—is that the kind of meaningful alternative you’re talking about?

LM: There are a lot of similarities between the community diversion program and Restorative Community Pathways. The idea is to take first-time, nonviolent felony cases and to refer those individuals to community-based resources, so that they can get to the root cause of their poor decision making and behavior, and to offer those same types of resources to victims or harmed parties, including a loss recovery fund so that harmed parties have some of their out-of -pocket expenses taken care of.

Early reports show that RCP has a recidivism rate of 8 percent compared to either 21 percent or 58 percent, depending on what metric you’re looking at. Knowing that we can have success with juveniles, it kind of implies that we could try to have that same success with adults.

“I am proud of the fact that we file conservatively, that we want people to take accountability early on, and we’re not overcharging.”

ECB: The Seattle Times editorial board recently posted an interview with you and your opponent in which the Times said only 10 percent of sexual crimes reported to the sheriff’s office are prosecuted. The report they were citing actually reflected a much more nuanced picture than the way Times presented it, but it made me curious: Why do such a large number of sexual crimes never make it to the prosecutor’s office, much less lead to a conviction, and would you propose any steps to increase prosecutions of these cases?

LM: We participated in and fully cooperated with that audit. And one of the things they did is they looked at all the cases that we had declined. And the audit found that we did not declined a single case in error. And the recommendations that they had specific to [the prosecutor’s office], we were not only in agreement with, but were in the process of implementing by the time that the report was published. And one that was really meaningful to us was ensuring that a greater number of victims receive services earlier in the process. So we have [the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center], which is a great partnership. We also added 10 victim advocate positions in the office.

Once cases are reported, we have a shortage of police resources right now. The Seattle Police Department used to have 12 sexual assault detectives, and now they have four. And since they reduced, we have received 50 percent fewer referrals from SPD. I don’t think that there are 50 percent fewer sexual assaults that are going on. But I do think that their bandwidth and their capacity to respond and investigate sexual assaults was greatly diminished.

Then once those cases get referred to us, we have to look at the evidence, and we have to make that hard call about whether we have evidence sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And if we don’t have evidence, it’s really not only responsible, but it’s unethical for us to file those cases. You know, people often are like, oh, you should just file the case and give it to a jury and see if it sticks. That’s actually not our ethical obligation. There have been movements in recent years to change the definition of consent, for example, so that it does a more systemic job of addressing some of the challenges in prosecuting sexual assault cases, because that’s often the really difficult thing to establish—that there was lack of consent.

ECB: Your boss, Dan Satterberg, said at a recent forum that the system basically wouldn’t work if more than 5 percent of cases went to trial, which is why prosecutors offer more lenient sentences to people who plead guilty without taking cases to trial. Do you think this is leading to unjust outcomes or excessive sentences?

LM: I wish I had a simple answer to that. There are two practices in our country. One: There are prosecutor’s offices where they’re like, we are charging everything up front, we’re gonna charge you with five counts of this plus enhancements. And it makes it really easy to drop charges or drop enhancements. And among public defenders or private defense counsel, there may be this sense of, yeah, that’s a pretty easy sell to my client. When you’re looking at, say, 20 years versus 10, that’s easy math to do.

(Second, there’s) the way we do it, I am proud of the fact that we file conservatively, that we want people to take accountability early on, and we’re not overcharging. I’m really proud of that. I think the challenge with what I’ve heard described to me as the challenge of adding charges, is that yes, there are some who would characterize that as a trial penalty.

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ECB: Are you open to eliminating or reducing the use of cash bail for nonviolent offenses? What do you see as the purpose of cash bail, and how to you respond to the criticism that it keeps people in jail for long periods on charges while they’re still presumed innocent?

LM: We don’t have that path in King County, I’ll just be really honest with you. Cash bail was developed as a means of ensuring someone’s return to court. And we know that the challenge around cash bail is that it disproportionately impacts the poor and BIPOC communities. That is less of a challenge here in King County than in other parts of the country. But that doesn’t mean that we can fail to address it.

When you take away cash bail, and you give judges a binary choice of release or detain, I think you will have more judges making the decision to detain out of an abundance of caution. I think that the systemic change that would be more equitable, and more fair, and more long-lasting would be to have a robust set of alternatives [to incarceration] that well funded, designed to be fair, and designed also to protect public safety. Because that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Public safety means a lot of things to me. But the challenge about having people feel like they’re not safe is that it does threaten, in my view, some of the really great alternatives and some of the really great reforms that we have built over the past 15-plus years..

ECB: What sort of alternatives are you thinking of?

LM: I mean, some people really need structure. They might need a safe place to live, they might need treatment, they may not have a way to get to court, they might need transportation. They may not have the ability to kind of follow the calendar in a way that a type A like me might follow it, so they might need a reminder. And then there are some people that maybe they’ve committed a crime that is not homicide, but maybe it was a pretty serious assault, who could maybe be at home on electronic monitoring devices. It has kind of a full menu of options. And we just don’t have that in King County right now. It doesn’t mean we couldn’t build it. But that’s an opportunity for us.

ECB: Do you think the county’s therapeutic courts, like drug court and mental health court, have been successful in helping people with multiple barriers like long term addiction and homelessness?

LM: I think drug court has been successful, because we hear it in every single graduation. It doesn’t mean it’s successful for everyone, it doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for everyone. I believe in the value of drug court, veterans court, and mental health court, and I think we should provide increased access to all three of those therapeutic courts. I also think we need to offer more community-based treatment options. And we also need to offer treatment on demand. Individuals shouldn’t have to come in contact with the criminal justice system just to get help. And I think in order to have that have the type of impact that we want, we have to be honest about the size of the need in our community. When we aren’t honest about those types of things, we can bring a lot of people around the table together, and we can have a lot of great conversation, but we won’t have the results that we want.

“I think Operation New Day was effective in this way: It interrupted a scene, if you will, a collection of behaviors that people felt was scary and intolerable, and that caused a lot of alarm and concern. Focused policing can definitely have an impact, but we also have to have focused treatment and focused services.”

ECB: You supported Operation New Day, which targeted a few key intersections, like 12th and Jackson, with intensive hot-spot police patrols. I don’t know if you’ve been to 12th and Jackson recently, but the open-air market is very much back—it’s just sort of distributed around the whole block. Do you still consider those efforts a success?

LM: I think Operation New Day was effective in this way: It interrupted a scene, if you will, a collection of behaviors that people felt was scary and intolerable, and that caused a lot of alarm and concern. Focused policing can definitely have an impact, but we also have to have focused treatment and focused services. And in a perfect world, this is what we would have: We would have the mobile [police] precinct and we would have the mobile health clinic, and they would be right next door to each other. They’d be together. And we would have not only police officers addressing some of the alarming behavior that we saw on 12th and Jackson, like selling fentanyl to vulnerable individuals, but we would also have social workers and medical professionals seeing and treating individuals, and an army of social workers helping to find safe housing and safe shelter for individuals. In an ideal world, we’d have both. It’s not an either/or, it’s a yes, and.

ECB: Given that we don’t live in that ideal world, do you think this strategy is effective? Or is it just disrupting these activities at one location for a little while?

LM: I think it does disrupt. And I think there’s some value in the disruption. But I want to be really honest: It’s a short-term option. It can be beneficial to the community, and it can be beneficial to individuals who want to feel safe. It can be beneficial to business owners who are afraid to go into their businesses, and customers who are afraid to shop in those stores. But it doesn’t mean that it’s effective for the individuals who are suffering from trauma, mental health, substance use disorder. I understand why store owners were afraid at 12th and Jackson.  I also understand that there are individuals who are really vulnerable and are fighting to meet basic needs. We have to address both. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: King County Prosecuting Attorney Candidate Leesa Manion” →

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” →