Tag: Seattle Municipal Court

Courts

Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief


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.”

“The statements were untethered to a specific proceeding and published in part to provide political cover for a far-reaching blanket [Affidavit of Prejudice] policy of unprecedented scope,” Vaddadi wrote. “The effect of the policy was to exclude me from hearing all misdemeanor cases for most of 2024, which strained court resources and resulted in litigation against the City of Seattle.”

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.”

 

Courts, Drugs

Ann Davison’s New “Drug Prosecution Alternative” Is Just the Community Court She Ended Two Years Ago

Seattle Municipal Courthouse

By Erica C. Barnett

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.

City Council, Police

Focusing on “Johns” Doesn’t Reduce Street Sex Work, Disproportionately Targets Men of Color, PubliCola Analysis Shows

There’s no evidence that banishing sex buyers from Aurora and other “areas of prostitution” has had any impact, either.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council is currently considering legislation sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore (D-5, North Seattle) that would reinstate a recently repealed law against “prostitution loitering,” which the former city council repealed in 2020 in response to recommendations the city’s Reentry Work Group made in 2018.

Moore’s bill would also formalize a new Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone around Aurora Avenue from North 145th St. to North 85th, known as “SOAP Zone 1,” allowing courts to impose orders that bar people accused of loitering from going inside the area. In the 2000s, the city repeatedly added new SOAP and SODA (Stay Out of Drug Area) zones from which drug users and people involved in the sex trade could be banned; at their peak, these zones encompassed roughly half the city.

Moore has said that, in response to public feedback, she’ll amend the proposal so that only men accused of “sexual exploitation”—the term Seattle law uses in incorporating the state law against “patronizing a prostitute”—will be subject to future SOAP orders. This, along with the prostitution loitering law, will help “address…commercial sexual exploitation in this area, and associated gun violence,” Moore said in a newsletter in August.

However, a PubliCola analysis of SOAP orders and charges against sex workers and patrons during between 2004 and 2020 shows that focusing on sex buyers did not result in a decrease in the sex trade on Aurora and in other SOAP zones. It also had a highly disproportionate impact on Black and Latino men, including many immigrants and non-English speakers, who typically agreed to SOAP orders in exchange for a dismissal.

PubliCola obtained court data through a public disclosure request, and used the municipal court’s public database to do a deeper case-by-case analysis of thousands of prostitution loitering and patronizing cases. A note on the numbers: We only reviewed the cases of sex workers charged with prostitution loitering—street sex work, which is the focus of the current crackdown proposals—as opposed to the broader category of prostitution. Had we included charges involving people arrested for non-street-based sex work, the number of prostitution charges would be much higher. With men (and they were all men), we included every charge of patronizing a prostitute, a singular crime that encompasses all types of sex work. Overall, far more people (mostly women) have been charged with prostitution in Seattle than with patronizing a prostitute.

The records we reviewed did show a significant spike in prosecutions against men who were caught attempting to pay for sex after then-city attorney Pete Holmes announced he was going to start focusing on “johns” rather than women doing street sex work in 2012. (In the chart above, this announcement is denoted by a vertical line.) But that spike leveled off after about three years and prosecutions returned to previous levels after that, with no discernible long-term impact on Aurora.

A city council central staff memo describing Moore’s proposal says that judges “occasionally” issued SOAP orders prior to 2010. But an exhaustive review of court records at the Seattle Municipal Court’s public database, which we performed using the data from the court for prostitution loitering and patronizing charges, shows that between 2004 and 2009, judges actually issued nearly 1,000 SOAP orders for prostitution loitering and patronizing a prostitute, combined.

Far from issuing SOAP orders “occasionally,” judges actually issued them dozens of times a year until 2019, when they dropped dramatically before starting to rise again in 2020.

Source: Seattle Municipal Court data. De-duplicated data; numbers represent individuals, not charges. Hispanic/Latino is an estimate based on surnames.

One thing that did change dramatically after Holmes announced he would focus on “johns” in 2012 is that the City Attorney’s Office began and obtained SOAP orders against men more frequently The numbers, however, never topped 70 per year—a fraction of the high-water mark for SOAP orders against sex workers, the vast majority of them women; that happened in 2005, when judges issued 219 SOAP orders against the sex workers charged with prostitution loitering whose cases PubliCola reviewed.

Holmes told PubliCola his office decided to focus on “johns,” rather than sex workers, because the women getting caught up in stings and arrested for loitering on Aurora clearly needed services, not time in a jail cell. “We saw a lot of so-called perpetrators in our courtroom that looked a hell of a lot like victims themselves,” Holmes said. When cops go after women who solicit on the street, rather than online or through an escort service, “you’re going to sweep up the most desperate people, and that’s what we were seeing in court.”

Holmes says the shift toward focusing on men who buy sex (framed, at the time, as a renewed focus on men who “exploit” women by paying for sex) was “the sounder approach, in lieu of a comprehensive regulatory approach to prostitution or some other legal approach.” The city was “not interested in the consensual sale of sex,” he said, but “we couldn’t ignore the human trafficking that was happening, and we needed to get them into services.”

But public defense attorneys who represented men charged with sexual exploitation for patronizing a street-based sex worker say their clients were almost invariably men of color, many of them non-English-speaking immigrants, which is suggested by the data PubliCola obtained.

Overall, of about 1,270 men charged with patronizing a prostitute between 2004 and 2020, nearly a quarter—304—appeared to be Latino, and 213 were Black. Only about a third of the men charged—418—were white. The final three racial categories were Asian/Pacific Islander, “Unknown,” and American Indian/Alaska Native.

(Because the city’s data subsume all Latinos into the “white” category, making Latinx sex workers and buyers invisible, we attempted to disaggregate the data by labeling people with unambiguously Hispanic surnames as “Latino/Hispanic”—an inexact method of surfacing a racial identity that would otherwise be hidden in a misleading “white” category.)

King County Department of Public Defense deputy director Gordon Hill, who represented felony and misdemeanor clients during 16 years as a public defender, said Moore’s proposal targets lower-income men, including men who don’t speak English and are more susceptible to signing police reports that say they offered to pay for sex, which makes them harder to defend.

“What Cathy Moore is saying to the city of Seattle is: If you’re wealthy enough to arrange for a sex worker to drive to your house, knock on your door and come inside, then you go on about your business. But if you are poor, if you’re a person of color, and you engage in street level crime, we are coming after you,” Hill said.

“I think what this law does is going to be incredibly disproportionate. It’s going to be people with immigration challenges, it’s going to be poor people, it’s going to be people of color. So the degree to which it works at all is only going to [exacerbate] the inequities in our criminal legal system.”

In contrast, James Egan, an attorney who has represented both women accused of prostitution and men accused of patronizing a prostitute, said his private clients have all been white—and even they have been subject to fines Egan says some of them could ill afford. “The total fines for getting busted are in the neighborhood of $4,000—the city does not deal,” he said.

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Holmes said the city’s goal in pursuing sex buyers was “not trying to go after the poor guys of color who are out trying to find some love. They’re not a big public safety issues. It was the middle-aged white guys that were using their work computers to arrange online dates [with] people that had likely been trafficked.”

Based on court data, it’s unlikely that SOAP orders will serve as much of a deterrent for men subjected to them. Men, unlike women, essentially never get accused of violating SOAP orders; of the 1,270 SOAP orders issued against sex buyers between 2004 and 2020, only one man was charged with a violation. In contrast, 145 of the 1,110 SOAP orders against sex workers resulted in a violation, which usually resulted in jail time.

Hill said the reason SOAP orders have impacted sex workers, not sex buyers, could be simple profiling—the repealed prostitution loitering law allows tremendous leeway for an officer to decide someone “looks like” a sex worker or is acting like one. Additionally, cops get to know the women who work on Aurora by sight, making them more vulnerable to arrest. In contrast, “they’re less likely to know the johns,” who are typically in cars and don’t have frequent contacts with police.

“It’s a law that historically has failed to have really any impact whatsoever,” Hill said. “I think Aurora will look the same in a year, until it gentrifies like the rest of Seattle, and then some other place that’s a little further away will look like Aurora. I don’t think these orders will have anything to do with it.”

A review of news stories about prostitution on Aurora over the past 50 years shows the same repetitive cycle that is playing out now in the new council’s vow to finally “do something” about the issue.Ever since the area became a locus for sex work in the early 1970s, it seems, the city has never stopped trying, and failing, to eliminate it.

Over at least the last four decades, the city has periodically taken a supporsedly more enlightened approach, as Moore says she wants to do now, by focusing on sex buyers— or “target[ing] hookers’ customers,” as this 1987 Seattle Times piece put it. At other times, they have proposed shutting off parts of the neighborhood with physical barricades, a strategy Moore also supports; in 1990, for instance, the city attempted to address what police called a “cesspool of illegal activity” by blocking off “a neighborhood near Aurora Avenue North that’s riddled with prostitutes and drug dealers,” as the Seattle Time put it at the time.

None of those efforts, nor any in the three decades since, appears to have reduced visible sex work on Aurora for more than short periods.

Katherine Beckett, the co-author of “Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America,” which came out in 2010, told PubliCola earlier this month that business owners she talked to generally favored tougher enforcement. But, she added, “I think if one had pressed them to say, ‘Really? Are you seeing significant improvements?,’ I’m not sure it would have gotten an affirmative response, because they continued to complain about how bad things were even though the prostitution loitering law and SOAP orders were being used.”

Former city attorney Holmes lost his seat in the 2021 race that sent abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy and Republican Ann Davison to the general election, which Davison won, beginning a wave of backlash against the supposed anti-police excesses of 2020. Now, he said, “you’ve got a lot of people who rode that wave into office and…. the fact that they’re going back to the same old shit that failed in the past is pretty sad. It reminds me of Winston Churchill, who said*, ‘Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting every possibility.’ Well, here we go again.”

*Apocryphally.

City Council, Courts, Mayor Harrell

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

 By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are also more immediate, practical concerns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

City Council, Courts, Drugs, Health, Police

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

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

By Andrew Engelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courts, Elections, Morning Fizz, Police, public safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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