The Stranger has obtained more details about the cases that Republican Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison said prompted her to instigate a policy in February to disqualify Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) Judge Pooja Vaddadi from presiding over any criminal cases. The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington (ACLU) filed a lawsuit challenging this policy at the end of October.
As the City readies itself to go to court over its policy, and as the City Attorney’s Office (CAO) continues to prevent Vaddadi from performing her elected duties, it appears as though the CAO’s office distorted some of the details about the cases that caused this chaos. This undercuts the office’s claim that it took this drastic step because it couldn’t receive “fair hearings or trials” from Vaddadi, which is what former Criminal Division Chief Natalie Walton-Anderson said in a February memo explaining the CAO’s new policy.
Since the CAO instigated the policy, prosecutors from the CAO began regularly filing affidavits of prejudice (AOP) against Vaddadi to remove her from all criminal cases. AOPs are basically forms that allow prosecutors and defense attorneys to disqualify a judge from a case, and they can only be used once per case by either side. As a result of the policy, the SMC presiding judge reassigned Vaddadi to oversee traffic court. Davison’s sidelining of Vaddadi led to the ACLU’s lawsuit, which it brought on behalf of three individual voters and the Washington Community Alliance, who argued that Davison’s policy had usurped the will of the voters and undermined the democratic process. The ACLU asked the King County Superior Court to bar the CAO from blanket disqualifying any judge, and a hearing in the case is scheduled for the end of January.
In Walton-Anderson’s memo, which she sent to CAO prosecutors, the SMC presiding judge, the City Council, and the Mayor’s Office, she described three specific examples of times Vaddadi issued unfair or incorrect rulings. For nine months, Davison’s office refused to provide the case numbers to back up their claims. However, in a series of public information requests provided to The Stranger, records identified the case numbers described by Walton-Anderson, who now works as director of public safety for the Mayor’s Office.
The facts of the matter
The case facts appear to deviate from the claims made by the CAO in their memo. Some of the mistakes appear more minor, such as mistaking time frames, but all the inaccuracies ultimately served to cast Vaddadi as more incompetent than the cases actually showed. For instance, the CAO mischaracterized Vaddadi's reasoning for her ruling in an alleged assault case to make it appear she failed to understand the law, rather than simply ruled differently than the CAO wanted. Worse, the circumstances of one case appear to simply be wrong, with almost none of the facts matching the description of what happened, including Walton-Anderson claiming Vaddadi made a ruling she never did.
That glaring inaccuracy comes from Walton-Anderson’s accusation that Vaddadi failed to show “appropriate deference to court orders.” In the memo, Walton-Anderson cited an example in which Vaddadi had allegedly found a person in “substantial compliance with treatment” despite the person never actually making it to “his residential treatment requirement.”
First of all, the case number associated with this example involves a woman, not a man. Second off, Vaddadi never dismissed that case or made a finding of substantial compliance. The case wasn’t settled until August, months after the CAO’s office published its memo. The memo also omits critical context: the woman couldn’t comply with her treatment requirement because her wheelchair and upcoming surgeries prevented her from boarding the van to treatment. Another judge later ruled that this explanation was valid, and the City did not object to dismissing the case.
In another example, Walton-Anderson criticized Vaddadi for allegedly failing to consider public safety, citing her decision to release someone after a DUI arrest. While the facts of the case aligned a little more closely with Walton-Anderson’s description, there are still inaccuracies.
Walton-Anderson claimed police had arrested the person twice in a week for DUI, but it was actually two arrests in two weeks. Additionally, Walton-Anderson ignored the fact that the CAO failed to charge the man in the second DUI arrest due to a lack of blood evidence. Vaddadi released the man, but required him to sign a declaration promising not to drive while on release. The man has not reoffended in the case, according to court records. So, if Walton-Anderson wants to make the argument that something Vaddadi did endangered public safety, it would be stronger if the individual had committed another DUI, but he didn’t.
The last example is arguably the murkiest regarding whether Vaddadi ruled correctly, though Walton-Anderson still gave a misleading narrative about that case. Walton-Anderson claimed that Vaddadi frequently “failed to find probable cause where clearly probable cause exists.” Walton-Anderson then used the example of a time Vaddadi did not find probable cause for assault “when the suspect threatened a victim with a realistic (though ultimately fake) handgun, based on her belief there was no touching or contact between the parties.”
Walton-Anderson misrepresented why Vaddadi failed to find probable cause in that case. According to the police report, the case involved two men standing outside an elevator, when the alleged victim asked the other man to move because he was blocking the entrance. The man became agitated and stepped toward the alleged victim and told him to “mind his own business,” according to the police report. Then the man reached for something in his waistband that the alleged victim believed to be a gun. The alleged victim said he saw the object for a split second before getting on the elevator. Based on the police report, it's unclear if the man ever pointed the weapon at the alleged victim, though the victim described fearing that the man would shoot him.
Walton-Anderson’s claim revolved around the idea that Vaddadi had failed to find probable cause based solely on the fact that the man hadn’t touched the alleged victim, which is not the case. In an audio recording of the hearing in that case, Vaddadi told prosecutors that if the man “pulled the object out of his waistband fully and motioned toward the defendant,” then maybe Vaddadi might have found probable cause for assault. But she said his actions seemed closer to a charge of harassment, which is what investigating officers had originally arrested the man for. The case record shows that SMC Judge Catherine McDowall maintained Vaddadi’s finding of no probable cause at a hearing on September 21, 2023. Ultimately, the City dismissed the case entirely after the court determined the man was incompetent to stand trial.
In none of these cases did the CAO seek a remedy by appealing Vaddadi’s decisions to King County Superior Court. In fact, the SMC court has no record of King County Superior Court reversing any of Vaddadi’s decisions.
The Stranger reached out to the CAO’s office about these case numbers, and they declined to comment or confirm whether these were the cases Walton-Anderson referenced in her memo. However, public records show that when asked to provide the case numbers for the DUI case, the handgun case, and the failure to attend treatment case referenced in the memo, the CAO’s public information officer provided these case numbers. When they originally published the memo, the CAO said they’d be able to provide case numbers to back up their claims, but never delivered on that promise. Now, they regularly refuse to comment about the policy of disqualifying Vaddadi. Walton-Anderson also declined to comment through a Mayor’s Office spokesperson
Vaddadi assumed her office in January 2023 after winning her race with 61 percent of the vote. In contrast, Davison won her race with 51 percent of the vote. The CAO’s decision to effectively usurp the will of the voters started after Vaddadi ruled that an assistant city attorney could not prosecute a case in which she’d made herself a witness. The CAO filed an appeal on Vaddadi’s decision in that case, which ultimately failed in King County Superior Court.
Vaddadi declined to comment on the contents of the cases as well, though she wrote a whole op-ed about the situation back in August. The SMC presiding judge also declined to comment.
