During Erika Evans’ first week on the job as the Seattle City Attorney, she told The Stranger that her predecessor, Ann Davison, left behind a backlog of around 1,300 cases. But upon closer examination, that number was wrong, Evans told The Stranger. The backlog is actually 5,100 cases.
That’s surprising, mostly because Davison, who took office in 2022, inherited her own 5,000 case backlog after the slow, stuttering pandemic-era. When she wasn’t prosecuting drug crimes, Davison spent her time clearing those cases. Mostly by dumping them. According to PubliCola, declining to file charges on 3,790 cases. It was a polarizing decision that cost people their day in court and a chance at justice. But it should’ve cleared the backlog. Apparently not?
Evans primarily blamed Damien, the office’s 27-year-old computer software from 1999. “It reminded me of the Oregon Trail video game,” Evans says. Green text, black screen, and no graphics. Got it. Last year, the office switched systems to JusticeNexus, a shiny new software.
“It was not a smooth transition,” Evans says. “A lot of attorneys felt it was really rushed.”
Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert called the data transfer “a feat.” And the systems still aren’t fully migrated. Their computer system has to communicate with the Seattle Police Department’s system and the court system, which both use different languages. “It has not been seamless,” Robert says. “Our infractions unit is not integrated yet.” They’re logging infractions on a spreadsheet.
To a lesser extent, Davison’s office was also at fault. Shortly after Evans took office, her team discovered Davison’s office did not file Criminal Division quarterly reports in the third and fourth quarters of last year, which contain data from case filings and police referrals to the case backlog. Though there’s no penalty for it, the failure was a violation of city code, Evans says. Plus, Davison’s office apparently didn’t label about 1,000 of those with a category of crime, putting them in case limbo. Discovering all this actually led them to the primary culprit, Dusty Damien, and to understanding the scope of this mess: 5,100 languishing cases, 3,800 more than Evans thought.
Of those, 1,700 are domestic violence (DV) cases. Others concern elder abuse, child abuse, stalking, assault with sexual motivation, and the most serious cases under the city attorney’s jurisdiction: DUIs and those cases of domestic violence. Both have a two year statute of limitations. Most are from 2024 and 2025, so time is ticking to address them.
Time has run out on the oldest case, where someone who was required to blow into an interlock breathalyzer device before they drove, didn’t. A few animal control cases from 2023 cannot be tried either. “That is not doing justice on public safety,” Evans says.
“The ones that we’re having the most difficulty with are the DUI cases,” Criminal Division Chief Robert says.
Current state law dictates that toxicology testing for DUIs must be done at the Washington State Patrol toxicology lab. But it has a 15,000 case backlog of its own. According to Alan Pyke, communications director for the city attorney’s office, Davison’s office didn’t consider DUI cases waiting for toxicology lab results as part of the backlog. Evans’ office does. Last month, she testified in Olympia in support of a bill that would allow private labs to take on some of those tests. It passed the Senate and the House and just needs Gov. Bob Ferguson’s signature
The city attorney’s office sees between 10,000 and 11,000 cases annually. “Knowing we have to not only focus on the stuff coming at us right now, but also tackle this ginormous, 5,100 case backlog is pretty devastating,” Evans says.
Her plan is to prioritize the most serious crimes in the backlog first, but not ahead of new cases.
“From a public safety standpoint,” Robert adds, “the cases that are of most concern are the cases that are happening right now.”
Robert says they’re pushing low level “nuisance crimes” like theft, criminal trespass, and drug possession to diversion programs rather than jury trials, which should grease the chute clogged by Davison’s prosecute-first-ask-questions-later method.
More significantly, Evans will be reorganizing the Criminal Division. She’s switching it to a “vertical prosecution method,” similar to how the Department of Justice is organized (that’s where Evans worked before it became Trump’s Department of Injustice). Currently, the Criminal Division is organized horizontally, meaning multiple teams end up handling one case.
The vertical method gives one prosecutor ownership of a case throughout its duration. Evans believes it will be more efficient and improve accountability. Under Davison, the city attorney’s office had a 60 percent dismissal rate—meaning more than half of filed cases were terminated by a judge or voluntarily dropped before reaching a verdict—something Evans considers “unacceptable.” “It’s not fair to the suspects when you’re charging just to beef up numbers and then it’s ultimately a crap case that you were going to dump at some point,” Evans says.
The vertical method should help. She’ll roll it out across the division slowly, but will start with the domestic violence unit.
Back in 2022, Davison presented a similar plan for a similar 5,000 case problem—at least on the surface. She told KOMO News she would prioritize the backlog based on severity and was first and foremost on improving public safety. She also said she was going to “improve the processes” of the Criminal Division, except she only did that by implementing a “Close-in-Time filing” policy to speed up case filings. And, ultimately, she threw a bunch of cases away. Evans says she won’t be doing that.
“We’re going to do our best to go through them,” Evans says. “We’re not going to dump them.”
