At the height of the nationwide Catholic priest sex-abuse scandal in
April 2002, Seattle attorney Timothy Kosnoff—who has successfully
won over $50 million in settlements against priests on behalf of
child-abuse victims—sent a letter to the King County Prosecutor’s
Office.
Kosnoff, forbidden by a court order to talk publicly about what he
found through legal discovery in the local Seattle Archdiocese’s sealed
files, asked the prosecutor’s office to use its unique subpoena power
to force the horror stories of 49 cases into the public eye and bring
criminal charges against the priests.
The King County prosecutor’s chief of staff at the time, Dan
Satterberg, responded to Kosnoff, saying the prosecutor’s office was
invited “to assist the Seattle Archdiocese with formulating a policy
that is in compliance with state law regarding mandatory reporting of
child sexual abuse,” and there was no reason to subpoena the files.
Kosnoff is still incensed today—both about the appearance of a
conflict of interest when a law enforcement agency works closely with a
potential law breaker and about Satterberg’s refusal to look at the
files.
“In other cities, the Catholic Church was unmasked. They were forced
to disclose. In Seattle, we sat on this trove of information. The
prosecutor’s office is the only entity that’s capable of bringing this
to light. When the prosecutor’s office failed to do that, justice was
left undone,” Kosnoff says.
The reason Kosnoff is so exercised about Satterberg these days is
because Satterberg is currently running for the top job in the
prosecutor’s office—King County prosecutor.
Satterberg, a Republican, is running as heir apparent to his former
boss, Republican Norm Maleng (who died unexpectedly last May), against
Democrat Bill Sherman.
While dogged prosecutors’ offices across the country were forcing
the church to turn over files about complaints against
priests—including Los Angeles, where the district attorney’s
office famously took the Los Angeles Archdiocese all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court to get personnel files, winning last April, and is
now expanding its investigation and adding charges—King County
demurred.
“We have no evidence that local church officials have violated the
mandatory reporting law,” Satterberg responded in an April 12, 2002,
letter to Kosnoff. “If you have actual knowledge of a criminal act of
failing to report child abuse, please contact the police. We have no
legal basis to seek search warrants to seize records from the
archdiocese.”
“No shit, Dan,” Kosnoff says bitterly today. “You haven’t found any
evidence because you haven’t issued a subpoena.” Kosnoff complains that
“clerics were able to skate through with settlements paid for by
parishioners without ever being required to account for sodomizing
children. King County should have been doing its job, and I hold Dan
Satterberg responsible.”
Kosnoff, who’s still deeply immersed in cases against priests, holds
Satterberg in unique disregard for the county’s reluctance to go after
abusive priests because Satterberg served on the special panel at the
Seattle Archdiocese charged with making sure the church was dealing
with accusations of sexual abuse. State law requires the church to
contact law enforcement about any reports of abuse.
Kosnoff describes Satterberg’s position with the church—a
public law enforcement official working with the archdiocese on its
sexual-abuse protocol—as a massive conflict of interest. “Not
only were they not doing anything about it, he was serving in a
capacity to give the archdiocese cover.” It’s like tax cheats having
the IRS advising them, Kosnoff reasons.
Satterberg, who was raised Presbyterian, says serving on the panel
would only be a conflict of interest if the church weren’t sincere
about preventing abuse. “It might be [a conflict],” he says, “if their
motivation was to hide abuse, but they see it now as something they
have to exorcise.” Satterberg points to a recent Mercer Island case
where St. Monica’s Catholic Church suspended a priest for alleged
inappropriate contact with a minor last August. And Satterberg, who was
the “legal resource” for the special board, was among other public
officials: such as director of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault
and Traumatic Stress and the executive director of the King County
Sexual Assault Resource Center.
Satterberg is no longer on the panel, but one of his colleagues at
the prosecutor’s office, Lisa Johnson, is.
As for not bringing a subpoena from the county to get personnel
files, Satterberg says, “[The King County Prosecutor’s Office] deals in
the world of evidence. We need evidence before we just bust into an
office and start seizing documents. I need a specific person to come
forward and say they were a victim and then I might have a case, and I
could get files.”
In Seattle, an archdiocese final report in 2004 acknowledged that
since 1950, 153 people accused 49 priests of abusing them as children.
The Seattle Archdiocese has had to pay about $11.8 million in court
settlements and $13.5 million overall, including things like nearly
$500,000 for victim counseling and $900,000 in lawyers’ fees.
“There has been no law enforcement investigation into the largest
case of an institutional child-abuse cover-up in our state,” Kosnoff
says. “It’s a matter of public interest and the prosecutor’s office
should have done its job.” 
So this story tells me that Satterberg is not doing his job right and that he is letting murders and abusers free because he does not want to do his job. So he should be recalled if they can impeach him he know good for up holding the laws in this county!!