Judges, clerks, and attorneys in Seattle Municipal Court had a hell of a day yesterday after Republican City Attorney Ann Davison’s office removed first-term Judge Pooja Vaddadi from handling more than 150 criminal cases, causing an unexpected and challenging level of new work for the court.
On Tuesday, departing Seattle City Attorney’s Office Criminal Division Chief Natalie Walton-Anderson sent out a memo to prosecutors saying they planned to submit “affidavits of prejudice” against Vaddadi on all criminal cases moving forward. The memo made broad, overarching accusations against Vaddadi, claiming city prosecutors don’t receive “fair hearings and trials” before the judge. While Walton-Anderson’s memo accuses Vaddadi of numerous errors of law, Walton-Anderson does not list specific case numbers, making it difficult to determine the validity of the CAO’s concerns.
The CAO decided on this new policy seemingly out of the blue and without any attempt to resolve issues in a less disruptive manner. Seattle Municipal Court (SMC) Spokesperson Gary Ireland said if the CAO’s office had concerns about Vaddadi prior to taking this step, the CAO had not brought those concerns to SMC Presiding Judge Faye R. Chess or to the SMC court administrator until the office told Chess and Vaddadi about their plans to disqualify the judge. The SMC also has no record of King County Superior Court reversing any of Vaddadi’s decisions or rulings based on an appeal from the prosecutor’s office.
Washington court rules allow both prosecutors and defense attorneys to disqualify up to one judge from a case by signing an affidavit of prejudice. Both sides routinely bounce judges they perceive as unfavorable to their side, but they do so usually on a case-by-case basis. Blocking Vaddadi from handling all new criminal cases effectively allows her only to judge cases she’s already handling or those the CAO has already disqualified other judges from handling. In effect, this decision means that Davison’s office has unilaterally usurped the will of the voters who elected Vaddadi to the bench to rule in these cases.
The timing of the CAO’s decision also seems ill-planned, given that SMC began overhauling its digital filing system starting this week. The changeover means the court is already operating at a reduced capacity, and now the CAO has decided to take one of the court’s judges fully out of rotation, creating an unanticipated increase in workload, Ireland said.
Former King County Superior Court judge and SMC judge Theresa Doyle said Friday the move creates an administrative nightmare even under normal circumstances for such a high-volume court. Doyle called it “the nuclear option,” adding that she couldn’t imagine the decision would “endear Ms. Davison to the judges at all.”
The frustration in SMC became apparent Thursday when attorneys, court staff, and defendants waited about an hour for a judge to replace Vaddadi and cover a full pretrial court calendar. When SMC Magistrate Seth Niesen finally arrived to take over for Vaddadi, he made it clear the court had not caused the delay and told the courtroom that the City’s strategy stretched the court’s already limited resources.
“I’m not saying anything about the decision to do whatever you all are doing, I’m just saying that when that happens, it’s really stressful for us,” Niesen said.
In the memo directing the new policy, Walton-Anderson claims Vaddadi failed to find probable cause for assault in a case where someone allegedly waived a fake handgun at a victim, released someone from jail after the police had arrested the person twice on DUI charges in a week, failed to grant no-contact orders in domestic violence cases “in many instances” (but the memo gave no examples of this), and had dismissed a case against someone who had not followed up with a treatment order from the court. The Stranger has requested case numbers from the CAO to verify the circumstances of these cases. The CAO said they’d try to respond to our questions sometime Friday.
The memo also said that Vaddadi “routinely raises arguments on behalf of defendants without prompting or argument from their own attorneys.” On this point, Doyle pointed out that nothing about that seems unusual in SMC. The prosecutors and public defenders practicing in SMC often have some of the least experience in the court system, and judges routinely step in if they feel an attorney has failed to follow the law. Doyle called this particularly important when dealing with inexperienced attorneys.
Vaddadi declined to comment on the memo or the CAO’s targeting of her.
Last year, prosecutors in Whatcom County made a similar move against a newly elected District Court Judge, Jonathan Rands, who’d previously worked as a DUI defense attorney. However, prosecutors only challenged Rands on his handling of DUI cases, a much more narrow targeting, which a Superior Court judge allowed. Even then, the District and Municipal Court Judges Association called the move an “attack on judicial independence and the will of the voters.”
In 2019, the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD) began a campaign to disqualify Judge Ed McKenna from hundreds of cases. However, DPD was not alone in questioning McKenna’s judgement at the time, as then-City Attorney Pete Holmes had also accused McKenna of misconduct. DPD has not joined the CAO in its campaign against Vaddadi. Incidentally, McKenna endorsed Davison in her 2021 campaign for City Attorney.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify the timing of when the CAO spoke with SMC and SMC judges about their concerns regarding Vaddadi.
Between this and the city’s push for their own personal CCTV spying cameras, when did Seattle turn into a fascist state?
You have to love the phrasing about not providing specific case numbers, as if they just completely made it up and took the serious step for no reason. Wouldn’t hold my breath for Davison getting an apology either when it becomes obvious Judge Vaddadi hasn’t been doing her job.
Ashley, Seriously, “who’d”? It is a fine contraction in everyday speech, but just plain lazy when writing a serious article. Would it have really slowed you down to write “who had”? I think not.
TeamAnn
@1 Indeed, one shudders to think of the brutal practices of fascist regimes going to such terrible excesses as…uh…cameras in public. Hitlerian, to be sure.
@2 if they have examples why not share them? Maybe because if the public was able to look at the circumstances they’d agree with the judge? It’s also concerning that according to the SMC spokesperson CAO made no attempt to address these alleged issues by normal means before enacting this “nuclear option.”
Although completely unmentioned in this headline post, the Stranger supported Pooja Vaddadi for election to this office, and in very glowing terms, too: https://www.thestranger.com/elections-2022/2022/09/01/78417029/pooja-vaddadi-wants-to-heal-seattles-traumatic-court-system
This supportive post spent a lot of words on questioning the qualifications of her opponent:
“But Eisenberg also has his fair share of critics in the legal community, earning the lowest rating of all Seattle Municipal Court judges for impartiality and professionalism in a recent survey of King County Bar Association lawyers.”
It also noted she intended to take a confrontational approach to the City Attorney’s Office:
“Vaddadi also sees an opportunity to reduce the trauma the criminal legal system inflicts on people by administering her court with more independence from city prosecutors than she’s seen her opponent demonstrate.”
[…]
‘…she says this kind of pre-trial detention only contributes to the “pattern of abuse” she’s seen play out in Seattle Municipal Court on a daily basis.’
[…]
“To Vaddadi, focusing on keeping people locked up reveals too narrow of an understanding of what public safety really means.”
It seems the City Attorney’s Office has decided to push back. In some cases, such as with the “high utilizers” the City Attorney’s Office has removed from the diversionary program, “keeping people locked up” is the most effective method of assuring public safety.
@6 Is it not much more likely that, rather than there being some really sympathetic factors to these poor domestic abuser’s cases, the initial decision to not get into the weeds on the cases allows the DA to keep the focus to remain on addressing the broader problem at hand: ensuring that domestic violence cases receive adequate attention and justice within the court system, which this judge was failing to provide?
@8 I think it much more likely that this judge was devoting a little more “adequate attention” to the particulars of each case than CAO would prefer. It may shock you to your core to learn that not everyone accused is in fact guilty, and part of the intended function of the criminal legal system is to suss out who is and who isn’t.
@9 It’s awesome that she’s applying such high evidentiary standards to no-contact orders in domestic violence cases.
It seems that the Stranger always mentions the party when it is not a Democrat.
As if being a Republican was a crime. Look what decades of Democratic Rule has done to Seattle, King County and Washington State.
The Stranger thinks that by taking the judge away from criminal cases will put additional strain on the system. However a great deal of cases are civil and non-criminal so it really won’t really put any additional strain on the system.
Remember it was the Democrat Legislature that passed the Do Not Pursue laws and gutted the Three Strikes Law. It was Democrats like Dow Constantine (who persuaded voters to build a $250 million justice center and then when it was built immediately wanted to scrap it,) seeking keep criminals out of jail, who allowed armed robbers to cut off their ankle bracelets and go on an another armed robbery spree that ended with the murder of a pot shop employee.
Some people who write these comments would like to see even more people locked up. We have more people locked up in this country than the majority of countries in the world.
They like the status quo. Alternatives that are preventative and helpful and even safer are ignored. Not very intelligent. Very elitist and racist since the majority of people are having it very difficult to survive. Many people are living from paycheck to paycheck and half a million people in this country are homeless which began not so long ago.
Corporate criminals that poison our food and our environment and cause wars right now are left off the hook. Isn’t that convenient? So the elite can pretend it is not happening
and focus on the poor and working class and our desperation.
Too many dead people.
“making it difficult to determine the validity of the CAO’s concerns“
Let’s be real here: Stranger, you don’t care about “determining the validity of the concerns” one bit because there’s a greater chance of Tensorna growing wings and flying to Olympus than you finding legitimacy to the CAO’a concerns.
Also if this were Judge Eisenberg, you’d have zero issue with Public Defense doing this. The fact you object so strenuously tells me it’s VERY likely CA Davison’s office is right.
Ivy R. Nightscales: We have more people locked up than most nations. We have more criminals than most nations!!
There are many nations that have very little crime. That is not the USA (,especially in blue cities). Besides, didn’t your mom tell you that just because everyone else does it, doesn’t mean that you get to do it.
All armed criminals that are arrested need to be jailed with high bail.
@14 Yes, I would like to see more violent criminals incarcerated. The vast majority of people imprisoned in the US are there for violent crime. Combine this with how many homicides go unsolved, and it’s clear the country has an under-incarceration problem, likely contributing to the violent crime that leads us to have higher incarceration rates than many other countries.
@14 & 15 does the fact that this country has a historically high incarceration rate, and also a relatively high violent crime rate, not give you any pause that perhaps incarceration is not a real solution to the problem of violent crime? Does it at all seem to you like maybe doubling down on failed policies of the past might not be the way to go?
Judge Doyle is retired and irrelevant. She is best at spin class not weighing in here. If judges don’t care about victims then they shouldn’t be on the bench.
@16 Uh, no. Crime rose starting in the 1940s and topping out in the early 1990s. We began incarcerating a lot more people near the end of that crescendo, and crime soon after started falling and has been falling for the last 20 years, still relatively high but dropping as the incarceration rate rises. I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this, but the reason this happens is violent criminals who are in jail are not elsewhere committing violent crime.
Judge Doyle is irrelevant weigh in here. She is better spending her time in her spin class.
If a judge isn’t interested in protecting victims then they shouldn’t be on the bench.
@18 you don’t know what you’re talking about
https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/for-the-record-prison-paradox_02.pdf
“Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates”
Also:
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence
“Prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Persons who are incarcerated learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.”
Interesting how the Stranger loves to refer to Davidson as a Republican even though her position is non partisan. Biased journalism or what.
@20 & 21 A normal person does not read about how violent criminals come out of prison just as likely to reoffend and then conclude “I guess we better let them all out”. The conclusion that escapes you is that when deterrence doesn’t work, prison is primarily about incapacitation.
@23 speaking of conclusions escaping people, you apparently missed where in 20 I quoted the linked report as saying:
“Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates”
A “normal person” confronted with information contradicting their prior opinion will change that opinion. Higher incarceration rates do not result in lower violent crime rates (in fact at a certain point higher incarceration actually increases the crime rate) and severity of sentence has little to no deterrent effect. Your proposed solution to crime has no evidentiary support. But by all means don’t let that stop you from repeating your ignorant opinion as if it’s fact, that’s primarily what the internet is for these days.
@25 I don’t know how to explain this to you any simpler: people who are in jail are not elsewhere, committing violent crimes. Areas with high violent crime rates have high incarceration rates because they are incarcerating more of the violent criminals, though evidently not enough. Upon finding that you can’t “deter” violent crime, the correct response is to incapacitate them! This isn’t hard! It’s sort of the lesson of places like El Salvador: you can ignore progressives, put violent criminals in jail, and go from one of the most murderous places in the world to one of the least.
@12 Ivy R. Nightscales for the WIN!!
@13: “Also if this were Judge Eisenberg, you’d have zero issue with Public Defense doing this.”
Indeed, this headline post mentions Judge Ed McKenna, who in 2019 was subject to a similar action by the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD). The Stranger did not object in the slightest, even approvingly (!) describing the action as a “coup”:
‘There is a coup going on in Seattle’s Municipal Courts: Public defenders are filing affidavits of prejudice against Judge Ed McKenna at a rate 10 times higher than his colleagues in an attempt not only to get a different judge but to highlight how public defenders have lost confidence in Judge McKenna. According to Crosscut, McKenna was previously asked by City Attorney Pete Holmes and Anita Khandelwal, the director of the Department of Public Defense, to step down on accusations of prejudice, but McKenna refused. Now McKenna is being removed from the equation by a united front of public defenders that simply switch judges if he’s assigned to their case. One official called it essentially “a vote of no confidence” in McKenna’s ability to serve.’
(https://www.thestranger.com/news/2019/05/17/40232579/slog-am-taiwan-legalizes-same-sex-marriage-seattle-judge-ostracized-by-public-defenders-liz-warren-wants-to-protect-abortion)
When then-City Attorney Holmes asked for a judge to resign, and then the King County public defenders took action to effectively remove the judge without an election or impeachment vote, the Stranger was all for it. When City Attorney Davison does the same thing, the Stranger yells it’s an affront to democracy, etc.
@29 when both sides of the adversarial system agreed a judge was acting improperly The Stranger didn’t object, but now that one side acting unilaterally is trying to drive a judge out on questionable pretenses they are? My god, how do these writers sleep at night.
@30: Back then, “…both sides of the adversarial system agreed” that police referrals should not be prosecuted, plea-bargained, or otherwise processed in any way which might reduce overall criminal predations upon law-abiding citizens.
Holmes’ chronic and utter failure to behave as if he was actually a vital part of an ‘adversarial system’ provided material sufficient for not one but two extensive reports on the “System Failure” his inaction had caused. It also explains how a multi-term incumbent then lost a primary election (!), and was subsequently replaced by the current City Attorney.
So again: in each case, the attorneys in question agreed completely with the City Attorney on their course of action. Why was this alright in one instance, but not the other?
@11 – Muni Courts (like County District Courts) have essentially no civil trials. It’s all misdemeanors and traffic tickets.