Life’s not easy being a prosecutor these days.
Cases are more complex and time-consuming. Case loads are growing.
The complexities come from the advent of dashcam and police body cam footage that prosecutors review as case evidence.
Case loads grew, at least at the city level, from the 2023 re-criminalization of drugs as a gross misdemeanor instead of a felony.
Meanwhile, at the county level, the prosecutor’s office of about 200 people is shrinking next year. Up to 9 positions funded through federal coronavirus dollars are going away next year plus two others only funded until 2025. Those particular two might be saved depending if the County Council funds them through budget amendments set to be decided Nov. 25, County Prosecutor Jason Cummings said.
Caseloads at the county haven’t kept up with the growing population, and cases are getting denser to parse through.
The county office prioritizes crimes done against persons above property crimes, Cummings said.
However, the office is still overwhelmed.
“We have an all-time high number of open homicide files,” Cummings said, with more than 90 such cases, both charged and uncharged, but yet to be fully closed. Juvenile court referrals have tripled in the past two years, he said.
The county’s rejected public safety sales tax measure would have given funding to add about 20 positions to the County Prosecutor’s Office.
New cases filed within Everett hovered around 3,000 from 2013 to 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. Everett’s trajectory this year was over 4,500 filed cases as of late September, said Hil Kaman, one of the lead prosecutors at the City of Everett.
The recategorization of drugs and drug possession as a gross misdemeanor is driving an estimated 90% of this caseload increase in Everett. The caseloads are breaking out to about 3,100 cases of non-drug types, plus about 900 to 1,000 drug cases this year, Kaman said.
Everett prosecutors handle domestic assaults, DUIs, drug DUIs, cyberstalking cases in addition to a majority of thefts, trespass cases and drug possession.
Everett’s six full-time prosecutors are balancing about 750 cases per person, and they’ve become more complex, Kaman said. The department is 13 people.
Everett added one full-time prosecutorial employee this year.
“It was necessary to address the increased caseloads,” Kaman said.
They have also been absorbing more crimes handed off from the county prosecutor’s office.
Known as “felony declines,” Cummings said the staffing limits are why lower-level felony property crimes are being declined to cities to prosecute as misdemeanors.
Such “felony declines” are not a brand-new phenomenon, Kaman said.
However, it’s caused city offices to rebalance to compensate for these.
Not all cities have in-house prosecutors. Monroe contracts its legal firm to do prosecutorial work. The cities of Snohomish, Stanwood and four smaller towns in the county contract with the county prosecutor’s office for this need, Cummings confirmed.
About 13% of Everett’s drug cases are getting diverted prior to arraignment, Kaman said. City prosecutors still give legal support for these.
Everett Police Chief John DeRousse said a few months ago that Everett had made 124 referrals to the LEAD Diversion program, which is done before arraignment in court. DeRousse said Everett is tallying the largest quantity of these diversions among city law enforcement agencies and was praised.
A goal with a viable gross misdemeanor is rehabilitation, Kaman said.
They could dismiss with a diversion to anger management classes or other avenues. However, diversions still require prosecutor’s office time through check-ins and monitoring. The time savings is not hashing out the case in court.
What makes body cameras more complex?
Cummings gave this example: “if four officers responded to the incident and were on site investigating the crime for 45 minutes, the deputy prosecuting attorney will now have an additional three hours of video that must be reviewed. So what once took one hour to review now takes four hours.” About 15 years ago, a comparable case used to consist of “10-30 pages of police reports and statements, perhaps with several photographs,” he said.
Kaman said balancing staff resources has caused Everett prosecutors to have to decide not to prosecute on cases where there is no prior criminal history, cases that do not involve restitution, ‘de minimis’ theft cases of under $100 if there is no prior history and no restitution, and officer-initiated trespass cases specifically when the victim is not seeking prosecution.
Some first-time Everett offenders go unprosecuted because of the limited resources, Kaman said.
Additionally, Cummings described how reforms in case law from the state Supreme Court have crimped things on two ends: One, resentencing allows cases to be reopened. Revised petition rules allow defendants charged in court to file appeals via public defender “without corresponding resources to prosecutors who must respond to the increase in appeals,” Cummings said by email.
The Blake decision to re-evaluate drug possession has created a wave of resentencing. The Monschke decision, where the U.S. Supreme Court determined sentences should consider age as a factor, is another. In Monschke, people sentenced for crimes as young adults can have their case re-tried in a new light.
The county prosecutor’s office has processed over 6,200 vacations/resentencings under Blake over the past two years, Cummings said.
The case load limits to public defenders currently being discussed at the state Supreme Court worries the prosecutor field. It could triple the cost of public defense on municipal budgets. What would be squeezed to compensate when there hasn’t been any historic increase of prosecutors to meet demand?
“Even if it dropped to 200 cases a year, we would have to double the budget for defense, or halve the number of prosecutions conducted,” Kaman said.
Cummings summed up the situation: “Simply put, while the number of referrals has not increased dramatically since 2008, the complexity of cases has increased the workload exponentially. The inability to add more deputy prosecuting attorneys to deal with the increased complexity results in the office not being able to get to as many cases as it once did (and thereby having law enforcement file many would be felonies as misdemeanors in municipal court, artificially reducing referrals to the office).”
