Subscribe in a ReaderHague’s breath test won’t be in trial
November 29th, 2007 Filed Under Legal News
Read Gregory Roberts full article in the Seattle PI here.
The drunken-driving trial of King County Councilwoman Jane Hague has been scheduled for February — but breath-test results from her arrest can’t be used as evidence against her, a judge decided Wednesday.
Hague, 61, was arrested the night of June 2 while driving on state Route 520, police said. Hague has pleaded not guilty.
She failed two breath tests of blood-alcohol level, police said. Her breath-alcohol content registered in two readings at 0.135 and 0.141, according to the citation. The legal limit is 0.08.
But County District Judge Peter Nault ruled Wednesday that the breath tests can’t be used in the trial because of defects in implying Hague’s consent to them, her lawyer, William Kirk, and prosecutor Lynn Moberly said. The issue has been successfully raised by defendants in other drunken-driving cases.
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Are WSP Troopers filling ticket quotas?
November 29th, 2007 Filed Under Legal News
Courtesy of King 5 News. Click here for full story.
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Department of Justice finds "life-threatening" medical problems at King County Jail
November 21st, 2007 Filed Under Legal News
Seattle Times reporter Mike Carter has provided the following article. You can find the full DOJ’s Civil Rights Division’s 27 page report in PDF format here.
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Crime Labs: An Arm of Law Enforcement
November 19th, 2007 Filed Under Legal News
Criminal defense law often puts the attorney at odds with a scientist. This is not a good match-up. Lawyers are seen as advocates for their clients. Scientist are perceived as unbiased seekers of truth. As we know, this is not always the case.
Seattle criminal defense attorneys are dealing with this issue in DUI cases that involve the Gordon-Crime Lab scandal. In addition, numerous cases throughout the United States are being challenged because of faulty bullet lead analysis done by FBI.
Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect’s gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered “misleading under federal rules of evidence.”
Currently, forensic laboratories that are run by the State Law Enforcement (or Federal Law Enforcement) are judged by the questionable standard of convictions won. I suggest we remove criminal laboratories from the control of Law Enforcement and create an independent agency to remove the both explicit and more subtle bias. Criminal investigative services are supposed to be where science and the pursuit of justice merge, but too often they are a place where mistakes, omissions and a lack of honesty lead investigators down false trails or end in wrongful convictions. Time and time again, we see that under the direction Law Enforcement that Crime Labs are placing their thumb on the Scales of Justice.
The full article regarding the FBI Crime Lab can be found on The Washington Post.
Update: The 60 Minutes article can be found here.
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Support for the Jailed Lawyers and Judges
November 14th, 2007 Filed Under Legal News
Please join fellow lawyers TOMORROW at 11:45 a.m. in downtown Seattle to show your support for the jailed lawyers and judges in Pakistan and The Rule of Law. It is very unusual for lawyers to be “called into action” in our country. This is one of those rare requests. Your presence is critical. Please show your support for an independent Pakistani judiciary and for restoring the constitution of Pakistan.
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What: Lawyers March in Support of Pakistani Lawyers and Judiciary
When: Wednesday, November 14, 2007, 11:45 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Where: Federal Courthouse, 7th Avenue and Stewart Street, Seattle, WA
map of courthouse
Attire: dark suits/dresses, white shirts/blouses, ties for men
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Message from American Bar Association President, Bill Neukom
Images this week of police beating and jailing almost 3,000 Pakistani lawyers were almost as shocking as Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspending Pakistan’s constitution and putting its Supreme Court under house arrest.
The American Bar Association immediately spoke out against these clear breaches of the rule of law. But, American lawyers must do more to object to conditions in Pakistan.
On Wednesday, November 14, the ABA is organizing a lawyers’ march in Washington, D.C., to support the rule of law and lawyers in Pakistan. At 11:30 a.m., a critical mass of lawyers will gather at the James Madison Building (101 Independence Avenue SE) before walking around the Supreme Court. Lawyers across the country are participating in similar marches in their communities, and the ABA is encouraging and supporting these local efforts.
Over the last few days, brave Pakistani lawyers have dressed for work and headed to court knowing that they would be met by policemen’s batons and tear gas instead of their clients. These lawyers went to work anyway because of their belief in the rule of law.
It is time for us to demonstrate that we share Pakistani lawyers’ commitment to justice. Together, we will show that they are not fighting alone.
We have invited our members in Washington, D.C., to attend the November 14 march. For more information about this event, or state and local activities, please visit the ABA website at www.abanet.org.
Thank you for your hard work for the ABA and in support of the rule of law.
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Interesting Times in DUI (Continued)
November 13th, 2007 Filed Under Legal News
The Tox lab saga continues. The King County Prosecutor’s office has decided not to prosecute Ms. Gordon. The full article of Tracy Johnson is posted below:
The Seattle Post Intelligencer
updated 1:14 a.m. AKT, Sat., Nov. 10, 2007
King County prosecutors have decided not to file perjury charges against the state toxicology lab’s former manager, who was accused of swearing that she’d performed dozens of tests when she hadn’t. Prosecutors said the actions of Ann Marie Gordon “may well have been sloppy, or an honest mistake” but didn’t appear to have criminal intent or compromise the accuracy of any breath-test results for people accused of drunken driving.In a report released Friday by the office of Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, prosecutors found that there would be “little to be accomplished by any criminal prosecution” because “the public has not suffered any harm.”
Gordon resigned as head of the lab, which is overseen by the Washington State Patrol, when the allegations came to light in July.
Her alleged actions have threatened drunken-driving cases around the state.
Defense attorneys say the revelation that such a high-ranking official lied throws much of the lab’s work into doubt, and they’ve asked judges around the state to dismiss drunken-driving charges. A two-judge panel in Skagit County ruled against them last month, but heavily criticized the lab.
Judges in other courts, including King County District Court and Seattle Municipal Court, are expected to consider the issue in drunken-driving cases in the coming weeks.
Gordon’s alleged misconduct centers on an ethanol-water solution that’s used to make sure the breath-test machines kept at police stations across the state give accurate readings.
She is accused of signing more than 50 statements that she tested the solution even though another scientist did the work. Each statement read, “I (name) do certify under penalty of perjury that I examined and tested this solution.”
Attorney Linda Callahan, a former King County prosecutor who now specializes in drunken-driving defenses, said she believed prosecutors declined to charge Gordon because “they’re worried about their DUI cases.”
“She knew she wasn’t testing solutions, yet she signed certificates that she knew were going to be admitted as court documents,” Callahan said. “How is that not perjury?”
In their report, prosecutors said they believed they could prove that Gordon made false statements, but not that she did it “knowingly.” They said she would be able to claim that signing off on the work of a subordinate was a routine part of her job as lab manager.
Gordon’s attorney, Ron Sim, said Gordon was delighted with the prosecutors’ decision. “I believe they concluded that the certificates, while inaccurate, were not signed with criminal intent.”
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Vote
November 6th, 2007 Filed Under Other
Today is election day for a number of Propositions, State Measures and Local Races. Let your voice be heard.
Voter information
Polls open: 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Take ID: You’ll need identification to vote at the polls — a driver’s license, for example, voter-registration card, student ID card, paycheck, bank statement or utility bill. If you don’t have ID, your ballot will be considered a provisional one and elections workers will have to match your signature before your vote is counted.
If you are voting absentee: Ballots must be postmarked by today.
For more information, including help filling out ballots or finding polling places:
King County: Call 206-296-8683, or go to: www.metrokc.gov/elections
Snohomish County: Voting is by mail only. Call 425-388-3444 or go to: www1.co.snohomish.wa.us/Departments/Auditor
Kitsap County: Voting is by mail only. Call 360-337-7128 or 206-842-2061, or go to www.kitsapgov.com/aud/elections/elections.htm.
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Domestic Violence and No-Contact Orders
November 1st, 2007 Filed Under Domestic Violence, Legal News
Nina Shapiro, a reporter at Seattle Weekly has written a very insightful article regarding domestic violence at Seattle Municipal Courts. Ms. Shapiro has consistently examined numerous areas of the Washington State Judicial system with a careful eye. Having dealt with Domestic Violence cases in our practice, this was a look at some of the issues that are rarely raised in a public forum, given the emotionally charged nature of these cases.
How the Cops and Courts Turn Abused Spouses Into Voiceless Victims
The “enlightened” approach to domestic abuse has left women passive and powerless.Andrea Rich-Bell waits anxiously in a hallway of Seattle Municipal Court, her heavily pregnant frame wrapped in a bulky black jacket. She’s due to give birth in three weeks, but the baby feels like it might drop any minute. It isn’t lightening her load that her husband, a construction worker named Roy, is in the “tank,” the courthouse’s basement holding cell. Nor that prosecutors are proceeding with a domestic violence case against Roy over her ardent objections.
“It’s more pressure on me,” says the 29-year-old Rich-Bell, who’s had six children with her husband over a 14-year relationship, not counting the one on the way. “I have to deal with all these kids. They don’t look at stuff like that.” Bail was set at $75,000, “like he’s a murderer,” says Rich-Bell.
According to the police report, two 911 calls were made on Sept. 22 at around 11 p.m., one from a witness reporting a fight downtown, the other from Rich-Bell herself claiming that Roy was “freaking out” because he had lost some drugs on a bus. When police arrived, she told them he had been swinging a cell phone charger around in a circle over his head, the report says, and she was fearful he would hit her.
As often happens in domestic violence cases, Rich-Bell is telling a different story now, saying she never called 911 (although Roy’s defense attorney concedes a tape of the call exists) or said anything about drugs. Rich-Bell admits her husband did have a phone charger in his hand and was swinging it, but “not at me.” She says she told the arriving officers that he didn’t do anything to her. “They said, ‘OK, we’ll take him to jail for being intoxicated.’” The next thing she knew, he was being charged with assault in the fourth degree and harassment.
The court also imposed a “no-contact order” that prohibits her from seeing her husband while the case is pending—a period during which she is likely to give birth to their child.
At 9 a.m., Roy’s public defender arrives. Rich-Bell smiles gamely at her, greeting her as an ally. The attorney then goes into a small conference room where prosecutors and defenders discuss possible deals. A short while later, the attorney returns to debrief Rich-Bell on the options. Prosecutors are willing to ask the judge to lift the no-contact—but only, ironically enough, if Roy pleads guilty to assaulting her. If he insists on a trial, the order stays.
“So they’re not going to give him a temporary release for the birth of my child?” Rich-Bell asks.
“Well, we can ask the judge,” the defender replies, adding they would have to set a hearing date on the matter.
Rich-Bell goes down to the tank to meet with Roy and returns with a decision: They will go to trial. The no-contact order will remain in effect for now.
Across town at her South Seattle home, a woman with very different life experiences has been grappling with the consequences of a no-contact order she didn’t want either. Ever since the arrest of her husband, City Council member Richard McIver, on charges related to domestic violence, Marlaina Kiner-McIver, a lawyer who once worked for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, has indicated that she is displeased at the way events have played out.
“I’m just very frustrated that I can’t talk with my husband,” she says, reached at home by phone. “Let’s just say that if I had to do it over again, I would not have called 911.” Actually, she hung up rather than going through with the call. But when police came anyway, they say, she told them that her husband repeatedly grabbed her by the throat while going on a “profane tirade.” Although Kiner-McIver has said that such an incident never occurred before in their 34-year marriage, it is now largely up to prosecutors and the court to decide what the immediate future will hold.
That’s because it has become routine for no-contact orders to go into effect not only while a case is pending but for a period of two to five years should there be a conviction. In essence, the criminal justice system is forcing couples to separate—whether they want to or not.
That’s a problem, according to several defense attorneys who work frequently on domestic violence cases. “I’m not sure about all this state-mandated intervention in people’s lives,” says Roy’s attorney, Theresa Allman, who works for the Defender Association. “On the majority of my domestic violence cases, probably 90 percent of the time, the victim does not want a no-contact order.” Yet, she says, the victim “is not listened to. She’s not respected. Her opinions are not valued.”
“People have a right to make bad choices,” agrees Pat Valerio, another public defender who works for the Associated Counsel for the Accused. A no-contact order, she says, is supposed to be for the benefit of someone who wants to be protected. It’s not “to have all the power of government coming in and saying, ‘We know better than you; you need to get over this guy.’” The state’s policy, she says, is just another way of overpowering a person who’s supposedly already been overpowered by her partner.
Local practices around domestic violence are the result of a decades-long push by women’s groups and others to get such cases taken more seriously. In 1984, Washington state enacted a law requiring police to make an arrest when they arrive at a scene where they believe domestic violence has occurred. Merril Cousin, executive director of the King County Coalition Against Domestic Violence, says the law followed a number of studies suggesting that arrests reduce recidivism more than, say, “having the guy walk around the block, which is what they used to do.”
Then, she says, later studies argued that “arrests alone are not effective unless there’s accountability” through such things as prosecution, jail time, and no-contact orders. “The problem is that batterers will often continue to harass, intimidate, and control their partners” into not cooperating with the prosecution. So proceeding without such cooperation “sort of became state of the art,” she says, a trend that really picked up in the ’90s.
Cousin confesses to mixed feelings about the result. “We don’t want to say it’s up to the victims for a number of reasons.” For one, she says, domestic violence is a crime and it’s the community’s responsibility, not the victims’, to hold criminals accountable. “On the other hand,” she says, “there are often very good reasons why victims don’t want cases to go forward.” The financial consequences could be steep, for instance, or prosecution could trigger federal laws that would mandate victims’ partners be deported, not something they necessarily want.
“Sometimes victims’ wishes are not considered as strongly as I would like,” she allows. Consequently, she says, “often victims are angry.”
Sharon Hayden, director of the domestic violence unit in the City Attorney’s Office, says part of the reason why she can’t abide by a victim’s stated wishes is that the woman may not express “the deepest desire of her heart.”
“I tell victims when I’m talking to them on the phone, ‘I don’t know if he’s standing there with a gun to you head.’ They laugh and say, ‘Well, he’s not.’ He probably is not.” However, she says, “I’ve prosecuted numerous cases where victims came to court against their will and later thanked me. It’s a dilemma. Do we say, ‘We’re going to take this out of your hands so you’re not in further danger?’ Or do we say, ‘You’re an adult, you’re a self-determining individual, and we will honor that?’”
Making a decision on whether to proceed with a case is “an art, not a science,” she says, one that relies on the experience of police and prosecutors to make case-by-case decisions based on all the evidence at hand, including not only victims’ statements past and present but those of witnesses, photos of the alleged crime, and 911 tapes (all of which can convict a defendant with or without a victim’s cooperation). She says prosecutors also listen to “victim advocates” employed by the City Attorney, who meet with victims separately and push for their point of view within the office— “much more so here than any other place I’ve worked.”
Andrea Rich-Bell says, however, that when she talked to one such victim advocate, “she’s wasn’t helpful. She was, like, ‘This is what the prosecutor recommends.’ She was more on the prosecutor’s side.”
Says Allman: “I don’t know how many victims have said, ‘They’re not listening to me. I want him home.’”
In practice, Allman and other defense attorneys contend, prosecutors are not looking at cases individually. “My concern is there’s sort of a cookie-cutter approach,” says Karen Baker of the Associated Counsel for the Accused. With the specter of famous cases like the Tacoma murder of Crystal Brame by her police chief husband, prosecutors almost always seek and receive no-contact orders due to an assumption that women need to be separated from men who may actually kill them. But, Baker says, “that fear is not valid in the vast majority of cases, and the harm done by prosecutors acting on that fear is a huge problem.”
Baker points, in particular, to the effect of no-contact orders on children. The orders prohibit any communication, “directly or indirectly.” In practice, this often means that a domestic violence defendant can’t even have, say, his mother call to arrange a time for him to see his kids. Hayden, of the City Attorney’s Office, counters that the order would not bar that from happening.
But that’s not what the attorneys who work under Hayden argue in court, according to Baker. What’s more, she says, prosecutors usually fight her requests to include an exception to the order that would allow parental visitation. “Usually I lose,” Baker says. “There are a lot of kids going fatherless while their dads’ cases are pending.”
In theory, women could ignore no-contact orders they didn’t want, and sometimes they do. But their partners will face the consequences if, for example, the two of them are pulled over in a traffic stop. “We try to tell our clients it doesn’t matter who initiates contact,” says Valerio. “If they do anything but hang up the phone or walk away, he’s in violation.” She tells of one case in which her client called 911 because his alleged victim was on his front porch in the middle of the night, screaming. When police arrived, they jailed him for violation of the no-contact order.
“The reality is, many of the people involved in these situations are going to be together, and have families together,” Hayden acknowledges. “People don’t want to split up.” Allman believes that victims are looking for things they’re not getting from the prosecutor’s office: “more reasonable jail time,” perhaps family counseling, and “help at home with child care, the stressors that are causing offender behavior in the first place.”
Andrea Rich-Bell had her baby last week. With a trial set to start this month, Roy was still in jail and prohibited from communicating with his wife. Allman says she doesn’t know whether he heard the news or not.
By Nina Shapiro
October 31, 2007
Domestic violence is a complicated area of law with no easy answers or solutions. However, we should be able to reexamine our judicial system to determine whether processes are dragging to many innocent people into its current.
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