The government’s modern-day response to our nation’s overdose epidemic has been woefully inadequate. Rather than relying on medical science, our leaders have been influenced by the same misguided approaches that undergirded the “war on drugs” in the 1980s — fear, stigma and racism.

We need a smarter strategy that reduces harm and saves lives. This starts with prosecutors ending the criminal crackdown on drug users — pushing for treatment instead of pressing charges; encouraging law enforcement to change street approaches; and, most of all, calling for the development of overdose prevention sites where people can consume substances under supervision, get clean needles, and get access to treatment and counseling.

These sites are saving lives in Canada and Europe, where they have been in operation since the 1980s. But the criminal stigma behind drug use and addiction has kept such sites from opening in the United States, leaving users to struggle and, far too frequently, die.

Not one overdose death

America’s opioid crisis has worsened in recent years due to the influx of fentanyl into the drug supply. In many cities, fentanyl has replaced heroin because it’s cheaper, easier to import, and offers the chance for enormous profits. There is no reason to think that this is temporary, that law enforcement alone will stop it, or that it will fix itself.

The traditional response to drug addiction has leaned on three pillars: prevention, treatment and law enforcement. We advocate for an additional pillar — harm reduction. This means working to save lives and to see the humanity behind each person and family impacted by the tragedy of addiction.

If you talk to police in cities hit hard by the drug crisis, they will quickly admit that arresting drug users will never slow down demand or reduce supply.

In Seattle, Philadelphia, Vermont and San Francisco, elected prosecutors are taking new approaches, despite threats of retaliation from the Trump administration. They know deaths will continue to mount until people have low-barrier access to a full spectrum of treatment and harm-reduction measures, including methadone and Suboxone, clean needles and overdose prevention sites (also called supervised consumption facilities and safe injection sites). Elected officials have, among other things, vowed to stop prosecuting users who have Suboxone without a prescription. Prosecutors have also come out in support of injection facilities.

Studies of more than 100 sites worldwide have shown that these facilities save lives. In fact, not a single overdose death has occurred in one since they began operating about three decades ago.

Facilities make financial sense, too

Canada offers a real-life example of the fiscal impact sites can have.

Studies of Vancouver’s first overdose prevention facility, Insite, found annual cost savings of $2.85 million to $8.55 million from HIV prevention alone. Compare that with the $3 million annual operating budget of Insite, and the fiscal benefits are clear.

We led a delegation of prosecutors to Vancouver this month. What we saw on the city streets was disheartening, but overdose prevention sites offered a glimmer of hope.

Large areas downtown exemplify the extreme poverty and misery of fentanyl. We saw individuals struggling with homelessness (and in some instances facing physical and mental illness). Vancouver is working to address its homeless problem. But Insite’s medical professionals are trained to recognize and reverse overdoses, which they do, they said, 40 times a week. Cost-effective, tested solutions also minimize the spread of illnesses associated with needle sharing.

Despite this proven track record, they remain illegal in the US. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently vowed in a New York Times op-ed that the federal government would “meet the opening of any consumption site with swift and aggressive action.”

The primary argument against them is the so-called crack house statute of the Controlled Substances Act — the federal law that governs punishment for narcotics offenses. The law has been used to justify excessive punishment for crack offenses — a practice that has primarily targeted black men dating to the height of the war on the drugs in the 1980s. And the statute allowed officers to hone in on locations where users might have congregated. As misguided as the federal crack-cocaine laws may have been, they were never intended to clamp down on facilities set up to address a public health need.

Political opponents also claim that these sites are a magnet for illegal drug use and crime. Yet a person suffering from painful drug withdrawals does not need “encouragement” to use drugs. Vancouver’s overdose prevention sites have not increased neighborhood crime or the volume of drug users, according the city’s law enforcement and health professionals.

These same arguments were used to oppose decades-old needle exchange programs, which have become an effective public health strategy.

Federal efforts to block proven approaches signal a return to wrongheaded “tough on crime” policies and the politics of dehumanization that work to punish people with the disease of substance use disorder.

We have spent far too much time viewing drug users as unworthy of our care. Politicians need to set prejudice and fear aside and commit to saving lives. Stagnation is no longer acceptable.

Miriam Aroni Krinsky spent 15 years as a federal prosecutor and is the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a national network of elected prosecutors committed to new thinking and innovation. Dan Satterberg is the elected prosecuting attorney for King County (Seattle) and has been a prosecutor for more than 30 years.

Original story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2018/11/01/drugs-opioids-policing-usa/1821797002/

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Shelley spent most of her life addicted to drugs and Yoda provided a purpose and unconditional love, as well as a bridge to other dog owners and the outside world that she had retreated from for so long. Even though she finally managed to stay sober, the long-term health effects of addiction led to our losing her in March 2018.

It is estimated that nearly half of all Americans have a family member or close friend impacted by drug addiction. When it comes to what addiction looks like, Shelley’s struggles gave our family a front row seat. If there is any silver lining to our nation’s opiate addiction epidemic, it is that our personal experiences with loved ones struggling with substance use are helping to shape our public policy response.

More than 30 years ago, when my sister first got into drugs and “the wrong crowd,” I was a brand new deputy prosecuting attorney, just starting the career that has made me the King County Prosecuting Attorney. Within the first weeks of assignment to felony trials, I received a case involving the service of a search warrant in a drug case. I remember my anger and embarrassment when I opened the case file and saw my little sister’s name listed as a witness present in the house when the dealer was arrested. After I returned the case to my supervisor, I learned that Shelley testified on behalf of her dealer in a successful motion to dismiss the case.

We largely parted ways for a long time after that collision of her addiction and my profession. I would hear from Shelley every few months and learned to tell from her voice when she was using and when she was not. Years went by, some of which were brighter for Shelley than others. We lost our sibling relationship over her drug “lifestyle,” which I attributed to her bad choices and moral failings. I was angry with her for having hurt my parents and having squandered her privileges and potential. Pearl Jam has a song called “Life Wasted” and it summed up my feelings about my little sister.

Over time, my attitude, and the science of addiction, changed. We now know that addiction is a brain disease and that long-term use of drugs affects the chemistry and physiology of the brain.

The first casualty an addicted person suffers is the loss of connection to the positive people in their lives. They often lie and steal from those closest to them, burning bridges that isolate them further. The life of a person with an addiction is one of compulsive drug seeking, needing to use daily to avoid the painful symptoms of withdrawal. Shelley associated with the people who would help her score heroin every day and withdrew from the people who had always loved her.

Today, medical science uses the term “substance use disorder” to describe this condition. It recognizes that some people are more susceptible to addiction. Some people might have a genetic predisposition and others are vulnerable due to deep emotional and psychological issues, including untreated trauma.

Shelley had run away from home at the age of 14 because my parents wouldn’t let her go to a concert on a school night. My parents were devastated by this and it played a role in shattering their relationship with their daughter for decades.

Unfortunately, that trivial rebellion also put Shelley in harm’s way and in proximity with people looking to exploit her. Shelley told me later, and recounted to countless women in recovery groups, that she had been raped by two men when she was just a teenager but had never received any help for her deep trauma. Shelley identified this trauma as a trigger for her using. I am sure that using drugs numbed that pain and gave her the illusion of power, at least in the beginning.

The condition of substance use disorder is defined by continued use despite negative consequences. Historically, society has asked those of us in the criminal justice system to ensure that there are plenty of negative consequences for people with addictions. Science suggests, however, that efforts to judge, shame and punish those with substance use disorder does nothing to relieve the pain or pull of addiction.

So, the big question is: What does work?

In a recent survey at Public Health – Seattle and King County’s needle exchange program, 78 percent of the people said that they would welcome help to reduce or stop their use of opiates. One of the most promising strategies to help people reduce harm to themselves and to the community is through the use of buprenorphine, also called “bupe,” or by its commercial name Suboxone.

Buprenorphine works to block the painful symptoms of opiate withdrawal but without the disorienting euphoria of heroin. It’s an oral medication typically taken daily. For those trying to stop using opiates, it reduces the risk of mortality by more than 50 percent. Methadone has been in use longer and more than twice as many people in King County use it instead of buprenorphine. However, regulations surrounding methadone require an “observed dose” to be administered every day at a clinic, which can become the day’s dominant activity. For some people, this added structure is stabilizing, for others it is counterproductive. Buprenorphine is available in 30-day supplies and soon will be more available in long-lasting injections and implants.

If we made buprenorphine as easy to get as heroin, then people facing painful withdrawal symptoms could access the legal and safe alternative to street drugs. It would improve public safety and reduce crime throughout our county. Seattle has several new rapid access buprenorphine clinics where people can drop in without an appointment and begin the process of receiving a doctor’s prescription for this life-changing alternative to heroin.

For me, several important books have changed my view of drug addiction. In Chasing the Scream, author Johan Hari concludes with the observation that everything he thought he knew about addiction was wrong. He observes that “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It’s connection.” What most addicted people need to get better is to rebuild connections to the positive people in the community and to begin to believe that they are worthy of love and help.

Connections and medication-assisted treatment brought my little sister back into my life.

The best thing I ever did for Shelley was to take her to Navos in Burien, a nonprofit provider of mental health and substance use disorder services with a broad continuum of care. Shelley needed that kind of care — her life was a mess physically, emotionally and chemically. I waited in the parking lot while Shelley went inside. An hour later she had two counselors assigned to her, one for mental health issues and the other for her substance use disorder.

These amazing counselors got her on a path to detox, rehab and buprenorphine. Most importantly, these counselors convinced her of her value and made her believe that she was worthy of receiving love and help. They gave her tools that helped her to build strong relationships with other women in recovery.

For nearly three years, Shelley did not use any non-prescribed drug. You can argue that she was not “sober” because she traded heroin for buprenorphine. I would reply that “bupe” gave Shelley a quality of life that she had not known for decades. It allowed her to begin to repair the broken connections with her family.

A year after her new-found sobriety, Shelley and I went to the Bellevue Humane Society and adopted Yoda, a loving lap-dog with alien-sized ears. Yoda became something for Shelley to care for, and a way for her to meet others at support meetings which were also vital to her recovery.

As musician Neil Young wrote, “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done.”

The damage done can persist even after a person is no longer in the grips of addiction. Shelley died in March 2018 at the age of 51 of organ failure. Her decades of substance abuse devastated her body’s key defense systems, and she was eventually unable to fight off a simple infection.

Shelley’s final triumph was that she had taken no drug other than buprenorphine for nearly three years, and that she had established many healthy connections with other people, especially with my older sister and me — and Yoda.

In my role as prosecuting attorney, I have the opportunity to help shape a public health response to the medical condition of substance use disorder. Our response has to be informed by science and by our own personal experiences with family and friends affected by substance use disorder.

There is no single path that will work for everyone, but we owe it to people struggling with addiction, and their families, to help them make informed choices about their health, and options to manage their addictions.

Our goal should be to keep people alive while also helping them reduce the harm to themselves and to our community. We have a successful model in Seattle with the LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) program where connections are made between people who use drugs and case managers who offer unconditional help to people who stopped believing they were worthy of help. A stubborn insistence upon abstinence as a precondition to receiving help is the opposite of harm reduction, an idea pioneered at the University of Washington.

We also need to build up our community capacity for compassionate action, which includes meeting people where they are with care navigators, counselors and more rapid access to effective treatment medications.

We need to decide we are willing to build a judgment-free approach to holistic health needs for people struggling with substance use disorder. There is still a role for drug courts, Twelve-Step programs, and places like the Salvation Army that follow a different model. The human brain is complex and diverse and I have to believe that there are many paths to a better life for people with this brain disease.

The most fundamental change in our approach to this drug epidemic has to occur within each of us, and especially those who have seen addiction up close. Guilt, shame, prosecution and incarceration are not the answers.

Instead we need to set aside the kind of anger and judgment that I experienced with Shelley and support efforts to keep people alive long enough to rebuild broken connections. We need to help them reduce harm to themselves and our community.

America’s drug epidemic can be managed, one person at a time, by reaching out with offers of help and connection. We have to first decide that we are willing to help the people who make us mad. Combating drug addiction will take community resolve, patience, compassion and maybe the occasional dog.

Original story: https://crosscut.com/2018/05/my-sisters-drug-addiction-and-what-it-taught-me

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It is my duty to report that the death penalty law in our state is broken and cannot be fixed. It no longer serves the interests of public safety, criminal justice, or the needs of victims. I call on the Legislature to repeal the law and make the punishment for aggravated murder a sentence of life without the possibility of parole by supporting legislation like Senate Bill 6052 this session to abolish the death penalty.

It was the Legislature in 1981 that passed the death penalty law after years of debate. Since then, our state has carried out only two contested executions. Three men were executed as “volunteers” after instructing their attorneys not to appeal the jury verdicts. Eight men currently sit in prison with their death sentences at various stages of appeals in the state and federal courts. A ninth man died last year of natural causes, a fate much more likely than execution in this state, especially given the moratorium imposed by Gov. Jay Inslee on the carrying out of any finalized death penalty sentences.

We don’t need the death penalty because we already have the equivalent penalty in a true life sentence without possibility of release. A person serving life without possibility of parole will die in prison, unless granted clemency by the governor. The fight over the death penalty is in reality an elaborate effort to hasten the date of the inmate’s death, and to permit a state employee to eventually administer a lethal dose of drugs. The uncertain path to execution in our state may take 20 years, and consume millions of dollars in tax resources to pay for teams of lawyers to litigate in the state and federal courts. This fight is simply not worth the time, the money, nor the delay in the delivery of justice.

The national debate over the death penalty sometimes reveals deep flaws in the fairness of the criminal-justice system, but that is not our experience in Washington state, where prosecutors have done a good job of ensuring the fair administration of the law. There are no innocent men among the eight on death row or among the five who have been killed since 1981. Horror stories from other parts of the country about abuses of the death penalty, unqualified defense counsel, and unfair leverage for plea bargaining are deeply concerning but are not our story.

In Washington, our flaws aren’t found in the underfunding of criminal defense but rather in the soaring and uncontrollable costs of capital litigation. The specter of the death penalty threatens to bankrupt smaller counties and divert dwindling resources for other priorities within the county government. The truth is that smaller counties are not able to pursue the death penalty even if they wanted to.

Then there is the issue of delay. The two defendants who executed six family members in Carnation in 2007 faced the death penalty, but it took nearly eight years and three trips to the Supreme Court to clear the way for trial and for the jury to even consider the death penalty option for the man who shot two children, their parents and grandparents. King County spent nearly $5 million in costs for his defense team. In the end, the jury deliberated for less than a day and could not reach a unanimous decision in favor of death. He, and his co-defendant, are now serving life-without-parole sentences and will certainly die in prison.

I am also convinced that the death penalty as presently administered does not serve the interests of family members of murder victims. Families understandably want the maximum punishment for the killer of their loved one, but the issue of the death penalty sometimes divides families. When we explain that it takes on average 20 years to finally exhaust appeals and then the case faces the roadblock of an indefinite moratorium, most families say “no thank you.”

In 2010, I sat with the family of Holly Washa to witness the execution of the man who kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed the 21-year-old woman. It was the second time they had traveled from their hometown in Nebraska to Walla Walla to monitor the proceedings — the first time they drove all the way only to learn in the prison parking lot that the Supreme Court granted a last-minute delay. During the two decades of appeals following the murder, the family feared that some court would eventually release Washa’s killer. After it was finally over, her sister said to the press, “Now we won’t have to think about him anymore.” That same relief for victim families is available with a life-without-parole sentence, with a much quicker resolution, less cost to taxpayers and more legal certainty.

Our death penalty process is too slow, too uncertain, too costly and ultimately, by any measure, it cannot be said to work. It is time to move on from this four-decades-long failed experiment, and focus our time and resources on more rational responses to violent crime. The two men currently on death row from King County committed atrocious crimes, killing a total of seven women and children. One has been in custody for 18 years, the other for nearly 12, and they will both certainly die in prison, one way or the other.

It can certainly be argued from a moral standpoint that these men do not deserve to live. The more important question is, however, not what they deserve, but rather what do we deserve as citizens of Washington state.

Original article: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/king-countys-prosecuting-attorney-we-dont-need-the-death-penalty/

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The only complication was the driver. A 23-year-old undocumented immigrant studying at the University of Washington, she had gained some assurance against deportation through a federal program for people who had entered the country illegally as children. If she pleaded guilty to driving under the influence, the punishment any Washington resident might face could be compounded by a more permanent penalty. She could lose her protected status; she could be deported.

Which, for the prosecutor, presented a difficulty: Was this what justice should look like?

Now that President Trump’s hard line has made deportation a keener threat, a growing number of district attorneys are coming to the same reckoning, concluding that prosecutors should consider potential repercussions for immigrants before closing a plea deal. At the same time, cities and states are reshaping how the criminal justice system treats immigrants, hoping to hopscotch around any unintended immigration pitfalls.

These shifts may inaugurate yet another local-versus-federal conflict with the Trump administration, which is already tussling with many liberal cities over other protections for immigrants.

For prosecutors, such policies are also stretching, if not bursting, the bounds of the profession. Justice is supposed to be blind to the identity of a defendant. But, the argument goes, the stakes might warrant a peek.

“There’s certainly a line of argument that says, ‘Nope, we’re not going to consider all your individual circumstances, we want to treat everybody the same,’” said Dan Satterberg, the prosecuting attorney for Seattle and a longtime Republican, who instituted an immigration-consequences policy last year and strengthened it after the presidential election. “But more and more, my eyes are open that treating people the same means that there isn’t a life sentence of deportation that might accompany that conviction.”

With that in mind, his office allowed the student to plead guilty to reckless driving instead of driving under the influence. The deal, which included three days of community service and two years of probation — milder than the standard driving-under-the-influence penalty of 24 hours in jail, a few days’ community service and five years’ probation — did not jeopardize her protected status.

But many prosecutors remain wary, hesitant to meddle in what they regard as the federal government’s business and even more reluctant to depart from what they say is a bedrock principle of the system.

“There’s probably hundreds if not thousands of issues that I suppose we could take into consideration,” said Brian McIntyre, the county attorney in Cochise County, Ariz., “and when we do that, we necessarily wind up not being as fair to someone else.”

Cochise prosecutors are not supposed to consider the collateral effects of a conviction, whether it be to a child custody case or a military career.

If he made accommodations for an immigrant, Mr. McIntyre said, he felt that he would also owe a citizen in similar circumstances the same option, “because is he not being, essentially, negatively impacted by his U.S. citizenry?”

A criminal record often has different stakes for an immigrant than it does for a citizen. It can mean losing a green card or being barred from citizenship. Those who lack legal status can lose any chance to gain it. Those with legal status, as well as those without, can face automatic deportation.

In many cases, the city-and-state-level changes dovetail with broader criminal justice reforms that were already underway before Mr. Trump took office.

But to the administration, policies that help noncitizens duck immigration penalties are tantamount to an assault on the rule of law.

“It troubles me that we’ve seen district attorneys openly brag about not charging cases appropriately under the laws of our country,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in April.

The local efforts to help immigrants may not always work. The Trump administration has made clear that anyone without legal status may be deported, regardless of whether they have been convicted of a crime.

But reducing criminal penalties can help immigrants by keeping them out of jail, which can make it more difficult for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find them, or by preserving their options in immigration court.

In May, Denver stopped imposing a maximum jail sentence of 365 days for some lower-level crimes, like shoplifting. A conviction with a potential sentence of a year or longer — even if the actual sentence is far shorter — can disqualify noncitizens from most forms of legal status or render them deportable.

“Whether you committed a physical assault on someone or were caught urinating in the park, you were subject to the same maximum penalties, which doesn’t make sense,” the mayor, Michael B. Hancock, said in an interview.

The Denver shift builds on state laws in California and Washington State that cap misdemeanor penalties at 364 days. That ceiling applies retroactively in California, a major benefit for people detained by the immigration authorities over old convictions.

Immigration lawyers say they frequently see immigrants stripped of green cards or visas over convictions for lower-level crimes, exposing them to deportation.

“Not only do you do your time and pay your fine under criminal court,” said Jeannette Zanipatin, a lawyer at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “but you’re literally banished from your family and everyone you know.”

In some states, interventions have come from as high up as the governor’s mansion. In recent months, Democratic governors in Colorado, Virginia and New York have tried to help immigrants facing deportation by pardoning their old crimes, though the results have been mixed. One was released after a pardon, but another has been deported and a third remains detained.

Prosecutors who take immigration status into account say this consideration will not be extended to serious or violent crimes. They argue that showing flexibility in nonviolent, minor cases will help build trust with immigrants in their communities, making them more likely to report crimes and serve as witnesses.

The acting Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, went further than most in April, when he announced that his prosecutors would begin notifying defense lawyers about the potential immigration fallout of their clients’ cases and that he would hire two in-house immigration lawyers to consult on prosecutions.

Days later, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, Marilyn J. Mosby, said she had told her staff members to use their discretion when it came to cases with an immigration factor, considering defendants’ prior records and community ties.

“There’s no set standard,” she said. “You have to base it on everything that’s in front of you.”

It is not yet clear what that will look like in Baltimore or Brooklyn. But in Santa Clara County, Calif., whose district attorney was among the first to outline an official policy, prosecutors often allow a noncitizen to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for more jail time or probation.

“If we’re giving something, we’re going to get something,” said the district attorney, Jeff Rosen.

California law now requires immigration consequences to be factored into criminal cases. The state has also passed a law allowing people to erase or revise old convictions if they successfully argue that they were not advised at the time that a guilty or no-contest plea would endanger their immigration status.

Occasionally, cases involving noncitizens have boomeranged on local officials. In April, Mr. Rosen’s office was plunged into a controversy surrounding a domestic-violence case in which a green-card holder from India was charged with felony domestic violence against his wife, a citizen, but ultimately pleaded guilty to lesser charges. The woman has criticized the plea deal as too lenient.

Although prosecutors considered the potential loss of the man’s green card in negotiations, Mr. Rosen said, they felt there was not enough evidence to prove the initial charges in court.

In Boston, a suspect in the double murder of two physicians in May, a legal resident from Guinea-Bissau, had been able to keep his green card despite robbing two banks in recent years after his lawyer negotiated a plea deal that allowed him to plead to larceny instead of unarmed bank robbery. The sentence he received from a judge was also one day short of the 365-day threshold that could have led to his deportation.

But backlash has been infrequent, and prosecutors have continued to take immigrants’ status into account.

Luke Larson, the deputy prosecutor on the case of the Washington State student charged with drunken driving, said several factors favored a milder charge, including her strong academic record and lack of a criminal history.

Most unsettling, for him, was that she had not been back to her home country since she was a toddler. She got the deal.

“It’s easier to say, ‘I don’t want to know about the potential immigration consequences, and I don’t care,’” said his boss, Mr. Satterberg. “It’s harder when you want to know. Then it does require you to know more and to be more creative and to take more of a risk with the case.”

Original story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/us/prosecutors-dilemma-will-conviction-lead-to-life-sentence-of-deportation.html

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In response, thirty current and former state and local prosecutors have signed an open letter opposing Sessions’ memo, according to The Washington Post. (Sessions only has authority over federal prosecutors, not any of the letter’s signatories.) Among them was King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg. In an interview last week, he told us that with regard to “the War on Drugs…I think everyone can admit that that was the wrong response” and said he’s ready to use his office to defend Seattle and King County’s planned pilot safe drug sites, which will epitomize the kind of drug user intolerance Sessions opposes.

In a short memo delivered earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed his predecessors’ steps away from mass incarceration by ordering federal prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.” While this order applies to all federal prosecutions, the order will particularly affect drug crime cases, which in combination with mandatory minimum sentences have heavily contributed to America’s high level of incarceration. Where AGs in the Obama administration had begun a tepid retreat from the War on Drugs, using prosecutorial discretion to sometimes reduce charges against some drug offenders, Sessions’ memo doubled-down on it.

In response, thirty current and former state and local prosecutors have signed an open letter opposing Sessions’ memo, according to The Washington Post. (Sessions only has authority over federal prosecutors, not any of the letter’s signatories.) Among them was King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg. In an interview last week, he told us that with regard to “the War on Drugs…I think everyone can admit that that was the wrong response” and said he’s ready to use his office to defend Seattle and King County’s planned pilot safe drug sites, which will epitomize the kind of drug user intolerance Sessions opposes.

Original story: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/dan-satterberg-co-signs-prosecutors-letter-rejecting-jeff-sessions-return-to-war-on-drugs/

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Dan Satterberg is King County’s prosecuting attorney.
When victims of crime are afraid to trust police and the courts, the only winners are violent people. Because our top mission is public safety, this “crackdown” is an immediate and serious concern to those of us who work to protect all King County residents.

There are an estimated 1 million immigrants in Washington, one in every seven people in the state. Police and prosecutors have worked for decades to build trust with these communities, and encourage them to cooperate with the justice system. In King County, brave cooperation from undocumented residents who are witnesses or victims has allowed us to hold many violent offenders accountable. The wisdom of this approach has been widely recognized. Indeed, Congress even passed laws to protect immigrant crime victims to encourage them to come forward and report crimes that put us all at risk.

Undocumented immigrant victims, who are disproportionately women and children, are particularly vulnerable to crime due to language barriers, cultural differences and a lack of familiarity with the justice system. Violent criminals are adept at preying on the most vulnerable and marginalized in our community. This is of special concern in cases of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, where victims already take enormous risks to stand up to their abusers.

Today that hard-earned trust, built intentionally over many years, is being quickly eroded by Trump administration comments and highly publicized actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Prior administrations had focused their attention on undocumented people in jails or prisons; today the ICE attention is on neighborhoods. In El Paso, Texas, last month, a victim seeking protection from violent abuse was arrested by federal immigration agents in the courthouse where she sought help.

Just this week, Washington Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote a letter to Homeland Security Director John Kelly asking that ICE agents cease operating near our state’s courthouses, citing the real potential for driving victims and witnesses away from the justice system. No longer hypothetical or anecdotal, ICE actions are undermining trust in the neutrality of the court system, where “justice for all” has been our hallmark.

We are not safer when victims of crime fear being deported if they call 911, talk to police, or come to the courthouse to get protection. We are not safer when a victim of abuse thinks she must choose between deportation or suffering more violence at the hands of her abuser. Unpunished violent crime threatens us all.

We must continue to assure our most marginalized communities that it is safe to ask police and the courts for help. Here’s how we do that in King county:

• Neither the 911 operator, the police, nor the prosecutor will ask about immigration status. We want people to report crime and be safe;

• Victims and witnesses who assist local law enforcement and prosecution are eligible for immigration protection. Federal law still protects immigrants who are crime victims and witnesses.

• Crime victims are eligible for a new service from local civil legal aid organizations in partnership with my office at both Superior Court courthouses (Seattle and Kent). Among the legal services available for crime victims is advice and representation by Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

Confusion, fear and demagoguery are destabilizing important ties between immigrant communities, police and the court system. This directly undermines public safety. That’s why I join other criminal justice leaders in calling for an immediate end to this dangerous crackdown on law-abiding undocumented immigrants.

The trust we have spent decades building with immigrant communities can be lost in a few weeks. As for my office, we remain committed to doing all we can to encourage and protect all crime victims in our community.

Dan Satterberg

Original story: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/crackdown-on-immigrants-undermines-public-safety/v

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The winds blew a message into my email inbox last month, with an offer that I could not refuse. The email from John Legend was a personal invitation to a private dinner in New York City to “discuss ways that prosecutors can help reduce mass incarceration in America.” Legend continued, “The purpose of the dinner is for me to learn more about the role of District Attorneys within the justice system and to discuss ways that I can support you in your efforts to enact alternatives to incarceration.”

Legend, winner of Grammy and Academy awards, as a singer and songwriter, set up a nonprofit organization earlier this year called Free America (www.letsfreeamerica.org, #freeamerica). He describes his initial efforts as a “listening tour” that has brought him to prisons and jails to hear about the experiences of incarcerated people. Next, he thought he needed to hear from prosecutors about the complex decisions we face each day. I was honored to be asked to dinner with Legend and interested in the perspective a thoughtful artist could bring to the discussion that is too often dominated by lawyers and politicians.

Unlike so many discussions around criminal-justice reform that vilify prosecutors, the Free America team realized that prosecutors are a necessary voice and that we have the most power of all of the actors in the system. The invitation presumed we were also concerned about the future of criminal justice in America.

This is a good time for reform. The crime rate across the country continues a downward trend, hovering at lows not seen for half a century. Yet, if we were to return to the incarceration rate of the 1970s, we’d have to release 80 percent of all inmates in America. Our system is remarkable for its recidivism and racial disproportionality.

The fiscal costs of this era, which historians will no doubt label “The Era of Mass Incarceration,” are unsustainable. More important, reform is essential to begin to address the chasm of mistrust between our government and the communities most impacted by crime. We should work harder to keep young people out of the system, review excesses in sentencing laws, and develop intentional strategies to help people successfully transition from prison back into the community.

So I cashed in some airline miles and broke open my piggy bank to take advantage of the offer of a private dinner with Legend and the Free America staff. In a small room at a private club in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan, I joined elected district attorneys from Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco and Delaware, along with two prosecutors from the Department of Justice, all curious to see where this would lead.

Legend had done his homework. He knew that DAs have the discretion as gatekeepers of the system and that we have the power to shape a justice system that reflects the values and aspirations of our community. Among the topics we discussed over dinner were:

• School disciplinary policies that expel students to the streets, making graduation much less likely: People without a high school diploma are five times more likely to be imprisoned during their lifetime than those who graduate.

• Alternatives for drug addiction and mental illness: The criminal-justice system is the default system for these medical issues, but that can change, as evidenced by Seattle’s LEAD program, a national model.

• What should our response to gun violence be, especially when the lethal weapon is in the hands of a teenager with a developing brain?

• Diversion: I explained our 180 Program here in King County, a true partnership with the community that helps kids understand their choices in life and keeps them from the courtroom.

• Restorative Justice, where victims of crime can choose to have a mediated conversation with the person who offended against them.

• Second-look, parole, clemency: If we are going to reduce the prison population, we need a system to review exceptionally long sentences imposed decades ago to see if they are still necessary for public safety.

Removing those barriers to successful re-entry, such as the laws in Washington state prohibiting anyone who has ever had a felony conviction from applying for a license necessary for any one of more than 90 professions that might pay a living wage.

We shared not only dinner, but a deep concern that the policies we have been asked to administer as ministers of justice have brought us to the point where we are the world’s leader in incarceration. Everything must be on the table in the conversations about reform and more voices must be heard.

Just as the dessert plates were being cleared away and we had agreed that this was our time to lead and to act to bring criminal-justice reform to our jurisdictions, Legend checked his watch and thanked his guests. The Seahawks were on Monday Night Football and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, who is from Snohomish, is a big Hawks fan.

What if we brought the same enthusiasm we have for professional football to the cause of criminal-justice reform? If the Era of Mass Incarceration is truly over, what would historians call the next era? Suddenly, everyone agrees that reform is imperative. At stake in this movement is nothing less than the fabric of our nation and the profound moral issues of how we deal with crime, public safety and each other.

Maybe this revolution is too important to be left to the lawyers and the politicians. Maybe the people are ready for a movement led by artists and musicians and ordinary people, such as John Legend.

Dan Satterberg is the King County prosecuting attorney.

Original article: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/criminal-justice-reform-and-lessons-learned-from-my-dinner-with-john-legend/

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“Being a dropout in the 21st century is not a good idea,” said King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg.

Satterberg says many of them started their troubled legal lives in truancy court.

But a new court ruling says if you’re going to take kids to truancy court, you must provide them with a public defender. The prosecutor doesn’t like that idea.

“The county can’t afford to give them lawyers at every step of the way and I think giving a truant a lawyer to fight for their right to not be in school is a ridiculous waste of money,” said Satterberg.

So the prosecutor is changing course. Instead of court, he’s directing kids to new community truancy workshops.

It’s more cost-effective, and with the help of inspirational speakers and counselors, Satterberg hopes it will be more beneficial for the kids.

“We’re going to try to get to the root of the problem why these kids aren’t going to school and try to help them at that point,” he said.

The prosecutor is hoping budget constraints will end up being the mother of invention, keeping more kids on course and out of court.

“We don’t want to give up on these kids.  They’re truant now and truancy is a huge red flag.  We can’t ignore that red flag,” said Satterberg.

Satterberg says students who choose not to attend truancy workshops will still run the risk of being called to court

Original story: http://www.king5.com/news/local/Prosecutor-launching-program-to-keep-kids-in-school-72589932.html

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There. I admit it. When I was a kid I hated to go to school. I learned as early as my  kindergarten year at North City Elementary how to get out of going to class. The child of divorced parents, I was a latch-key kid who was responsible even at the age of 5 to get to school on my own and decided I’d rather stay home and watch J.P. Patches. My brush with truancy ended when my mother attended a parent/teacher conference and found out I had missed more than 45 days of instruction. She and the principal, Mr. Honeycutt, took a get tough approach and required me to make an appearance at his office every day to prove I was in school. I was forever changed.

Clearly that was a different era. My mother admits that leaving a 5-year old home alone – even in the 1960s – wasn’t a good idea. Then, though, there was no state law against it – or against truancy. Now, Washington State law says that a student is truant if they miss more than seven days of schooling in any one month or ten days in a semester. Kids and their parents face contempt of court charges if they don’t get to class.  Parents can be also be fined up to $25 for each day their child misses and truants can be placed in detention for up to two weeks.

But that’s the least of their worries. When students start missing class on a regular basis it is, understandably, hard for them to catch up on their classwork. Once behind, those students are more likely to drop out of school entirely. Statistics show that three-quarters of all state prison inmates are high school dropouts. A Seattle School District study identifies more than 14-percent of its high school students as truant, this in a school district that has an on-time graduation rate of only 63-percent.

In an effort to curb those statistics, the King County Prosecutor’s office is partnering with the Center for Children and Youth Justice to find new ways to convince kids to stay in school. Instead of requiring kids and parents to go to court, they’ll get a letter indicating that they need to attend a truancy workshop.  “For many of these kids, and their parents, the truancy letter they get from my office will be a wake-up call,” said Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg in his weekly Prosecutor’s Post. “I don’t want to haul them into Juvenile Court, but I do want to get their attention.”

Hmm. A letter. I’m not sure that would get my attention over someone knocking on the door saying I needed to take time off work to go before a judge and explain why my child wasn’t attending school.  The fact is, truancy cases make up thirty percent of all cases filed in Juvenile Court. Truancy cases are creating a backlog in the Juvenile Court system. A report compiled by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy released just last month indicates it cost the state’s courts more than $15-million dollars last year to prosecute truancy cases.

Under Satterberg’s new plan the cases would be diverted from court and into community and school-based truancy workshops aimed at identifying the underlying issues that are keeping the child out of school.  Research shows the biggest reasons behind truancy can be traced to the home, among them a lack of supervision, failure to encourage academic achievement and physical or emotional abuse. If these are indeed the causes, wouldn’t we want to send a stronger signal of the importance of education to both parents and children than a letter?

Original story: http://www.king5.com/ztest/blogger-king/Prosecutor-to-get-tough-on-truancy-69891122.html

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An armed juvenile is a threat to the peace of the community, and gun possession by a juvenile is a felony offense when it is not associated with hunting or organized shooting events.

Several weeks later, the teenager stood before a Juvenile Court judge who gave him a standard sentence for his illegal handgun. The judge also sent him a strong message:

The sentence: six months of probation, 40 hours of community service, and a deferred disposition, meaning that the conviction would disappear from his record in a matter of months.

The message? Carrying a gun in your school backpack is no big deal.

Fast forward eight months: The same young man, who had just turned 18, knocks on the back door of a Central District nightclub. The door is opened and he walks in, firing another handgun. He kills one man, severely injures another, and fires nine shots into the crowded club.

The young man now awaits trial in adult court for first-degree murder and assault. This time, he faces a 30-year prison sentence.

The new message? Using the gun in your backpack is a very big deal.

The scenario above is not only true, there are six more just like it from King County in the last year. In each of these six cases of murder and aggravated assault, the teenage defendant had recently been sentenced in Juvenile Court for gun possession, where they each received a minimal sentence. Within a year, each had committed a violent gun crime that landed them in adult court, facing decades in prison.

Young men, armed with guns, roaming the streets of Seattle ought to raise serious concern in the eyes of the law. Instead, unlawful gun possession in Juvenile Court is one of the least-serious crimes on the books.

The sentencing law for juveniles convicted of illegal gun possession is as follows:

• First conviction, zero to 30 days detention, zero to 12 months probation;

• Second conviction, same as the first, zero to 30 days detention, zero to 12 months probation;

• Third conviction, the same;

• Fourth conviction — If the first three trips through the court system didn’t teach the offender a lesson, well, they still only face 0 to 30 days in detention, zero to 12 months probation.

What you have read is not a typo. Only upon the fifth felony conviction will the sentence require that the juvenile spend some time (15 to 36 weeks) out of the community and in a state Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA) facility, like Echo Glen near North Bend.

At Echo Glen, youthful offenders spend time with counselors and engage in research-based programming designed to get them to see the consequences of their actions, and to take responsibility for their own decisions — like the decision to carry a gun.

At Echo Glen, juvenile offenders also learn that this state will treat them as an adult if they choose to use a gun, even if they are only 16 or 17.

We have failed our youth with the current sentencing model, which does so very little to deter or teach a kid about the danger of the decision to carry a gun.

We cannot wait until a kid has five felony convictions for carrying a handgun before we act to remove them from the community. That is a failed law that endangers both the kid and the community.

Nor can we wait until they decide to squeeze the trigger before imposing significant consequences. The qualitative difference between carrying a gun and using it is not that great — especially for young people who do not always link actions to consequences. And yet when a kid carries a gun and is caught and arrested, virtually nothing happens to them in court. Once they use the gun, the system comes down upon them like a ton of bricks — adult court and adult sentences await.

This next legislative session, county prosecutors from all over the state will ask lawmakers to treat juvenile gun possession as a serious crime, with the result that the first conviction earns the offender a trip to a JRA facility for 15 to 36 weeks, instead of the fifth conviction. Our goal is to make it quite clear to all youth the decision to carry a gun is a serious life-altering decision, with life-altering consequences.

We are all alarmed at the escalation of youth violence, and many community leaders are wondering out loud what we should do about kids who carry guns. I believe we should start by paying attention to kids who arm themselves to go to school or drive around their neighborhood.

An armed juvenile is a red flag that we ignore at our own peril.

Original story: http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2009895718_guest20satterberg.html

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