County prosecutor Dan Satterberg’s opponent alleges a ‘war against poor people’

The first challenger King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has faced in more than a decade says Satterberg is “waging a war against poor people.”

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Prosecutor Satterberg is defending his job against Daron Morris. Morris was a King County public defender for 20 years before he resigned to campaign against Satterberg.

Both candidates generally agree on the direction of the prosecutor’s office, but Morris says there’s a big issue standing in the way of true justice in King County.

“King County is ahead of the national average on criminal justice issues, but that just tells you what a national crisis we are in,” Morris told Seattle’s Morning News. “The injustices that are going on in this county can be seen as progressive because the rest of the nation is in such an awful state. What we have in this county, in spite of the reforms Mr. Satterberg has promoted around the edges, is a continuing war against poor people.”

Morris says the King County Prosecutor’s Office is using bail and plea bargaining as a means of keeping trial numbers low. This results in poor people and minorities trapped in the prison system. Another result, Morris alleges, is that innocent people plead guilty just to get out of long sentences — in other words, innocent people are systematically pressured to plead guilty.

“I’ve seen it,” Morris said. “I’ve been a public defender for 20 years and that’s what happens. Really, his chief criminal deputy is the one running the show on that, but of course, the buck stops here and Dan Satterberg is in charge of these things.”

“What I’ve seen is people telling me that ‘I didn’t do this’ … and they are saying to me ‘If my choices are to face 50 years, go in front of a jury, leave it up to 12 people who I don’t know to decide what happened, or I can go back to my family today; I owe it to my kids to be a father. I am not risking 50 years,’” he said.

Bail, from Morris’ perspective, should be used as a means of ensuring people return to court, not as a means of detaining people. There are legal methods of detaining dangerous people. Instead, judges and prosecutors set high bail amounts in 30-second court hearings that poor people can’t afford, Morris says. So they stay in jail.

“Harvey Weinstein pays that bail,” Morris said. “It’s only the poor person who doesn’t.”

“When we allow justice to be decided under duress, under these threats and that becomes the norm; when duress, and threats, and delay, and coercion, and money bail become the foundation of our justice system, instead of the right to a jury trial, then we’ve lost,” Morris added.

“People are threatened to take this plea, we’ll hammer you, no one can really go to trail anymore,” he said. “And this fact that 97 percent of our cases are getting resolved through plea bargains, which are really plea threats and plea coercion … how can you have a constitutional right to a jury trial and only 3 percent of people actually using it?”

Dan Satterberg’s prosecutor’s office

Satterberg argues otherwise, saying that if there were such problems in his office, there would be a long line of lawyers waiting to tell him. He said that not even Morris has brought such issues to him while he worked as a public defender for King County. Satterberg says that Morris’ accusations against his office are “a dystopian view of our criminal justice system that isn’t actually what’s going on.”

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“His vision of a 100 percent trial rate is just not realistic,” Satterberg said. “I’m progressive, but I’m also realistic. I’ve been in this job for a long time and I know what we can do and what we should be doing. To say every case should go to trial is simply a fantasy.”

All legal systems in America, Satterberg says, encourage people not to go to trial. King County’s trial rate, he says, is a “healthy trial rate” of about 5 to 8 percent of more than 6,000 cases annually.

“Every system has a disincentive included so we don’t take every case to trial,” Satterberg said. “We are going to give you your best offer on a negotiation early. If you make us go to trial and we have to do all this work, and bring in all these witnesses, and take the risk and expenses of trial, then you are not going to get the same deal. In fact, if we think the evidence shows that you committed additional crimes, we will put those in front of the jury, too.”

“It is true that people who have committed serious, violent felony crimes have some tough decisions to make,” he said. “That’s the consequence that people face when they kill someone, rob a bank, beat a woman, or rape a child. You are going to face some tough choices. The first choice that you face is ‘Do I accept early responsibility for this and agree to plead guilty? Or do I demand a trial?’”

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