As the daddy of a preteen daughter, I continually fear about how I will help to supply a secure and shiny future for her as she grows up. As an elected official, I’m additionally known as on to signify the area and make the perfect choices I can to maintain our youth secure. There are specific points that I encounter on the Metropolitan King County Council the place these two roles overlap, and I have to take into consideration how the choices I make might have an effect on my daughter and lots of others like her.
Particularly, I’ve needed to grapple with what fathers and moms and, extra importantly, their teenage daughters are experiencing within the title of a King County coverage generally known as “Zero Youth Detention.”
Just lately, credible experiences have emerged that the King County Prosecuting Lawyer’s Workplace’s Juvenile Division is failing to correctly handle juvenile intercourse offense circumstances. Sexually motivated crimes like rape and sexual assault have long-lasting impacts on the victims and their households, together with post-traumatic stress dysfunction, melancholy, elevated substance use and suicidal ideation, amongst others. Teenage women who endure violent sexual assaults need to have their offender investigated and charged by means of our legal authorized system.
However the KCPAO officers are failing them by selecting to not prosecute many underage sexual assault predators and never fulfilling their responsibility of bringing the victims the justice they want.
A KOMO News investigative report dropped at gentle how poor the state of juvenile justice has turn into. King County is now prosecuting solely 17% of juvenile sexual assault expenses referred to them by legislation enforcement — the bottom price in current many years and down from 28% in 2019. In a single case, data present that juvenile prosecutors didn’t take even fundamental investigative steps, together with executing a search warrant on the alleged rapist’s cellphone for textual content and photos of the alleged rape. Juvenile Division Chief Jimmy Hung, who doesn’t dispute the 17% submitting price, minimized this statistic by describing this traditionally low prosecution price as “encouraging” in one other KOMO news story — an evaluation that issues many who work with victims of sexual assault.
Former King County Sexual Assault Useful resource Heart CEO Mary Ellen Stone publicly known as for extra transparency across the Juvenile Division’s practices, talking particularly to a priority in regards to the misuse of a classification known as “Statutory Referral Solely.” KCSARC’s new CEO, Kate Krug, recently said that “ … the vast majority of [Juvenile Division] circumstances which were sentenced have plead down from a intercourse offense to a non-sex offense.” Sadly, this suggests the Juvenile Division charging statistics, already at report lows for sexual assault, could possibly be even decrease than we all know.
Within the KOMO story, former King County deputy prosecutor Julie Kays asserted that she is observing an absence of will to prosecute sexual assault circumstances within the Juvenile Division. Lately, King County management, sadly, has centered on the objective of “zero youth detention,” regardless of the well-established proven fact that 15-17-year-old criminals could be each bit as harmful and violent as adults.
With a view to obtain this objective, the council’s governing majority has moved to create packages like Restorative Neighborhood Pathways, the place juveniles arrested for a lot of crimes by no means see a decide and are despatched to satisfy with community-based nonprofit teams, with little oversight. This is only one instance of how King County’s experimental juvenile justice method is coming on the expense of public security.
King County might face scrutiny and a possible investigation from outdoors teams, together with the U.S. Division of Justice. As a former federal prosecutor, I do know that the Prosecutor’s Workplace is strolling a dangerously positive line, however it’s important to keep in mind that survivors of sexual assault have civil rights, too.
Simply final week, the Citizen Action Defense Fund sent a letter formally requesting that the civil rights divisions of the Washington Lawyer Common’s Workplace and the Justice Division formally examine the alleged violations of the civil rights of survivors of sexual assault and failures to satisfy constitutional and statutory duties. Though the County Code prohibits sexual assault referrals to RCP, the authorized fund acquired data by means of public disclosure that displays not less than 20 people accused of sexual assault had been diverted to RCP. This diversion of sentencing and conviction is deeply troubling as a result of there is no such thing as a court docket oversight and little accountability.
Such equally low sexual-assault charging charges have attracted investigations in different jurisdictions. In 2014, an almost 17% sexual assault charging price ended the profession of an elected prosecutor in Montana’s Missoula County after the DOJ decided that low sexual-assault charging charges mirrored coaching and supervisory points, violations {of professional} codes of conduct and a callous disregard for victims of rape.
In an period the place we’re taught to imagine survivors of sexual assault, in a metropolis as progressive as Seattle, it’s onerous to think about that juvenile rape survivors should battle, usually unsuccessfully, to be acknowledged by King County Juvenile Division prosecutors.
The KCPAO should be much more clear with group leaders about why they’re selecting to not prosecute underage sexual assault perpetrators. Based mostly on the info I’ve been supplied, it seems that the PAO’s efforts are slanted towards defending the offenders as a substitute of working as an advocate for underage women reporting these crimes.
I feel being a father has made me a greater, extra compassionate chief. I work onerous to make the fitting choices for my daughter and all of the mother and father and kids I signify. Ladies who report sexual assault are courageous and need to be believed and have their offender absolutely investigated and charged. And though there’s nothing that may ever make up for the trauma engendered by sexual assault, victims need to have the King County Prosecutor’s Workplace make its easiest effort to convey sexual predators to justice.
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