It's not Sunshine Week--that was in March. But, the following story about excessive government secrecy deserves a wider hearing.
Months after two men were convicted and sentenced for murder, Yakima County officials are refusing to release records of how defense attorneys in the case spent $2 million in taxpayer dollars.
County officials have turned down a public records request by the Yakima Herald-Republic on the grounds that billing records are sealed by a Superior Court judge and the courts are not governed by the Washington State Public Records Act.
The bills were submitted to Yakima County by several attorneys defending two men convicted of killing a father and his 3-year-old daughter in their Yakima apartment in 2005.
From a legal perspective, this would initially seem like a no-brainer.
The state Legislature last year amended the Public Records Act to make it clear that legal fees paid for by taxpayers are public records, and an appeal ruling last month in a Thurston County case applied the new rule retroactively, Monahan (the Herald-Republic's attorney) said.
"We don't have any objection to the redaction of protected work product, we simply want to know where the money went," he said.
Yet, the county government has repeatedly failed to turn over the records. Thus, the Herald-Republic has decided to sue. Why have things gotten to this point?
"We have tried every tack short of a lawsuit to break through this unfathomable system," she said. "Part of the frustration has been that we never get a yes or no on our request for documents. It's always, 'We'll have to ask somebody else.'"
Yakima County Prosecutor Ron Zirkle said he supports the newspaper's attempt to gain access to the billing records but also does not want to run afoul of the court.
He said his deputies will file a motion, supplementary to the newspaper's lawsuit, asking the court for direction. "My job is to follow the law," he said, "only I don't know what the law is."
...
A central figure in the case has been Superior Court Judge James Lust, who ordered the records sealed after he was appointed to oversee requests for defense spending. In that role, Lust came to be known as "the budget judge."
Brendan Monahan, the Herald-Republic's attorney, said having a judge sign off on all the financial paperwork in the case was a setup peculiar to Yakima County that blurred the judiciary's role.
Why was a judge involved in approving the costs, and why did he order something that seems to clearly fly in the face of the law? Here's where things get a bit messy.
...the dispute also exposes shortcomings in the statutory framework of potential death penalty cases in Washington and fears by some that defense attorneys are deliberately trying to bankrupt counties as a way of scaring off prosecutors.
Prosecutor Zirkle made a controversial call early on when he gave Sanchez's defense team of Jackie Walsh and Steve Witchley a year to prepare a report on their client called a mitigation packet. Walsh and Witchley, both from Seattle, were on a short list of lawyers in Washington qualified to handle such cases.
The mitigation packet is an informal practice in Washington based on case law that requires prosecutors to consider circumstances in a defendant's background that might mitigate the decision to seek the death penalty.
It is not required by law, but prosecutors, mindful that roughly half of the state's death penalty cases have been overturned by the courts over the past 20 years, have adopted the practice as a hedge against such appeals.
...
Despite being given a year to prepare, Walsh and Witchley missed the first deadline, then broke several more before they were tossed off the case by Superior Court Judge James Hutton for misconduct related to their handling of a witness in the case.
The state is now investigating the attorneys for witness tampering. They'd already racked up about $1 million in charges when they were tossed. And after their replacements finally got the mitigation packet ready, the prosecutor decided not to press for the death penalty, claiming weak evidence that might not stand up to appeal. Yes, it's the same prosecutor who says he doesn't know what the law is when it comes to releasing the financial records on the case.
Sanchez was convicted and sentenced to life without parole, and the other man pled guilty before the trial and was sentenced to thirty years. But was that $2 million well spent? The public has a right to know.
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