Tag Archives: Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison

Features

Is It the Era of Ann? : A Retrospective of Ann Davison’s First Year in Office

Despite the shift in rhetoric, the City Attorney’s Office may not have changed as much under Ann Davison as you’d think.

by Guy Oron

(This article was originally published on Real Change and has been reprinted under an agreement.)

When Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison took office, she pledged to bring “quiet, behind-the-scenes” leadership and integrity to the law department. Her election was hotly contested, narrowly beating out abolitionist public defender Nicole Thomas-Kennedy in what many perceived to be a conservative “backlash” election. 

After the election, the one-time Republican lieutenant governor candidate became an early backer of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “Operation New Day” to tackle visible homelessness and poverty, meeting with business owners in Little Saigon and Westlake and pledging to increase prosecutions in order to “disrupt the cycle of addiction, theft, drug sales, and human suffering.”

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Voices

OPINION: End Harmful and Ineffectual Prosecutions in Seattle Municipal Court

by Anita Khandelwal and Mark Stroh

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office has embarked on a strategy that will harm our community’s most vulnerable members and lead to the incarceration of individuals too mentally ill to stand trial. The city attorney should abandon this counterproductive effort and allow service providers to work with these individuals without criminal legal system interference.

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News

Davison’s Plan to Clear Case Backlog Includes Dismissing Nearly 2,000 Misdemeanors

by Erica C. Barnett

(This article originally appeared on PubliCola and has been reprinted with permission.)

City Attorney Ann Davison’s office announced Davison will decline to prosecute nearly 2,000 misdemeanor cases referred by the Seattle Police Department as part of an effort to eliminate what she has described as a 5,000-case backlog left over by her predecessor, Pete Holmes. “In order to maintain close-in-time filing for present day cases, some cases from the backlog will be declined, including those involving: Property Destruction, Theft, Criminal Trespass, and Non-DUI Traffic,” the announcement from Davison’s office says.

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