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SNOHOMISH COUNTY—The Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office is still struggling to keep up with its ever-increasing criminal case backlog four years after the pandemic closed and restricted the court systems.

Snohomish County Prosecutor Jason Cummings informed the Lynnwood Times getting caught up on case backlog is “a little bit like playing whack-a-mole.”

Since last the Lynnwood Times and Prosecutor Cummings spoke about the backlog in February 2023, his office has been diligently working on reducing cases at the District Court level but as a result the felony backlog has increased. Now the focus is on regulating the felony backlog, but this could lead to an increase of backlog in District Court, Cummings noted.

In a little over a year the Prosecutor’s Office went from 6,600 felony cases to 5,100 cases today but in that same timeframe Cummings’ office saw an increase from 6,700 District Court cases to 9,000.

Additionally, the county is nearing an all-time high for the number of open homicide cases it currently has.

In the last 12 months, the Prosecutor’s Office has been averaging about five felony jury trials a month (not counting bench trials and dispositions), and only five or six of those are the non-violent variety.

“My team has really been doing an amazing job with the limited resources we have but it just continues to put added pressure on them,” said Cummings. “You get out of trial then boom you’re back in again.”

Just minutes before our conversation with Cummings, he checked in with one of his victim witness advocates just to see how she was doing. According to Cummings she said she constantly felt like she’s been playing catch up and has been in non-stop trials since last November.

Cummings says the problem is his office is “really hurting on the employment front.” Since 2018 62 Criminal Deputy Prosecuting Attorneys (DPA) have left the office—the same amount of positions the office has budgeted, basically a 100% turnover rate.

“We’ve basically had a help wanted sign open for the last six years,” said Cummings. “Right now, I’m down to a skeleton crew in my non-violent charging but that had to be done because I needed to move someone into my non-violent trial team because their caseloads were over 150 cases a person which is just unsustainable. We keep robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Today, the Prosecutor’s Office still has six vacancies with two more potentially pending (meaning they’ve given their notice).

One of the scariest statistics right now, Cummings added, is what’s taking place at Juvenile Court currently.

This corroborates with the recent publishing of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chief annual crime report which found that juvenile cases across Washington have effectively doubled in the last two years.

In 2022, the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office had 900 referrals for Juvenile Court. In 2023 that inched up to be just under 1,200 referrals. The Office is currently enroute to have approximately 1,800 referrals this year—almost double the referrals for juvenile crime in Snohomish County.

This also affects backlog especially given the recent vacancy left at the Juvenile Court level.

The Prosecutor’s Office went from having 366 cases of backlog, which was under pre-pandemic numbers, to about 1,038 cases that are backlogged, meaning that priority is given to in custody reviews (which means that out of custody cases take longer to get to due to the overall increase in volume).

Prosecutor Cummings has been regularly communicating with the Snohomish County Council and Executive Dave Somers requesting more resources, he informed the Lynnwood Times. Part of the problem, he noted, is that the Prosecutor’s Office could be more competitive with neighboring jurisdictions.

“It’s not acceptable, it’s not sustainable,” said Cummings. “Folks are leaving this office to go work for the state, to go work for the AG’s [Attorney General’s] Office, I’ve lost to Pierce County, to Whatcom County. Our salaries are just not competitive right now.”

Positions at the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office start at $78 thousand a year, for a starting salary for a DPA. This is an attorney who has graduated from law school and passed the bar. Other counties in the region start their DPA’s at $100 thousand and provide a signing bonus.

Yakima County, for example, just issued a $15,000 signing bonus for new hires in addition to the $100 thousand a year salary.

In a recent study conducted by the county, it found that attorneys working for the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office are about 30% under the market value. There are currently negotiations at the county level to increase base salaries for attorneys to not only keep those working for the Prosecutor’s Office but also attract new people.

Two weeks ago, the County Council unanimously approved to place, what they’re calling a public safety sales tax, on the November ballot. If that measure passes that could allocate about $2.7 million to the Prosecutor’s Office which could hire close to 20 new positions, not all of them attorneys, however. Some would be victim witness advocates which are also critical to the judicial system.

“This would absolutely provide additional resources to bring down this backlog and allow us to effectively deal with the cases we currently have,” said Cummings.

Cummings has prepared a priority package request for Executive Somers for more funding, which he plans to present to the County Council soon leading up to the Executive’s submission of the biennium budget proposal this September.

The Lynnwood Times reached out to Executive Somers’ Office for comment regarding whether he plans to allocate more funds to the Prosecutor’s Office in coming years but were told that no announcements would be made until the proposed budget is finalized.

Last year during Cummings presentation to council he “took baby steps,” he said, requesting about eight more bodies which he didn’t receive. His office did, however, get a victim witness advocate increase from a .5 to a 1.0 and two project positions which were otherwise American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) positions which would have been cut as the funding dried up. Those project positions are still slated to be eliminated soon.

This year Cummings plans to request about 20 more bodies, a combination of attorneys and staff.

Included in the Executive’s last proposed budget it called for a 3% reduction to the Prosecutor’s Office which Cummings said would be “critical.”

“The criminal division in my office alone would experience a $700 thousand cut – that’s five to six DPA’s. That puts us well below the 2008 staffing levels were effectively functioning at right now,” said Cummings.

Although felony cases dropped since the Blake decision, in which many drug-related crimes that would have been felonies were dropped, felony referrals have still largely remained the same.

Currently the Prosecutor’s Office has over 80 open homicide files but not all of them have been charged and some of these are awaiting competency decisions or restoration. A few of these are also cold cases.

Just last May, the Prosecutor’s Office brought Mitchell Gaff to a guilty verdict, who murdered Judith Weavers inside her Rucker Avenue home in Everett in 1984—a cold case that was successfully brought to a close 30 years in-the-making.

Prosecutor Cummings hopes to continue working closely with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office to bring an end to more cold case investigations in the near future.

Author: Kienan Briscoe