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This story has been bouncing around the feminist blogs for a little while now, but I didn’t realize it was in Washington State. It’s pretty grim. I’m not quoting the most explicit parts of the story, but The Longview Daily News has more details. What’s pertinent is:

In October 2012, a woman was held against her will, taped naked to a chair and sexually assaulted. This week, Cowlitz County prosecutors had the same woman arrested to help prove the case against her alleged captors.

The 43-year-old woman — the victim and prime witness in the case — has not been charged with any crime. She just wasn’t showing up for pre-trial meetings with prosecutors, despite promising to do so several times.

So earlier this month they obtained a judge’s order for a material witness warrant.

It’s a little-used procedure under state law that allows police to arrest a witness of a crime to ensure they show up for court. Chief Criminal Deputy James Smith said such warrants are rare and requested only “as a last resort.”

In this case, it had the added irony of using a warrant to hold the woman against her will so she can help convict someone else of holding her against her will.

Prosecutors said they can’t comment directly on an on-going case. Generally, though, Smith said the severity of the charges is always a factor in taking such a serious step.

Like the people I linked to above, I’m horrified that this happened.* The counties should certainly take up prosecutions of this sort, but detaining a rape victim — one who was for the most part cooperating, but had missed a court date — can’t possibly be the best way to go about it.

It certainly feels like an abuse of the material witness statute. I hope the legislature will take up both better ways to help witnesses who might be transient get to court and to reign in this type of use of the statute. And I hope prosecutors who might be in a position to do this will reconsider.

I mean, we certainly want to prosecute rapists to the extent possible. But surely not by locking up victims, and potentially re-victimizing them. Maybe some of the lawyers in the comments section can think of positive changes to the law.

If you want to contact the Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney’s office and ask them to do better next time, you can do so here.

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– If you’re going to have an ACA horror story, it would be nice if that story was based in fact. But that’s probably too much to ask.

– It’s also important to emphasize going forward that the pre-clearance requirement in Section 5 was far from obsolete. Because of the nature of elections, before-the-fact challenges to vote suppression are far more effective than after-the-fact ones. Once a state has conducted an election, it becomes much more difficult for the courts to order remedies. A pre-clearance requirement is not sufficient, but it’s a crucial part of voting rights protection, and Congress should not concede this issue to the Supreme Court going forward.

– The King County Council officially put the measure to save Metro on the ballot.

– Transportation Advocacy Day is coming up. I still haven’t got my Transportation Advocacy Day tree, or done most of my Transportation Advocacy Day shopping.

– Several years ago Washington legislators arrived at a sensible compromise, requiring districts to include measures of student growth in their evaluations of teachers – but leaving it to the districts to decide what that actually meant. It’s a good system that should be given time to be properly implemented. But Duncan insists that teacher evaluations be directly linked to specific test scores, even where states have chosen not to do so.

– I still don’t understand Bitcoin, and I’m genuinely sorry for the people who lost money here, but, you know, there are reasons for regulations on actual money.

– Did you get any snow? Here are school closures/delays in Washington.

– Despite how amazingly think-about-what-you-did that assignment is, i’s total bullshit that his record remains clean, and ideally his punishment would remain in place and he’d have to make his being-a-decent-human presentation and have to write “don’t be a dick” on the blackboard fifty times.

– Here’s another view of the brand new ship Macaw Arrow, docking at Port of Olympia on it’s first ever journey, to deliver “frack sand” proppants for fracking North Dakota oil shale.

– I’m not really in the habit of linking to sermons here, or listening to them online, really, but this one really got to me.

– The anti-choice movement is up in arms over my play, MOM BABY GOD, and I have a simple message for them: Bring it on. We’re not backing down.

– I’m afraid Goldy was perhaps too irenic to Boeing management here.

Well this certainly bodes poorly for police reform. As well as being pretty crappy in its own right.

I just got a call from Seattle Times reporter Steve Miletich confirming a rumor I’d heard recently: Seattle police chief Harry Bailey has overturned the one-day suspension of Officer John Marion, the cop who threatened to harass me at work in retaliation for reporting on police misconduct. Chief Bailey wants to provide more training instead, and as Miletich explains, Bailey doesn’t seem to understand that he’s also apparently overturned the misconduct ruling itself

The police in this city are problematic on a level enough for the DOJ to get involved. They have a pattern stretching back over a decade. The last mayor half assed reform only when the Feds got involved, and previous mayors didn’t even do that much. It’s disheartening to see Ed Murray’s team not even be able to match the halfassedness of his predecessor.

But maybe I’m making too much of one thing. Oh (Seattle Times link).

Bailey, who was appointed interim chief last month by Mayor Ed Murray, said he took the action as part of a sweeping review of more than 25 pending grievances stemming from backlogged disciplinary actions imposed by former interim Chief Jim Pugel and former Police Chief John Diaz.

He said he wants to “get all of these things cleaned up before the new chief comes,” a reference to Murray’s goal to find a permanent chief by the end of April.

Bailey said he was working with the City Attorney’s Office and the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) to resolve some of the cases.

We let police officers carry guns and arrest people on the public dime. We ought to expect there will be some accountability when the fuck up, but it’s looking like even that is too much to ask.

– The Big Burger Boycott is today, Seattle.

– Volkswagen’s top labor representative threatened on Wednesday to try to block further investments by the German carmaker in the southern United States if its workers there are not unionized. [h/t]

– (video plays automatically) Well I’m no expert but firing Hanford whistleblowers seems like a bad idea.

– Honestly? You probably don’t want just any old scab driving your kids around first thing in the morning.

– At what point does Rodney Tom just give up any pretense of being a Democrat(Seattle Times link)?

– The Dignity of Work

The Pay It Forward program (Spokesman-Review link) sounds like it’s good as far as it goes.

Instead, under a bill proposed in the House, they’d pay after leaving school in the form of a small, fixed percentage of their future income for up to 25 years.

Rep. Larry Seaquist, who introduced the Pay It Forward program in House Bill 2720, said with tuition costs and loan debt skyrocketing over the past decade, those from low and middle income families find it increasingly difficult to access higher education. The Democrat from Gig Harbor said the Pay It Forward program would remove that barrier.

I don’t want to be too down on this It certainly seems better than getting into debt with whatever the interest rates are to go to college. Look, I hate to be a broken record here, the best way to make college affordable is to not make it so expensive. So long as we are a high tuition state, things like this are eating around the edges, not attacking the problem head on.

The biggest barrier to letting people from underserved communities into college is the fact that it’s fucking expensive. And this plan, while a better alternative for some, is still pretty expensive. Instead of paying for it with taxes, preferably as progressive ones as we can muster in this state, it’s gimmicks like this. And look, if this gets people who wouldn’t otherwise go to college into college, great. But ultimately it’s a poor substitute for making college affordable.

– On the Killing of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn

– I’m looking forward to the Broadway Bikeway

– Few people ever stop to question why the 358 seemed to carry all of society’s “undesirables” — but the answer is simple: Because the 358 gets people to the necessary services they require to get by in an economy with no safety net.

– Remember, Stein’s report is quite informative – when Bush struggled with Part D implementation, he used executive-branch powers to tweak implementation. Obama is taking the same steps now. The difference is, when Bush did it, no one in Congress, in either party, ran around whining about the president creating a “government of one.” It just didn’t seem that important – because it wasn’t.

– Here’s hoping Oregon can pass their background checks legislation.

– Is Bertha still stuck?

– Just a quick note: When Drinking Liberally is in wandering mode, Darryl is going to post that thread in the morning, and I’ll post an Open Thread in the afternoon. Since you can use either as an open thread* it shouldn’t change conversations here too much.

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There are two bills in Olympia that recognize that it’s not always in the state’s interest to keep felonies on people’s criminal records. First one that would let members of tribes with fishing rights vacate convictions for fishing off reservation before 1975 (Yakima Herald link). Since they have had their rights recognized for decades now, it makes sense to vacate the convictions of the people who made that possible. Also they had the right to fish there, even if the state didn’t always recognize it. Fortunately, that’s another lopsided vote.

House Bill 2080, which passed by a vote of 92-6, would allow those tribal members to apply to the sentencing court to expunge their misdemeanor, gross misdemeanor or felony convictions. Family members and tribal officials could also seek a vacated criminal record on behalf of a deceased person. The court would have the discretion to vacate the conviction, unless certain conditions apply, such as if the person was convicted for a violent crime or crime against a person.

“We have a responsibility to try and make things right,” said the bill’s prime sponsor Rep. David Sawyer, D-Tacoma. “It simply allows tribal members to apply to have those convictions vacated so they can live their lives in dignity. It’s essentially an apology as well.”

Tribal members and others were roughed up, harassed and arrested in the 1960s and 1970s while asserting their right to fish for salmon off-reservation under treaties signed with the federal government more than 100 years before. At the time, however, those acts violated Washington state regulations, and there were raids by game wardens and other clashes with police. The Northwest fish-ins known as the “Fish Wars” were modeled after civil rights movement sit-ins and were part of larger demonstrations to assert American Indian rights nationwide.

The other thing is a bill to allow prostitutes to clear their convictions stemming from prostitution if they were a result of. This story is a bit sensationalist, and probably makes some generalizations about why people become prostitutes that aren’t great. Not every prostitute is a victim or trying to leave, but this bill is still a good thing.

This session, Washington lawmakers hope to support victims by expanding a law to allow survivors of sex trafficking to clear their records of multiple prostitution convictions. A current law, passed two years ago, only allows for removing one conviction.

The new bill continues the state’s role as a leader in legislation to combat trafficking. So far, only about a dozen states have similar laws on the books. The latest legislative effort also continues a national trend toward taking a “victim-centered” approach to prostitution.

[…]

“The reality is that individuals engaged in prostitution are often caught and arrested and prosecuted multiple times over their time in ‘the life,'” said King County’s Senior Deputy Prosecutor Val Richey, who works exclusively on human trafficking cases. “Allowing them to remove those convictions because they were obtained as result of engaging in prostitution through force or coercion makes a lot of sense, whether it’s one conviction or two or three.”

Richey said he hopes the bill expansion passes through the state Senate. An identical expansion to the bill passed the House last year but got stalled in the mostly Republican-controlled Senate. This year the bill’s sponsor said it has a better chance because a compromise is being sorted out.

In both cases it shows the legislature, or at least some members, see the limits of the criminal justice system. That in those instances, people having a criminal record is worse than the thing that we’re trying to prevent by convicting people and giving them those records in the first place.

I didn’t realize this was even in the works as a possibility, but Jay Inslee has put a stop to the death penalty when he’s in office (Spokesman Review link). While I’d prefer him commuting people’s sentences or the legislature actually passing a ban on the death penalty, this is an important thing, and I’m glad he did it. Still the real work to make this permanent is ahead.

Inslee announced a moratorium today on capital punishment, saying he will issue a reprieve if any execution warrant comes to his desk. He’s not issuing a blanket commutation of sentences, and anyone who gets a reprieve from him could still be executed by a successor.

He expects the moratorium to spark a conversation about the death penalty in Washington.

There was a discussion in yesterday’s Open Thread about how much it means. I don’t know if there’s much of a chance to get something passed this session, but it might be worth letting your legislator know if you want the death penalty ended.

– Maria Cantwell is right that the DC Football team has the wrong name.

– If I were writing for The Seattle Times’ Ed Board, I wouldn’t oppose the minimum wage.

– State Senate Republicans set new date to finish negotiating with themselves on transportation plan they don’t have votes for

– I would hope Gillibrand’s military sexual assault bill would get a vote.

– The NFL Will Never Be ‘Ready’ for an Openly Gay Player

– So keep on bikini-ing, I guess, bikini baristas! And I’ll keep on driving the extra 10 minutes down Aurora to get to a Starbucks or something because all the hometown pride in the world isn’t going to get me to drink crotch-coffee.

As you might have heard, this Wednesday there was a bit of a parade in Downtown Seattle. Given that the crowd was larger than the population of Seattle, getting to and from the event was no small task. Martin H. Duke at Seattle Transit Blog has the early info on how the systems did: Mostly pretty well but he also suggests room for improvement.

In all, a memorable day for transit. All transportation modes were overwhelmed beyond their capacity. Things might have been much worse had it not been for crowds of riders in good cheer, orderly, and forgiving of systems well beyond their design limits. Moreover, agencies showed uncommon agility in mobilizing for Wednesday on short notice, and the efforts of foot soldiers controlling crowds at Westlake station and other places were nothing short of heroic.

[…]

However well Wednesday made the point that Seattle’s transit capacity is valuable, there were certainly some suboptimal operations. In particular, joint tunnel operations are severely capacity-reducing when demand reaches these levels. Your humble correspondent arrived at Westlake a little before 5 pm; lines criscrossed the mezzanine as police limited access to the platform for safety reasons. These volumes compounded the usual bus friction, with restricted movement on the platform, Metro’ s insistence on adding congestion at the point of maximum stress, and the apparent breakdown of Metro’s sequencing system for southbound buses. It was clear that the surge of novice riders was largely waiting for the train, well in excess of the share of platform time granted Link.

Moreover, the consistent weakness of rider information arose once again. The tunnel message boards spouted useless platitudes. The crowd got restless as train headways widened, with no real-time information to satisfy them. Moreover, the instinct of a savvy rider, knowing that full trains will pass up riders further South, is to head to Westlake, which no doubt added to the overflow there. Sound Transit, in a brilliantly creative move, sent some trains “out of service” through Westlake to clear out the other crowds and ran some trains between Stadium and Seatac only. It might have relieved some of the pressure to let people know that taking relatively empty buses a few stops would not maroon them, and in fact might get them home sooner.

I don’t want to downplay the people who were stuck at stops but still and all, with only a couple days to prep the agencies — some that have faced severe budget cuts recently — got most people who wanted to be there downtown. It is a testament to the agencies and to the individuals who pulled it off.

Given some of the nightmares that came out of New Jersey after the game, it wasn’t a given that this would work. Of course people were able to come in slowly (the route was pretty well attended at 7:00 when I left for work) and were able to enjoy Seattle for a while rather than all going home at once. I don’t think there’s any way this could have run perfectly, but it did run pretty damn well.

Sometimes as a Seattle resident I’m disappointed that my legislators aren’t as full-force liberal as I’d like. But at least I can take comfort in not being represented by Matt Shea, because here’s what he’s telling his constituents.

Democrats aren’t stopping the assault against our freedom with tax increases. They also want every law abiding citizen who owns a gun to have a background check…. Initiative 594 would require background checks whenever a firearm is sold or transferred between licensed dealers or private parties, with few exceptions. Any sale or transfer of a firearm must be completed through a dealer. If you gave a firearm to your son, a brother or other family member, the proposed law would require them to have a background check or be in violation. It would criminalize law-abiding citizens people, such as Gonzaga University students Erik Fagan and Dan McIntosh, who used a gun last year to scare off a six-time convicted felon when he tried to break into their on-campus house for money.

Christ what an asshole. Hank at Shallow Cognitions takes care of most of the making fun of this. The fact that this was supposedly a bad bill of the week, but is an initiative, the fact that the initiative doesn’t apply to gifts to family (although, I’ll say don’t give a gun to your felon family members if you have any), the fact that the initiative doesn’t have fuck all to do with university rules about firearms. He also has a link to Matt Shea’s road rage incident, that somehow I hadn’t heard about.

That’s all correct, and worth talking about. But I’m curious about the politics? This is an incredibly popular idea. Background checks should be a no-brainer. They’re also super popular. I mean I get that in an off, off year recall in Colorado this can have some resonance. But as an initiative that will almost certainly go to the people and will probably pass, what the fuck? Does he realize he has to be on the same ballot as the thing a supermajority of gun owners support?

Even if you’re trying to just get favor from the gun lobby, this seems like a poor idea politically. I mean, speak at their rallies and answer questions, I suppose. But to announce it to constituents who almost certainly are majority on the other side seems unhelpful. It seems like even if he isn’t worried about reelection (he got 56% last time in a GOP year, but I don’t know about the quality of his opponent or the district more generally), it would make him less trustworthy.

This is a bit old, but somehow, I’d missed it.

State Senate Democrats sent out a news release today about a bill introduced by their Republican counterparts that would eliminate the elected office of insurance commissioner, which has been filled by Mike Kreidler since 2001. He began his fourth term in office in 2012.

Since federal health care reform passed, Kreidler has been all about health insurance, all the time. He’s the one who determines which insurance plans get included in the state exchange, and last year rankled some critics when he decided that some plans initially did not have robust enough offerings to be included — effectively limiting the options that were available in the exchange. The four plans that were denied entry appealed his decision, and he later settled with them so they all got included after all.

The Senate Republicans’ Bill 6458, which hasn’t even been heard in committee yet, “creates the state insurance board which will be responsible for the oversight of the insurance code.” It “transfers the powers, duties, and functions of the office of the insurance commissioner pertaining to regulation of insurance to the state insurance board.”

I’m not generally a fan of the way we elect so many executive positions. So I could probably hear arguments that putting that power in the Governor’s office is more logical.

Still, it seems to me that at least part of the reason that this could get 13 GOP co-sponsors is because of the way that the office has kicked ass for consumers. Both on the ACA and long before it (Seattle Times link). But if they oppose him making policy they’ve had 4 chances to take that case to the people. This seems like a pretty silly runaround.

– This is the polite way of saying the CRC is fucked, right?

– I have nothing to add about Dinesh D’Souza, but his defenders make me sad.

– After a while, I stopped linking to Macklemore local-boy-makes-good stories. I mean he was crushing it, so whatever at a certain point. But I will say, I’m glad he’s pissing off the right people.

– Oh, Northwest rate payers are subsidizing Kentucky. Seems fair.

– Will the last Republican woman turn out the lights?

– Who could have predicted that Rodney Tom would keep dicking people around?

– I dig the Seattle buildings turning blue and green, but holy cowThe Empire State Building blue and green.