Chapter 14

• Jurisdiction: United States

Chapter 14 Charging and Plea Bargaining

Prosecutor Filing and Disposition Standards

"You file it; you try it." That was the often-repeated adage during my early days in the King County Prosecutor's Office. There are over twenty law enforcement agencies in King County that investigate crimes, the largest being the Seattle Police Department and the King County Sheriff. In my early days in the prosecutor's office, a detective in one of these law enforcement agencies would investigate a crime or crimes, compile a police report, and then present the case to a deputy prosecutor on the fifth floor of the courthouse for the filing of criminal charges.

Detectives would deputy shop—seek out a deputy prosecuting attorney who would likely file the case. Certain deputies became favorites. One of the safeguards against a deputy filing a shoddy case was the slogan "You file it; you try it." The trouble was that what would be a "fileable case" according to one deputy prosecutor, could be a "decline to file" for another. No formal standards for filing criminal charges existed.

The practice of deputy shopping ended when we created the Filing Unit in the Criminal Division. Rather than a case being presented to individual deputies, all cases were submitted to the Filing Unit that was headed by a senior deputy who directed deputy prosecutors and staff. This change in the Division's operations resulted in improved accountability and more uniformity in how cases are handled.

The prosecutor's role in deciding whether to file criminal charges is a powerful one. The prosecutor decides whether the law is valid and whether the evidence in the case is sufficient for charging. When a prosecutor reviews a case submitted by law enforcement, the prosecutor can file charges, decline to file charges, or send it back to law enforcement for more information or investigation. Much of my time in the prosecutor's office was spent reviewing cases. I spent multiple tours as the head of the Filing Unit. This may be a stretch, but I think that during a rotation stint on the Filing Unit, a single deputy prosecutor may decline to file charges in more cases than a defense attorney can expect to get dismissed and acquitted in a career.

A prosecutor is vested with discretion when making decisions about whether criminal charges should be filed and what crime or crimes should be charged. Those decisions affect human lives, the administration of justice, and the community as a whole. In my early days in the office, the only legal standard was the ethical one in the Code...