Four years ago, there may have been complaints with Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell — there were certainly critical newspaper articles — but even in a year that was supposed to be a blue wave, nobody bothered to challenge the Republican prosecutor.
This year, however, it's different.
Haskell is facing three challengers, including current and former employees who object to his leadership.
"The political climate changes all the time," Haskell says. "You don't own the chair, it's on the lease to you for a period of time."
In many ways, the political climate — with a rising sense of disorder sparking backlash against progressive prosecutors even in places like San Francisco — should be ideal for a prosecutor who prides himself on not negotiating with chronic criminals.
Yet earlier this year, the Inlander revealed a slew of racist and otherwise offensive posts made on Facebook and the alt-right social media site Gab from the prosecutor's wife, Lesley. That included posts calling MSNBC host Joy Reid the n-word, declaring herself a "proud white nationalist" and espousing rhetoric like "our race is dying, we need to make more White babies!"
(Lesley has since made her Gab account private and changed her profile description to "Damn! What's she saying that we can't see!?!")
At a press conference earlier this year, Haskell declared that while he didn't believe his wife was a racist herself, her internet posts certainly were racist.
"They're reprehensible," Haskell said. "And they've caused a lot of pain."
Three candidates filed in the subsequent months. First came Stephanie Olsen, who spent 12 years working as a deputy prosecutor and nearly four as a Washington state assistant attorney general. She says she won a statewide innovation award for her work developing electronic search warrants.
Then came Deputy Prosecutor Stefanie Collins, an aggressive 28-year veteran still with the Spokane County Prosecutor's Office who has several big-name cases under her belt. She echoes a lot of tough-on-crime rhetoric — including criticizing progressive prosecutors in places like Portland — but presents a plan to reduce recidivism with a creative approach to plea bargaining.
Finally, there's the only non-Republican in the race, former Police Ombudsman Commission Chairperson Deb Conklin, a pastor who says she spent the last four years reestablishing her decades-old bar credentials specifically to run against Haskell on a "Smart Justice" platform.
"It's about decades of an office that overcharges and oversentences but keeps getting worse results," Conklin says.
But with Haskell having the advantage of the incumbent — losing in the primary would be a big upset — and Conklin running as a third-party independent, with her legal experience as a Clallam County prosecutor 35 years in the past, the big fight to advance to the general from the Aug. 2 primary could come down to Stephanie vs. Stefanie.
CUTTING BACKLOGS
Both Olsen and Collins have direct, first-hand experience with Haskell's office. When the Inlander asks Collins if she believes that Haskell shares his wife's ideology, she pivots to alleging that, other than at candidate forums, she hadn't seen her boss in years.
"I have no contact with Mr. Haskell," she says. "He stays in his office. When I'm out at community events, he is not present."
Collins, who supervised the domestic violence unit a little over a decade ago, is particularly disturbed now by a two-year backlog in domestic violence cases.
Haskell argues that's the consequence of a pandemic.
"The courts almost shut down for a good period of time — a lot of the hearings that were being conducted were to release people, due to the threat of COVID inside the facility," Haskell says. "Crime didn't take a day off."
He calls on Collins to do her part to help fix it. But Collins argues it's a result of Haskell's mismanagement.
"Many people sat at home while court was closed, and that would have been the perfect time to review a backlog and fix it," Collins says.
And that's exacerbated by a labor shortage, she suggests, as qualified attorneys have left the prosecutor's office.
"I think the employment environment has something to do with the fact that Mr. Haskell is not able to recruit people to work there," Collins says.
CHRONIC OFFENDER SYNDROME
Olsen was one of those attorneys who left. She says the atmosphere under Haskell was morale-sapping. She echoes a long-running complaint from Haskell's critics — that he doesn't exercise enough discretion when it comes to charging felonies.
"You've got 2,600 cases going through — there's not enough days in the year to even do felony cases, let alone civil cases," Olsen says. "You just clog up the court system with cases that you don't necessarily need to be going to trial on."
Olsen could point to a number of cases that might not need to be filed, she says, including the trial of a juvenile for stealing $10 of allowance. But Olsen specifically cites a case where the possession of a single pill was brought to trial. It was one of her cases, she says. She remembers the pill name, Clonazepam, though not the name of the defendant.
She thought it was absurd.
"We had a jury, and it was ridiculous," Olsen says.
But under Haskell's chronic offender's policy, if a defendant had nine felonies or more on their record, the prosecutor handling the case had to get Haskell's signature to offer a lighter sentence or divert the offender to therapeutic courts. In that case, she says, Haskell wouldn't budge.
Yet Haskell says being particularly tough on chronic offenders prevents crime and saves the community resources.
"The one thing I do know is that they won't be committing crimes in the community during the time," Haskell says.
Each candidate believes that chronic offenders need to be dealt with, but they disagree over the strategy.
Collins wants to replace the notion of plea bargaining — where a prosecutor and a defense attorney try to come up with a plan for the offender — with what she calls "offender accountability plans" for offenders who want a deal.
"They come to us, and they say, 'This is what I did, I understand the impact of my choices...,' and I want them to put together a plan for themselves on how they're going to get themselves out of the system."
Yet Olsen is skeptical that the plan is meaningfully different from a traditional plea bargain — and has doubts that it's constitutional.
"No defense attorney's going to agree to have their client write something down that they did, prior to even getting a deal," Olsen says.
Olsen says the office needs to focus on improving and adding to what already works, like expanding therapeutic courts. No need to reinvent the wheel.
"There's a wheel already built; we have to just make it rounder and better," she says.
PROSECUTORS, RACE
Earlier this year, one local defense attorney attempted, unsuccessfully, to get Haskell removed from the case because of both his wife's comments and a study that looked at data from 1996 through 2020. That study found that Spokane County prosecutors were much more likely to add an optional weapon enhancement to first-degree robbery charges when defendants were Black, resulting in more jail time.
Haskell's office countered with a study from Police Strategies, a firm that the Spokane's police chief and sheriff frequently cite to push back against accusations of systemic bias. It found that, overall, Spokane County charges roughly the same proportion of Black defendants as the proportion of Black suspects arrested by police.
"There's been attempts to find evidence that we are biased in one way or another," Haskell says. "They haven't worked out very well."
But beyond data, there have been specific examples that critics have used to allege racial bias.
In 2016, LaShawn Jameison — a Black former Eastern Washington University football player — was charged with the murder of a bystander. Video showed he was innocent. In fact, he was hiding behind a car when the victim was shot by a man named Anthony Williams. Jameison had only fired once or twice, only after the victim was hit, and facing in the opposite direction from the victim.
But under Haskell, the Spokane County Prosecutor's Office pushed the murder and manslaughter charges aggressively, even appealing the case after it was dismissed in Superior Court.
"I believe they went after him with the voracity they did because he was a Black man with tattoos," says City of Newport Prosecuting Attorney Josh Maurer, who defended Jameison pro-bono. "It was a travesty."
But it's not just Haskell who's implicated in the case. Collins was the deputy prosecutor who led the prosecution — the state Court of Appeals calls out Collins by name when her factual claims were contradicted by the video evidence.
Today, Collins says race never entered into the equation for her. She argues that Jameison and his friend deserved blame for stoking the confrontation.
"They prepared for battle," she says. "They armed themselves, and they waited."
Yet the court records suggest that, in fact, Jameison only armed himself after Williams did.
"I don't have to smear her. She has her own skeletons."
"He was in jail for a number of months, and he lost his college scholarship," Olsen says. "She prosecuted an innocent man. She destroyed his life."
Olsen portrays Collins as trying to win at all costs, while Collins accuses Olsen of stooping to dirty politics.
"She sounded on the verge of tears when I confirmed that I would run, and she told me she would attack me — not my experience or plan, but me personally," Collins wrote in an email to the Inlander.
Olsen vehemently denies that conversation ever took place.
"I don't have to smear her," Olsen says. "She has her own skeletons. She's made so many enemies. There's plenty of people who are happy to smear her that are not me."
But Collins has plenty of fans, too, on both sides of the courtroom and both sides of the ideological aisle, including defense attorneys like Steve Riesch who praise her common-sense discretion for resolving cases.
Collins argues her record of professional success speaks for itself. She points to the way she helped gain the trust of the wary family of Black infant Caiden Henry, and got a guilty verdict for the family.
"Maybe compare my trial stats to hers," Collins writes in an email about Olsen.
But Olsen, who says her trial stats are just fine, thank you, argues that type of mentality is a major part of the problem in the office. Olsen says she witnessed perverse incentives at play, where those who had more trials under their belts received promotions — incentivizing rushing cases to trials or going to trial even on cases that were shaky.
Conklin, the progressive pastor, who says she's the only candidate who can define systemic racism, calls for a dramatic change to shift the culture in the prosecutor's office — she pushes for a higher evidentiary standard for filing charges and wants the office to stop using threats of dubious charges to negotiate a plea.
"I have a very different philosophy of how to approach the job," Conklin says.
But Haskell says he isn't dogged by doubts or regrets about things he could have handled differently. The key to fixing any perception problem his office may have, he says, isn't big changes. It's to stay the course.
"You continue doing what you're doing," Haskell says. "You do it right, and then you make sure everybody else is doing it." ♦
[CORRECTION: This story has been updated online to correct the spelling of LaShawn Jamieson's name.]
