WA: prosecutors bailing out

Plenty of job openings up in Mount Vernon, if you could work for this guy:

Prosecutor’s Office losing many lawyers
- Some point to hefty workloads, interoffice tension as factors

As caseloads have increased in the Skagit County Prosecutor’s Office over the past three years, so has the departure of staff attorneys. Much of the blame is directed at Prosecutor Tom Seguine, who took office in January 2003 with an ambitious agenda that saw about a 50 percent increase in criminal filings that year.

The recent wave of resignations brings the total office turnover for the past three years to 12 lawyers — nine deputy prosecutors and three civil attorneys...

Seguine’s critics say his policies on charging and plea bargains have created the difficult work environment. Dennis Scott, a lawyer with 30 years of experience as both a prosecutor and defense lawyer (said), “If you have a prosecutor’s office that refuses to see the benefit of resolving cases equitably, then you have crushing caseloads... Morale is so bad that people have difficulty finding the time to be civil to each other. My experience was that there was no collegiality, which is necessary to sounding out good legal strategy and making reasoned decisions.”

Defense lawyers say deputy prosecutors tell them they want defendants to plead as charged, leaving little room for negotiation. “From a defendant’s standpoint, what exactly would be the benefit of pleading guilty when you can take your chances and end up with the same result at trial?” said Scott, who previously worked for the Skagit County Public Defender.

Seguine’s plea bargaining policy has made a critic out of a former supporter from his own office. Former deputy prosecutor Ron Costeck said Seguine’s philosophy got in the way of his stated goals. “The rigid approach to some of the plea bargaining is not victim-friendly or victim-oriented,” Costeck said. “That neither caters to the community nor to the victims.”

Surmising from the photo accompanying the story, once they're dog-tired from handling the 50 percent increase in criminal filings (curiously enough, not tied to anything approaching a 50 percent increase in local crime), it looks like deputies also are being put to work doing construction on the elected prosecutor's house. I'm probably wrong about that detail, though.