KING COUNTY, Wash. — A new executive order issued today by King County Executive Dow Constantine intends to streamline inquests into law enforcement-involved deaths.
The executive order plans to simplify proceedings, implement a multidisciplinary panel to evaluate law enforcement practices, and suggest reforms to improve the safety of community members and officers.
“Families deserve accountability, officers deserve fairness, and the public deserves a clear, unbiased account of what happened in the case of an officer-involved death,” said Executive Constantine. “This streamlined inquest process will deliver objectivity, while easing the emotional toll on all involved, and will allow more effective review of officer training and use-of-force policies to help jurisdictions improve procedures and minimize the chance of deadly encounters involving law enforcement.”
According to a press release from the King County Executive, under the County Charter, an inquest is held whenever an interaction with law enforcement or corrections officers plays a significant part in a person’s death and is an administrative, fact-finding inquiry into the causes and circumstances of the death.
Key changes in the new executive order:
- Inquests will now be completed within 12 months of a person’s death; previously, inquests often occurred years after the deadly use-of-force incident
- A new all-volunteer Deadly Incident Review and Recommendation Panel will meet regularly to review the outcome of inquest proceedings and develop recommendations for consideration by community members and policymakers. Previously, once inquest juries completed interrogatories, there was no further review of a case. The new panel will have expertise in law enforcement accountability, civil rights law, mental health, academia, and judicial practice, and will include a person whose family member died after an interaction with a law enforcement or corrections officer.
- The inquest hearing participants will now include the Inquest Administrator, Inquest Program attorney(s), witnesses, and the jury. Counsel from the parties involved in the deadly use-of-force incident will have the opportunity to present their view of the incident to the inquest attorneys, but will not be direct participants in the inquest itself.
While much will change under the new Executive Order, some aspects of the current process will remain, including live streaming and posting hearings to promote transparency, the comprehensive gathering of records and evidence to inform the inquest, and Inquest Administrators, who are retired judges, continuing to preside over hearings as a neutral party.
The following will be the first cases reviewed using the updated inquest process:
- The death of Shaun Fuhr, which occurred on April 29, 2020.
- The death of River Hudson, which occurred on May 6, 2020.
- The death of Denis Rodriguez Martinez, which occurred on February 7, 2019.
- The death of Ryan Smith, which occurred on May 8, 2019.
The death of Isaiah Obet, which occurred on June 10, 2017, will also proceed now that former officer Jeff Nelson has been sentenced in his criminal case.
According to the press release, Executive Constantine first sought to amend the inquest process in 2018, but proceedings were held up for several years by legal challenges. Those challenges were resolved through a 2021 ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court, and inquests resumed soon after. Since then, 21 hearings have been conducted by the Inquest Program, under the process outlined in a 2021 executive order.
Executive Constantine believes the Supreme Court’s decision made inquests unnecessarily contentious and drawn out, and families were unnecessarily forced to relive a traumatic event.
Considering this, Executive Constantine worked to draft this new executive order to update the county’s inquest process. Additionally, as the state Office of Independent Investigations (OII) comes online over the next few years, improved death investigations are expected to enhance the overall process.
The new executive order is effective immediately and the new Deadly Incident Review and Recommendation Panel is expected to convene for the first time late this spring after a nomination process is completed, according to the press release.
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