Ruling may free dozens of prisoners

A court ruling this week could result in the release of dozens of inmates from the Spokane County Jail and immediately change how police in Washington make arrests.

The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday struck down two laws that allowed the state to suspend drivers’ licenses by mail if the drivers failed to pay traffic fines.

On many local suspended-license arrests, deputies or police officers search the suspects’ cars and find drugs, weapons or other items that lead to further charges, sheriff’s Capt. Dick Collins said.

As a result, Spokane County prosecutors must review every case of the 635 inmates in jail Friday to determine whether they should be released as a result of the court ruling, Collins said.

“It could mean a reduction of inmates by 20 to 25 percent,” Collins said. “Prosecutors are working on it now. Obviously, we will keep the inmates in jail until we get a piece of paper releasing them of charges. But as soon as we get word from the prosecutor, they will be going out the front door.”

Jack Driscoll, chief deputy criminal prosecuting attorney, said he was cross-eyed Friday afternoon after reviewing 635 cases. That review resulted in no immediate releases because the jail didn’t have any inmates arrested only on the charge of third-degree driving with a suspended license.

However, Driscoll’s office must now research whether the court ruling affects other charges. He doubts the ruling will substantially increase vacancy at the jail.

“If the court finds that the officer had no right to make a search because the charge is unconstitutional, then yes” those cases would be dismissed, Driscoll said. “That’s going to be the question to be resolved.”

Driscoll said city prosecutor Howard Delaney has already advised Spokane Police to stop arresting drivers for third-degree driving with a suspended license.

Spokane Valley Police Chief Cal Walker said his department and the sheriff’s officer are undergoing similar reviews of arrest procedures.

“As soon as we heard (about Thursday’s court decision) we sent a message to our appellate attorneys and our training division to start looking at training bulletins for changing our procedures,” Walker said. “By Monday afternoon we should have things pretty well sorted out.”

Walker stressed it’s too early to tell how much of an impact it will have on the cases pending in court.

“I wouldn’t go as far as to say they are all void,” Walker said, referring to charges following arrests for suspended licenses. “There are some constitutional protections. If a search is done during an arrest that is then found unlawful, anything after that unlawful act is not able to be presented at a trial. But there are a number of different reasons why they may be held accountable.”

For instance, if the driver is taken into custody both for driving with a suspended license and for a pending arrest warrant, the arrest warrant would still stand, Walker said.

“It’s a pretty big decision and has some far-reaching consequences. But it doesn’t eliminate the fact that somebody can be arrested for driving on a suspended license,” he said. “The question is whether it was suspended prior to any hearing.”

That was the basis of the cases brought before the Supreme Court. The state mails out hundreds of thousands of notices each year to inform drivers that their licenses have been suspended for failure to deal with tickets or pay fines.

But two men cited by Redmond police argued in their lawsuits that the suspensions violated their constitutional rights to due process because they weren’t offered hearings.

Driscoll said prosecutors have already begun computer searches on citations or warrants issued on cases that hadn’t yet resulted in arrests for the charge of third-degree driving on suspended license.

“We will be dismissing the counts that involve those,” he said. “I don’t know how many permutations, but there is going to be a lot of litigation over this issue.”

The only other court ruling that had such a statewide impact was when Washington’s high court in October 2002 threw out the “felony murder” statute that prosecutors had used for decades. The now-defunct law allowed a felony murder charge to be filed against someone who committed an assault that resulted in death.

Still, Collins, the county’s jail commander, said it would be a relief if the new ruling results in the release of inmates from the jail, which can hold a maximum of 699 inmates.

“Realistically, we are probably talking about releasing less than 50” inmates, Collins said. “If we can reduce the population by 100 for a while, that would be really nice for my staff, as well as the other inmates who are here.”

Deputy prosecutor Clint Francis said he doesn’t like the thought of anybody getting out of jail as a result of the new court ruling.

“Certainly as a member of the driving public, the idea that a judge is putting people who aren’t even responsible enough to go down and pay their tickets out on the road with the rest of the drivers is just abhorrent,” Francis said.

Walker said the bigger concern is that the county doesn’t want to hold any person in jail who shouldn’t be there.

“That’s why they are going to have to take some quick actions,” he said. “We’ll take a look at immediate steps to get accurate information to our folks so they are doing the job the public expects from them.”