Adams County Officials Battle With Prosecutor Prosecutor Wants Bigger Budget; Commissioners Want Own Lawyer

In mid-argument, Adams County Commissioner Bill Wills got up from his chair and peeled off his sport coat.

“I’m not going to fight you,” he told Prosecutor Dave Sandhaus. “I’m just going to take my coat off.”

They might as well have brawled. They even had an audience - in this case, the county clerk and auditor - heckling from the back row.

It’s an easy fight to hype.

In one corner there’s the commissioners and an army of trainers that includes major department heads and the county’s political machinery.

In the other corner is Sandhaus - balding, thin and with a confrontational style at odds with this farm county’s ethic of blending in with the local crowd.

His critics say he isn’t doing his job, failing to take on enough of the county’s civil work. He contends the commissioners have failed to fund his office well enough to tackle a crime rate that is among the fastest-growing in the state.

Critics call him other things as well, including empire builder and egomaniac.

“We tried to explain how we do things up here,” said Dennis Morgan, a public defender and former prosecutor. But Sandhaus insisted on doing things his way, Morgan said.

In the end, Sandhaus violated the prosecutor’s cardinal rule: “Don’t make enemies of people you need to be your friends,” Morgan said.

“And he’s made enemies of just about everybody,” Morgan said.

Among those, said Morgan, is Superior Court Judge Richard Miller, who once grew so exasperated with Sandhaus, he said, “I’m tired of your crap” - in open court.

Miller said Monday he does not recall making the statement.

“I know that I’ve had problems with him in the past arguing with my decisions, which is strictly taboo,” said Miller, who denied having a hand in any political pressure being brought to bear on Sandhaus.

By his count, Sandhaus has filed about a dozen affidavits of prejudice against Miller, who is up for re-election this fall. Sandhaus also recently criticized Miller to Spokesman-Review columnist Doug Clark for suggesting a 12-year-old rape victim was “a tramp.”

Last week, the county commissioners appealed to Miller under a special statute letting them contract with an outside lawyer to do the county’s civil work.

That morning, in the meeting so heated Wills removed his coat, Wills cited a Revised Code of Washington - or RCW letting the board tap someone other than the prosecutor for the work.

The following typical exchange took place when Sandhaus asked where Wills, chairman of the board, was getting legal advice.

Wills: “Probably, it’s uh, the way it works is I went out and seeked my own lawyer.”

Sandhaus: “Well that’s illegal, Mr. Wills.”

Wills: “and paid my own dollars. What’s illegal?. You give me an RCW!”

Sandhaus: “What attorney did you go out and hire?”

Wills: “NYB. None of your business. I don’t have to give you that right now.”

Sandhaus wanted the board to hire a firm to do civil work. The board refused. That afternoon, Wills told Miller they wanted to hire Paul Szott, who resigned as deputy prosecutor last month. He quit after complaining that Sandhaus forced him to prosecute cases that Szott said lacked legal merit.

After receiving mixed reports of how urgent the county’s civil work is, Miller let the commissioners hire Szott.

The commissioners have also refused to let Sandhaus refill Szott’s former position. This could lead him to stop prosecuting misdemeanor cases, Sandhaus warned.

Sandhaus said the commissioners and other elected officials “want to make it impossible for me to do my job and (make) the personal anguish on me … so great that they make me quit. And that’s not going to happen.”

The prosecutor is elected by voters and independent from other county agencies. But the commissioners approve the office budget. Therein lies the rub.

In appearances before the board and a series of town meetings around the county, Sandhaus has repeatedly said he needs more staff and resources to fight crime. His rap has become so routine that when he began talking about it last week, Auditor Leon Long groaned “here come the statistics.”

Culled from state crime figures, those statistics show Adams County had the fastest growing rates of reported violent and property crime of any small county from 1989 to 1993, the last year Sandhaus cites. Figures for Othello, the county’s largest city, show a 456 percent increase in reported violent crime between 1989 and 1994.

Overall, Othello crime rose 58 percent in that period, giving the city nearly the same per-resident crime rate as Yakima.

“Yakima has a tough crime-fighting atmosphere,” Sandhaus said in an interview. “Here we’re playing games.”

Adams County has the fewest prosecutors per crime of any small county, he added. It also has a plea bargain rate approaching 99 percent, compared to 90 percent nationwide. This lets criminals skirt extended jail time and the tougher sanctions of mandatory sentencing guidelines, he said.

“We’re hitting that critical mass where the criminals realize they’re in control of the streets,” he said.

Commissioner Wills, a Lind farmer legendary for his use of the English language, said Sandhaus is using “unfact figures.”

While he does not marshal crime statistics of his own, Wills points to figures showing that the prosecutor’s office filed nearly as many charges in 1988 with one-third the budget and less than one-third the staff that it has now.

“I don’t think you’re going to stop crime with more deputy prosecutors and money,” Wills said. “The way you’re going to stop crime is at home and get the moral values back home.”

Wills and other Sandhaus critics say the number of cases filed in Superior Court is the better measure of crime in the county.

A reported burglary can actually be “a guy who’s lost his key trying to get into his home,” said Bob Blair, county clerk. If there are 10 witnesses to a crime, he said, “you have 10 reports of violent crime coming in.”

Blair, a Miller supporter, said the anti-Sandhaus movement is unrelated to his criticism of the judge.

The problem, he said, is Sandhaus is “simply not working.”

But Sgt. Kris Boness, supervisor of the local Washington State Patrol detachment that oversees the busy anti-drug program on Interstates 90 and 395, said Sandhaus “works harder than anybody I know.”

“There’s been inadequate prosecution of criminal cases in this county for as long as I can remember. And this guy is the first one that I’m aware of to take the bull by the horns and attempt to do something about it.”

Blair’s notion of what constitutes a reported crime is off the mark, said Bill McDonell, Othello chief of police. For the most part, reported crimes actually occurred, he said, but only the strongest cases can be brought to court.

And Sandhaus does not have the resources he needs to do that, McDonell added.

“If we don’t continue to prosecute strongly, I think we’re going to continue to have problems,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo