Bomber wants to fire attorneys
Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam has told a judge he wants to fire his public defenders and represent himself when he is resentenced Dec. 3 in federal court in Seattle.
The Seattle Times said he sent a letter Tuesday to the judge, which has been sealed. Ressam previously said he doesn’t trust his lawyers.
The Algerian was arrested in Port Angeles in 1999 with explosives and convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around Jan. 1, 2000.
Judge John Coughenour sentenced Ressam to 22 years in prison in 2005.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sent the case back to the judge to recalculate the sentence.
Lynnwood, Wash.
Charges filed in child’s overdose
A 17-month-old toddler climbed out of her playpen, took a bottle of methadone out of her grandmother’s purse, drank the cherry-flavored syrup and died of a drug overdose.
Snohomish County prosecutors this week charged the grandmother, 54-year-old Robin Gail Reed, of Lynnwood, with manslaughter. She’s accused of negligence by leaving the methadone in her purse on the kitchen table instead of a lockbox provided for the drug.
Alison Reed died in May and detectives had to wait for toxicology tests before sending the case to prosecutors.
She’ll be arraigned Nov. 24 in Everett.
Olympia
Geoduck operation approved in Sound
State health officials have approved a two-mile stretch of Puget Sound in south King County for commercial geoduck harvesting.
Water tests found no health concerns in the harvest area, about 138 acres of waters offshore between Des Moines and Federal Way. It’s the first time an area on the east side of Puget Sound has been approved since health officials began monitoring shellfish areas in the 1960s.
The Puyallup Tribe had asked the state to check the waters.
Boise
Idaho cancels prison contract
The Idaho Department of Correction has terminated its contract with private prison company The GEO Group and will move the roughly 305 Idaho inmates currently housed at a GEO-run prison in Texas to a private prison in Oklahoma.
Correction Director Brent Reinke notified GEO officials Thursday in a letter.
Reinke said the company’s chronic understaffing at the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas, put Idaho offenders’ safety at risk.