Shawn Vestal: County shooting settlement, and subsequent doubling down, a bad faith failure of justice

All of the sadly ordinary obstacles to police accountability leaped to the fore this week with the settlement of a lawsuit against a sheriff’s deputy who killed a mentally ill man in 2019.

The lawsuit raised valid questions about the shooting of Ethan Murray, who was chased into the woods and shot to death on May 4, 2019. The deputy who shot him initially claimed he had a knife, though it turned out the only knife found at the scene belonged to another deputy, who later said he’d dropped it.

The shooting had been ruled justified by the prosecutor, who has never met a police shooting that wasn’t justified. The cleared deputy was promoted.

Murray’s mother hired an attorney, whose complaint posed troubling questions about the shooting. But instead of producing answers, one way or the other, the lawsuit was simply settled by the county.

Spokane County paid $1 million – a painless payout that will come from a joint insurance fund shared with other counties – but neither the deputy, nor the sheriff’s department, nor county government at large was in any way held responsible or formally cleared of the suit’s claims.

In fact, as if to illustrate the utter bad faith behind it all, the sheriff and prosecutor held a news conference, whining about The Spokesman-Review, criticizing defense attorneys and other elected officials, relitigating old complaints, claiming excessive use of force by law enforcement is statistically insignificant, and – wait for it – working in an implied pitch for a new jail.

No. This bore little resemblance to justice.

Meanwhile, our understanding of the death of Ethan Murray, and the performance of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office during two days where he was repeatedly reported for displaying the obvious signs of someone suffering a mental health crisis – two days that ended when he was chased into the woods by Deputy Joseph Wallace – is no clearer than it was before.

This is not a critique of the Murray family for settling. It’s a critique of a system that offers no reliable, independent oversight of the fatal actions of officers. We have a “take our word for it” system – investigations of shootings conducted by neighboring departments, who are practically co-workers, and prosecutors, who are also practically co-workers. Between the two, it is always possible to meet the low bar of justification for a shooting – an officer’s claim that he reasonably felt threatened.

This is why the city ombudsman’s office is such an important institution (though it is not involved in county cases like Murray’s.). It’s also why that office has been in constant conflict with the city police administration and officers union, who have been able to defang the ombudsman, to a degree, from the start.

If we truly want to improve our systemwide crisis of mental illness, and the role of law enforcement in it, we would not resolve the Ethan Murray case this way. At a time when homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse test the abilities of police and government, it deserved a true, independent accounting of what went wrong, not a million-dollar cover-up.

Murray’s case is troubling for reasons beyond the shooting. Over the course of the final two days of his life – May 3 and 4, 2019 – he was reported to city and county law enforcement six times. Each time, according to police records, he showed the signs of the schizoaffective disorder with which he had been diagnosed.

He was often shirtless and shoeless, filthy in his socks. He talked to himself and said things to officers that didn’t make sense. He stuffed money into his mouth.

He made people uncomfortable, and those who reported him often assumed he was on drugs – though the investigation after his death did not find drugs in his system, according to the lawsuit. On five occasions, he was dealt with by officers who seemed to recognize that he was troubled, not dangerous. On five occasions, he was questioned and simply let go. One city officer gave him a ride.

On the sixth call, though, that changed.

Residents of an apartment complex in Spokane Valley reported Murray was running around near children. Some considered him threatening. When deputies arrived, Murray was standing, shirtless and shoeless, on the other side of a chain-link fence.

When he was confronted by Wallace, he ran toward the woods, where there was a homeless camp. Wallace chased him there, where he claimed that he found himself trapped in a situation with a dropoff at his back so he couldn’t safely retreat. He said that Murray cursed him, ignored his commands, and threatened him with a knife, so he shot him.

No one else saw this happen. Prosecutor Larry Haskell said Thursday that a witness heard “a good bit” of the altercation and “largely corroborated” Wallace’s report.

In his report, which was released 30 days after the incident, Wallace referred repeatedly to the supposed knife. But the only knife found at the scene belonged to another deputy. After it was initially entered as evidence, it was later removed, and the story evolved: Murray was threatening Wallace with a pair of sunglasses that was found at the scene.

In the lawsuit, the Murray family’s attorney noted that in all the previous interactions with police – in which Murray possessed nothing but what was in his pockets and hands – there was no indication he had sunglasses. The suit also questioned why Wallace didn’t do what other officers had done in the two previous days – use de-escalation techniques. It questioned why he chased him into the woods at all.

It may be that a jury or a judge, or some other independent finder of fact, would have concluded that Wallace was justified. But we got nothing like that in this case.

We got a painless payout from the county, a furious round of “take our word for it” from the people in charge, and an absence of accountability.

A travesty of justice.