King County prosecutor's office sanctioned for withholding evidence

A King County Superior Court judge sanctioned the King County prosecuting attorney's office $10,000 last week over discovery violations in four felony cases filed in juvenile court.

Prosecutor Leesa Manion and Chief Juvenile Deputy Jimmy Hung appeared last Monday before Assistant Presiding Judge Tanya Thorp to address a remedy for the state's withholding of potentially exculpatory evidence in a 2025 case involving a 15-year-old boy accused of shooting his sister's boyfriend in a Burien parking lot.

In her May 5 order for Manion and Hung to appear, Thorp wrote that the prosecutor's office's mismanagement of juvenile cases and failure to disclose evidence wasn't an isolated incident and had reached systemic levels.

"The Court has observed delayed and withheld discovery, finger-pointing at law enforcement, delays in witness identification and scheduling, and settlement negotiations when exculpatory evidence is not disclosed," Thorp's order says. "These errors are significant and wide-reaching, negatively affecting the operation of the juvenile justice system in our county. Questions surrounding integrity, ethics and good faith dealing are reasonably raised."

Thorp acknowledged "the oddity" of questioning the elected prosecutor, but ordered the hearing because of what she saw as a pattern of untimely disclosures to the defense, according to an audio recording of Monday's proceedings. She said the court would not be complicit and that there must be consequences for the state's actions.

Manion said her office is taking Thorp's concerns seriously, but noted that an audit found issues in four out of 315 pending juvenile cases, according to the audio recording.

After the hearing, Manion and Hung contacted The Seattle Times to discuss the rare judicial sanction and provide context for the monetary penalty that will be transferred out of the prosecutor's budget and go to the King County Department of Public Defense. They provided summaries of what happened in each of the four juvenile cases, plus other materials.

The King County Department of Public Defense declined to comment last week about the court's $10,000 sanction and the four cases at the heart of the matter.

But in a May 15 filing, defense attorneys Jeffrey Wicks and Morgan Rozman wrote that the state's mismanagement impacted four additional juvenile cases - two that were dismissed, one that resulted in a not-guilty verdict and one where mismanagement was found but dismissal was deemed too extreme of a remedy.

So what happened?

In the 2025 Burien shooting case, the 15-year-old was initially charged with first-degree assault with a firearm and second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm. The case had been set for trial when prosecutors learned that data extracted from two cellphones by the King County sheriff's office last year wasn't given to prosecutors until February.

The juvenile division then mistakenly held onto the data for an additional 45 days before disclosing it to the defense - three weeks before the boy's trial was to begin. Six supplemental police reports also had not been given to the defense in a timely manner.

Thorp denied a defense motion to dismiss the case over the discovery violations, given the severity of the allegations and risk to the community - and ruled against the state's suggestion to suppress the evidence because it would have been wholly inappropriate given it could have benefited the boy's defense. She made a finding that the state had mismanaged the case.

The boy ultimately pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree assault with a firearm as well as the unlawful possession of a firearm charge, court records show. By the time his case was resolved on May 5, he had spent 371 days in juvenile detention and was released with credit for time served.

In another case investigated by the sheriff's office, a teenage boy was charged with second-degree assault and felony harassment, according to materials provided by the prosecutor's office. One of the detectives told a deputy prosecutor there was nothing more to disclose, and he did not think he'd even written a report.

The deputy prosecutor later learned of three police reports that hadn't been disclosed to the defense, including one written by that detective, according to the prosecutor's case summary. The deputy prosecutor sent 18 pages to the defense the morning the boy's trial began after previously turning over 480 pages of documents and 458 pieces of electronic evidence.

The court denied a defense motion to dismiss the case, but made a finding of government mismanagement.

In a third case, a 14-year-old boy was accused of assaulting a man and stealing liquor from a Safeway in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood. The defense sought to dismiss the case after one deputy prosecutor missed an initial deadline to provide a witness list for trial, and another deputy prosecutor later amended the list. The 14-year-old was ultimately accepted into a diversion program, court records show.

The fourth case involved a 19-year-old man who had moved to Italy by the time Renton police referred a case to prosecutors. He was charged last year with child molestation and attempted child rape for crimes he allegedly committed in 2020 when he was 14. Prosecutors consulted with the Department of Justice, but there were numerous delays in notifying the 19-year-old of the charges against him.

"In hindsight, we could have acted with more urgency," says the prosecutor's summary of the case, which was ultimately dismissed.

What's next?

Manion said she is working to address staffing challenges and the way the juvenile division is structured. In the adult division, attorneys are typically assigned to units - prosecuting, for instance, homicides, sexual assaults or domestic-violence cases, and thereby becoming subject-matter experts in those kinds of cases. On the juvenile side, individual deputy prosecutors are responsible for prosecuting misdemeanors all the way up to Class A felonies, so they don't necessarily have the same expertise in every kind of case.

The prosecutor's office is offering additional training to everyone in the juvenile division, looking to ensure compliance with deadlines, improve collaboration between attorneys in the adult and juvenile divisions and update instructions for police officers to submit case materials, according to Manion and Hung. The office is also reviewing the four juvenile cases to determine if there was prosecutorial error.

They've also noted that the volume of defense motions to dismiss criminal cases - in both adult and juvenile court - has increased significantly since a change to a court rule went into effect on Sept. 1, said Manion, adding the increase isn't unique to King County.

Under the old rule, defense attorneys could file motions to dismiss criminal cases if mismanagement or misconduct on the part of the state materially impacted a person's right to a fair trial. Under the amended rule, a court now needs only to find that there was some kind of mismanagement or misconduct on the part of the state that prejudiced the rights of the accused.

"By changing the standard to any sort of prejudice, it opens the door for judges to move to the next phase, which is, ‘What's the remedy?'" Hung explained. "The remedy could be dismissal, it could be suppression of evidence or, as in [the Burien shooting case], it ended up being sanctions."

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published May 24, 2026 at 6:44 AM.