(The Center Square) – Since 2013, the Washington Attorney General’s Office has been fined a total of $1.52 million in court sanctions and $12.7 million in summary judgments. Most of the sanctioned amount involves a single case of discovery violation.
The 2016 case ended with a King County Superior Court judge issuing a $1.2 million sanction “as a result of discovery violations regarding preservation and production of records of experts,” according to information received through a public records request. The case involved a group of plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit after the 2014 Oso mudslide that killed 43 people and destroyed 49 homes.
The other two sanctions against the AGO involved relatively small fines of $100 and $250.
The total sanction amount against the AGO since 2013 includes the recent $200,000 fine it received from a King County Superior Court judge after failing to provide records in response to discovery. The AGO and the Department of Social and Health Services later agreed on a $3 million settlement for the lawsuit, which involved a woman with developmental disabilities who claimed DSHS failed to investigate her claims of neglect and abuse.
While the 2016 court-ordered sanction noted that the “State’s overall response to the court’s sanctions order has been honorable,” the 2023 sanction issued by King County Superior Court Michael Ryan lambasted the AGO for being “cavalier” with “its respect to their discovery obligations” while refusing to “take responsibility for its client’s failure to provide responsive documents…or acknowledging that it lacks adequate internal safeguards to prevent this type of discovery abuse.”
The summary judgment of $12.7 million issued last year in King County Superior Court was due to a “dispute involved insufficient and late invoices submitted by a Special Assistance Attorney General that were not paid because they were not submitted in accordance with the contract. The issue went to arbitration. The arbitrator awarded the SAAG payment resulting in a money judgment.”
In an email to The Center Square, AGO Director of Public Records La Dona Jensen noted that the office handles 20,000-30,000 legal matters at any given time. Additionally, she noted that during the same timeframe as the sanctions and summary judgments, the AGO had recovered $1 billion for the state general fund.
