By Henry Zhang
The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Northwest Asian Weekly. We invited Ann Davison’s campaign to respond but did not receive a reply before publishing.
The criminal justice system depends on the police and prosecutors, but also on judges. The Seattle Municipal Court—the busiest court of limited jurisdiction in Washington state by case volume—has only seven judges to adjudicate misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor criminal proceedings. In the first half of 2025 alone, Seattle Municipal Court judges have held over 21,000 criminal hearings.
For the past year and a half, however, the incumbent City Attorney Ann Davison has hamstrung the Seattle Municipal Court, decimated the court’s already limited bench, and disrupted the court’s ability to manage its own criminal docket. Justice delayed is justice denied. Depriving the court of a judge who otherwise could’ve presided over criminal hearings does a disservice to victims of assault, theft, and domestic violence.
In March 2024, Davison instructed her office to indiscriminately lodge “affidavits of prejudice” against duly-elected Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, essentially overriding the court’s internal case assignment process by blocking Hon. Vaddadi from hearing any criminal cases. Davison’s “extraordinary” and “highly unusual” scheme caused Assistant City Attorneys—whose salaries are paid by Seattle taxpayers—to waste hours unnecessarily spamming the court with thousands of affidavits of prejudice. This, in turn, forced the court to hire temporary judges—once again, at the expense of Seattle taxpayers—to assist with the overflowing criminal caseload that otherwise would’ve been assigned to Hon. Vaddadi.
The pretext for Davison’s “nuclear option” against Hon. Vaddadi, articulated in an internal memorandum from then Criminal Division Chief Natalie Walton-Anderson, who is no longer with the City Attorney’s Office, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
For example, in the third paragraph of the memorandum, Walton-Anderson claimed that Hon. Vaddadi “failed to find probable cause for the crime of assault… based on her belief that there was no alleged touching or contact.” However, Hon. Vaddadi’s actual words were: “had he even pulled the object out of his waistband fully and motioned toward the [complaining witness], I think there would have been probable cause for assault… This is so bare in information, and I don’t believe there is probable cause for assault.”
Walton-Anderson implied that Hon. Vaddadi believed assault required contact, when Hon. Vaddadi plainly stated the opposite. She didn’t find probable cause for assault not from lack of contact, but rather, from lack of evidence.
In the sixth paragraph, Walton-Anderson claimed that Hon. Vaddadi had “ruled that a defendant was in substantial compliance with treatment and dismissed the case, even though it was clear that the defendant never got on the transport van to ABHS to fulfill his residential treatment requirement.” Wrong again, on multiple counts.
First, Hon. Vaddadi denied the defendant’s motion for substantial compliance. Second, she didn’t dismiss the case, but actually issued a warrant. It was Hon. Faye Chess—not Hon. Vaddadi—who later dismissed the case. Third, Walton-Anderson also conveniently omitted the fact that the defendant couldn’t comply with her treatment requirement because “her wheelchair and upcoming surgeries prevented her from boarding the van to treatment.”
Uncharacteristic of attorneys, Walton-Anderson negligently omitted the underlying case numbers to support her allegations. To make matters worse, Davison’s office stonewalled, for months, requests from The Stranger, PubliCola, and civically-engaged citizen Bennett Haselton for the case numbers necessary to fact-check the memorandum.
Because of these and other inaccurate yet reputationally damaging statements in the memorandum, combined with subsequent efforts by Davison’s office to stymie transparency and accountability, Hon. Vaddadi and Haselton filed separate disciplinary complaints against Davison and Walton-Anderson. The Washington State Court Rules of Professional Conduct 8.2(a) states that “a lawyer shall not make a statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications, integrity, or record of a judge.”
The City Attorney position is ostensibly nonpartisan. Whether Davison is ultimately Democratic (as she was in 2019, running for City Council), Republican (as she was in 2020, running for Lieutenant Governor), or nonpartisan (in her current position as the City Attorney), the optics of her actions “kneecapping a political enemy,” who is a first-generation Indian American, against the looming backdrop of Trump’s public attacks on judges and hostility toward immigrants, are concerning. Whoever leads the City Attorney’s Office should respect the independence of the judiciary—and at least not have multiple unresolved ethical disciplinary complaints pending against them.
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