Prosecutors are declining to charge more felony domestic violence cases, citing staffing issues

In April, Spokane police arrested a man for grabbing a woman by the neck and pushing her to the ground. A neighbor had called 911 worried that the yelling next door was a domestic violence situation, and the woman told an officer through tears that she was sick of her boyfriend putting his hands on her, according to the police report.

The next day, Spokane County prosecutors sent an email to police. There was probable cause that the man had committed a felony-level assault, since he had prior domestic violence convictions for assaulting and strangling other women he was dating. But the prosecutor’s office decided to decline the case because the victim didn’t want to pursue charges.

It used to be rare that prosecutors declined to bring such charges, said Sgt. Dave Adams, who has worked at the Spokane Police Department for over three decades and has led its domestic violence unit since August 2024. But starting last summer, Adams said that similar emails started trickling into his inbox, until October, when it was like a spigot had opened. The Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office went from declining one or two felony domestic violence cases referred by law enforcement per month to declining over a dozen, peaking in March at 25 declined cases, according to the prosecutor’s office’s data. People who were arrested for crimes like strangulation, assault and no-contact order violations were being released within days, with no new criminal charges on their record.

“It was a little bit of a shocker,” Adams said. “Suddenly my inbox starts getting filled up, and I’m like, ‘What have I missed here?’”

Spokane County has one of the highest reported rates of domestic violence in the state. But under Prosecuting Attorney Preston McCollam — up for election this year after being appointed to the position in July 2025 — the county has seen a surge in domestic violence cases being declined, the office’s data shows. While McCollam, Spokane police and survivor advocates point to differing reasons for the case refusals, they agree that the county’s criminal justice system is at capacity — and that consequently, some cases must take priority over others.

Adams and advocates at Spokane’s YWCA attribute the increased refusals to prosecute to a June 2025 Washington State Supreme Court order that slashed the number of cases that public defense attorneys are allowed to take each year. The order, drawing on recommendations from the Washington State Bar Association’s review of a national public defense study, aimed to lighten the heavy workloads of public defenders, who represent low-income people charged with crimes — a legal service that each state is constitutionally obligated to provide.

Instead of providing relief, some prosecutors and law enforcement officers say that the new mandatory caseload limits — which jurisdictions had to start implementing in January — are tipping Washington’s strained criminal justice system to a breaking point. As public defenders take fewer cases each year in accordance with the court rules, prosecutors say they are having to be even more selective with the charges that they file or else they’d risk a judge tossing the case out later due to a lack of representation. Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney Joseph Brusic said his office is declining more property crime and non-domestic violence assault cases because there aren’t enough prosecutors or public defenders to take them all.

“Since we’ve had the attorney shortage, we’ve had to be more selective. It’s angered police chiefs, and it’s angered the community to some degree, because we have a high crime rate,” Brusic said.

Although McCollam said that he’s worried about the state’s public defense crisis, he disagrees that it’s impacting his office’s charging decisions, especially when it comes to domestic violence cases. Those decisions are based on the strength of the case, admissible evidence and whether they believe they can prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

It also depends on the availability of prosecutors — the Spokane County office is down 20% of its staff at any given time, operating with around 40 criminal lawyers when they should have over 50, McCollam said. Following his appointment last year, he sent a clear message to law enforcement: While the office remained committed to prosecuting violent and chronic offenders, they’re facing “significant challenges” in prosecuting crime due to staffing and changing court rules.

The state Supreme Court issued another order in July 2025 that accelerated the timeline for prosecutors to make charging decisions in state superior courts, McCollam pointed out. McCollam and Spokane County Superior Court judges had submitted public comments imploring the Supreme Court justices to reject this change, arguing that the “extremely overwhelmed” criminal justice system was already straining to assign attorneys in the current timeline, and that prosecutors would have significantly less time to notify and confer with victims about charges. The changes were adopted anyway.

“The system is still struggling under the burden of these rule changes,” McCollam said.

As a result, there are some crimes that the prosecutor’s office has stopped prioritizing. Over a quarter of Spokane County’s declined felony domestic violence cases from January 2025 through March 2026 were for “invited” violations of no-contact orders, according to the office’s records — meaning that the survivor allowed their alleged abuser to contact them despite it being a crime under the court order. The prosecutor’s office can’t prioritize those cases due to the “sheer number of violent crimes and nonconsensual contact cases,” according to McCollam.

Before last year’s Supreme Court orders, the prosecutor’s office used to take those cases, Adams said. There are many reasons why domestic violence survivors might allow their abusers to contact them, said Adams, like fear of telling their abuser “no” or because they’re trying to navigate shared custody of their kids.

Now, Adams doesn’t assign detectives to those cases.

“I can’t waste taxpayer dollars investigating stuff that won’t be prosecuted,” he said.

Victim cooperation

On a cool, clear night in April, a woman called the Spokane Police Department afraid she was going to die. She reported that her boyfriend had squeezed his hands around her neck, yelling that he would kill her as she gasped for him to let go, according to the police report.

When police arrived, an officer noted a fresh cut on the woman’s lip and redness on her cheek where she said her boyfriend had hit her. Her neck was red and her eye was bloodshot. She was shaking.

They arrested the man for second-degree assault, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The Spokane County Superior Court issued an order barring him from contacting the woman or coming within 1,000 feet of her home, and the police department assigned a detective to dig further into the case.

But the detective never got the chance. Within days of the arrest, the Spokane County prosecutor’s office declined to file charges against the man. He was released from jail, and the no-contact order was dropped.

The prosecutor’s office sent an email to Spokane police explaining why they declined the case: When the office reached out to the woman, she told them that nothing bad had happened and she was fine. Without her cooperation or more independent evidence supporting the allegations, prosecutors decided not to move forward with the case.

“Victim noncooperation” is a common challenge in domestic violence cases, said Sally Winn, YWCA Spokane’s director of legal services. Many victims call 911 because they need immediate protection, but after the emergency is over, they don’t agree to be involved in the criminal investigation. That decision is often for safety reasons, Winn said.

“Maybe he’s threatening her. Maybe he’s withholding child support if she goes forward,” she said. “We don’t know what kind of influence the abuser is having over the victim in trying to prevent her from going forward. That is not an indicator of whether or not the case is valid.”

Before the June 2025 state Supreme Court order, the prosecutor’s office would often still file charges in these instances based on evidence like medical records, photos, videos, witness testimony and text messages, according to Winn and Adams. Yet as fall turned to winter then spring, Spokane police received more and more emails from the prosecutor’s office declining cases because the victim wasn’t cooperating.

“That’s been the biggest change for us in law enforcement, is to see those cases get declined,” Adams said. “The nature of domestic violence being what it is, the chances that a survivor is going to want to cooperate are essentially zero.”

In March, Spokane police interviewed a woman whose face was streaked with blood after an alleged assault, according to police records. The woman described how her boyfriend pushed her to the ground and squeezed her neck with his thighs. The officer saw shattered glass throughout the apartment and a broken TV that the woman said her boyfriend smashed with a granite block.

The prosecutor’s office declined the case days later, after the woman told a victim advocate that she had “no safety concerns” and didn’t want to press charges.

In another case later that month, a woman told a Spokane County Sheriff’s Office deputy that her intoxicated husband had slammed her face into a car window and screamed that he would kill her. The deputy photographed the woman’s swollen cheek and scratches on her face. Her husband, who had a previous conviction for assaulting her, was arrested and booked into jail. Again, the prosecutor’s office dropped the case within days after the woman told a victim advocate that she didn’t have safety concerns.

Although cases become much more difficult to prove without the survivor’s testimony, filing charges still has benefits for survivors, Winn said. It activates protection mechanisms like no-contact orders and requirements for alleged abusers to relinquish their guns. It also allows survivors more time to recover from the incident, speak with advocates and make safety plans — supports that could eventually give them the capacity to engage with prosecutors later in the process.

In Yakima County, which also faces high rates of domestic violence, Prosecuting Attorney Brusic said that his office doesn’t need victim cooperation to charge domestic violence cases, although they always prefer to have it. “There are evidentiary ways we can get around it,” Brusic said, like relying on hearsay exceptions and eyewitness accounts, “but it does have an impact on our decisions at times.”

But McCollam said that he “absolutely” needs cooperation from the victim in order to present domestic violence cases in court. Filing those cases without it does a disservice both to the victim and the community, he said.

“If we know at the onset that we can’t prove it, we’re kind of clogging the court system even more,” McCollam said.

Supply and demand

In September 2024, Washington State Association of Prosecuting Attorneys Executive Director Russell Brown stood in front of the state’s Supreme Court justices and, on behalf of Washington’s 39 elected prosecutors, asked them to reject the proposal to slash public defender caseloads.

“We are seeing currently in many communities already under the current labor shortages, there are not enough public defenders, and frankly, not enough prosecutors to manage the current criminal caseload,” Brown said during the public hearing.

The proposed court rules would only aggravate this complex problem, he argued. “You would see substantial numbers of serious criminal cases that would be unable to be filed.”

Several prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, city mayors and judges submitted comments echoing Brown’s concerns that lowering public defenders’ caseloads would only worsen counties’ existing attorney shortages.

But in June 2025, the Washington State Supreme Court found that the state’s public defense crisis required immediate action. Low-income people who had been charged with crimes were waiting weeks or even months for an attorney, while overburdened public defenders were drowning under excessive caseloads.

The justices issued an order lowering the maximum cases that public defenders can take on from 150 felony cases per year to 47 — effectively tripling the number of defense attorneys that Washington needs to manage the same volume of cases. Jurisdictions have 10 years to comply, using a phased approach that requires them to get incrementally closer to the new standard each year.

In many jurisdictions, however, the money and labor pool needed to implement the required changes simply don’t exist. Unlike most states, Washington contributes little funding to its public defense system, leaving local governments to pay for more than 94% of the costs — a burden that many smaller and rural counties don’t have the resources for.

Spokane County is already facing implementation challenges. In May, the directors of two public defense offices sued the county for setting caseload limits that they argue exceed the limits allowed by the state Supreme Court. Some public defenders have had to stop taking assignments and work hundreds of unpaid hours in an effort to give their clients quality representation, according to the lawsuit.

Prosecutors are not optimistic that the problem will be solved anytime soon. Although the state Legislature more than doubled its funding for local public defense services in its budget for 2026 and 2027, counties say the funding still falls far short of what’s needed. A proposal to direct 7% of Washington’s new “millionaires tax” revenue toward public defense was dropped by lawmakers before the bill passed in March.

“To say we need some more defense attorneys, I think, is reasonable. But to say we need three times as many defense attorneys, I don’t see that as reasonable or workable,” said Clark County Prosecuting Attorney Tony Golik. “Already, this is causing real damage to the justice system. The damage will become very, very serious in another two, three, four years.”

Some counties’ superior courts are already at a breaking point. In 2024, Benton County released five people from jail who were charged with crimes including domestic violence and rape because there were no defense attorneys to represent them. A Clark County judge dismissed 24 misdemeanor criminal cases in February for the same reason. In Yakima County, the lack of defense attorneys grew so dire that the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington sued the county over it in 2024.

The Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has not begun selecting out domestic violence cases, which are still being filed at the same rate as previous years, according to the office’s data. But Prosecuting Attorney Brusic and Yakima Police Department officers worry that refusals to prosecute domestic violence cases will become a larger issue as the public defender caseload limit phases in over the next decade.

“All of those laws designed to keep victims of domestic violence safe are being countered by the inability to prosecute people that should be prosecuted for domestic violence,” said Yakima Police Department Capt. Chad Janis. “The question is, how many times is it acceptable to assault your wife before we prosecute you? Because that’s where we’re going to go.”

In Spokane County, McCollam emphasized that prosecutors still decline relatively few cases. From June 2024 to April 2026, the prosecutor’s office filed 5,866 cases and declined 766, a decline rate of about 13%. The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, in contrast, declined to file over 40% of cases referred by law enforcement in Superior Court during that same timeframe, according to the King County office’s data dashboard.

“We should never be in a situation, I don’t believe, where we’re filing a case or we’re not filing a case because we’re worried about whether or not they have an attorney,” McCollam said.

But in practice, prosecutors like McCollam know that there are only so many cases that will make it through the state’s underfunded criminal justice system — and if they don’t triage those cases on the front end, then a judge could end up dismissing them later in the process due to a lack of attorneys, as happened in Benton and Clark counties.

McCollam looks at Oregon as a cautionary tale. In February, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that more than 1,400 cases had to be dismissed due to a shortage of public defenders.

“That’s something that I’m really concerned is coming to Washington if we can’t get this thing figured out,” McCollam said. “So we need to be aware of it, and we need to be prioritizing resources.”

The prosecutor’s office doesn’t leave domestic violence survivors out in the cold, added Spokane County Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Hannah Stearns. Attorneys refer them to the YWCA and other organizations to help with things like custody issues, housing and transportation.

But the YWCA’s capacity is also at its limit. Their shelter is full, their domestic violence helpline is constantly ringing, and the number of people getting legal support nearly doubled since last year, according to a May statement from the organization. Adding to the strain, federal funding for crime victims has plummeted in recent years, causing Washington domestic violence nonprofits to cut positions and scale back services just to continue operating.

“We can try and protect the client as best we can, but there’s nothing in place to change the trajectory of the abuser,” Winn said. “That’s kind of what we need the criminal justice system to do, so it doesn’t happen to the same survivor again or doesn’t happen to another survivor.”

In January, when a mom of three didn’t want to engage with Spokane County prosecutors, the prosecutor’s office emailed law enforcement that “with great regret” they had to decline the felony domestic violence referral. The victim was “100%+ uncooperative,” the email explained, and they didn’t have other witnesses who could testify. But the prosecutor’s office concluded with a warning: “We’ll see this family again.”

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This story was originally published by InvestigateWest and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.