Washington
Ex-judge to head office probing Washington police shootings
SEATTLE (AP) — A former judge and prosecutor is being appointed to oversee Washington state’s new independent office to review cases where police use deadly force — the first such agency in the U.S.
Gov. Jay Inslee said Wednesday that Roger Rogoff, who spent nearly two decades as a deputy King County prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney before becoming a Superior Court judge in 2014, will head the Office of Independent Investigations.
“Roger’s experiences make him exceptionally suited to lead an agency, independent of law enforcement or the governor’s office, to investigate cases of officer-involved shootings,” Inslee said.
The Legislature created the office at Inslee’s request as part of an ambitious package of police reform legislation last year. The agency’s mandate is to conduct “fair, thorough, transparent and competent” investigations of police use of deadly force to see whether the shootings were justified or warrant criminal prosecution.
The investigations are to be carried out by regional investigation teams, and beginning in July 2023 the office will have the authority to reopen old investigations into police use of force should new evidence arise in those cases.
Community groups have long called for independent investigations of killings by police, and those demands grew louder following a botched review of the 2020 death of Manuel ElIis, a Black man, in Tacoma, Washington. The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office initially investigated the case without disclosing that one of its deputies had been involved.
“I intend to lead an agency that conducts excellent investigative work, free from influence, with the goal of ensuring justice by learning the truth behind these incidents,” Rogoff said in a prepared statement.
Rogoff recently served as legal counsel for Microsoft working on matters of data privacy and public safety. He also spent two years as a criminal defense attorney.
Rogoff is a graduate of Emory University and received his law degree from the University of Washington Law School. He also served on the Washington State Criminal Justice Task Force, which reviewed the state’s sentencing laws.
His appointment is effective June 16.
Nevada
Judge: Trump administration illegally withdrew bird listing
RENO, Nev. (AP) — A federal judge has ruled the Trump administration acted illegally in 2020 when it withdrew an earlier proposal to list as threatened a hen-sized bird found only in the high desert along the California-Nevada line.
It’s the latest development in the on-again, off-again protection of the bi-state sage grouse — a cousin of the greater sage grouse — under the Endangered Species Act over the past two decades.
Greater sage grouse live in sagebrush habitat in 12 western states, including California and Nevada, while bi-state grouse exist only along the Sierra’s eastern front. Threats to the survival of both include urbanization, livestock grazing and wildfires.
U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco said Monday the agency relied on flawed assumptions to conclude in 2020 that the ground-dwelling bird “is not likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout a significant portion of its range.”
She reinstated the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s original 2013 listing proposal for the bi-state grouse and ordered the agency to issue a new final listing decision.
After rejecting listing petitions in 2001 and 2005, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed threatened status for the bi-state grouse for the first time in 2013 but abandoned that proposal two years later.
In 2018, another U.S. judge in San Francisco found the agency had illegally denied the bird protection and ordered it to reevaluate its status.
The agency then again proposed for protection, but in March 2020 the Trump administration withdrew that proposal. The service said at the time its latest review indicated the population had improved, thanks largely to voluntary protection measures adopted by state agencies, ranchers and others.
The Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians and Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit challenging that decision in October 2020. The judge on Monday agreed with their claims the agency’s action was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the bi-state grouse population is half what it was 150 years ago along the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada.
About 3,500 of the birds are believed to remain across 7,000 square miles (18,129 square kilometers) of mostly high desert sagebrush stretching from Carson City to near Yosemite National Park.
“We’ve watched for more than a decade as these sage grouse have continued to decline,” said Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Without the Endangered Species Act’s legal protection, multiple threats will just keep pushing these grouse toward extinction,” she said Tuesday.
Agency officials were reviewing the ruling and had no immediate comment, Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Robyn Gerstenslager said Wednesday.
Among other things, the judge said the service failed to adequately analyze the impact that the bird’s dwindling numbers in small population management units could have on its overall risk of extinction.
Lawyers for the service had argued any errors in the review’s scientific assumptions weren’t serious enough to change its conclusion about the bird’s overall status. The judge disagreed.
“These errors go to the heart of the service’s listing decision and are not harmless,” she wrote.
Washington
Harris set to meet with abortion providers as court ruling looms
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled speak Thursday with abortion providers from states with some of the nation’s strictest restrictions to thank them for their work, the White House said.
Harris’ virtual meeting with medical professionals practicing in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Missouri and Montana comes weeks after the leaks of a draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting that justices are on the brink of overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. Justices are expected to issue their final ruling in the next six weeks, but those states and others are already laying the groundwork to ban abortion outright if the court allows individual states to set their own rules for the procedure.
“The Vice President will hear stories from abortion providers who are working in states with some of the most extreme abortion restrictions, and she will thank them for fighting to protect reproductive health care, despite personal risk,” the White House said in a statement. She will “emphasize that the Administration will continue to defend women’s constitutional rights and protect access to abortion,” it said.
In fact, the Biden administration has few options available in bitterly divided Washington. A Senate bill to expand abortion access failed due to bipartisan opposition last week.
