Breean Beggs, who represented Otto Zehm’s family, plans to run for Spokane County Prosecutor. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
JUSTICE
The Outsider
Among those planning to run for county prosecutor and sheriff: one of the community’s most outspoken Smart Justice advocates BY HEIDI GROOVER
L
ast spring, amid panic about overcrowding, calls for a brand-new jail took over the regional conversation. But soon, a different voice emerged. A group of local reformers declared our region didn’t need more jail beds. Instead, they said, we needed to use the ones we had smarter. In the time since, the group “Smart Justice” has seen its ideas embraced by nearly every corner of local leadership. Support for its proposals — keeping nonviolent criminals out of jail, rehabilitating them in the community and tackling racial disparities in the criminal justice system, all while decreasing the number of inmates — has been snowballing, most recently within the findings of the
Spokane Regional Criminal Justice Commission. So if there’s a time for a reform-focused civil rights watchdog to make a move for elected office, this could be it. “If you talk to the police chief, the mayor, the county commissioners, the sheriff, the people who run Geiger [Corrections Center] and the jail, the judges — they’re all ready to go to work to put things together. The county prosecutor’s office, in my observation, has been largely absent in terms of leadership on that,” says Breean Beggs, a prominent local attorney who plans to run as a Democrat for Spokane County Prosecutor next year. After six years as director of the nonprofit Center
for Justice, Beggs now works in private practice, where he focuses on personal injury and civil rights cases and represented the family of Otto Zehm in their civil suit against the city. Zehm was killed in 2006 during a violent confrontation with police, spawning high-profile criminal and civil cases and calls for independent police oversight in Spokane. “[The prosecutor] is really the attorney for the entire county, the whole community,” Beggs says. “That’s the lawyer I’ve always tried to be, the lawyer for the greater good.” While the elected prosecutor doesn’t allocate funds for programs (that power belongs to county commissioners) and doesn’t alone determine whether every case gets prosecuted (the elected prosecutor oversees about 60 deputy prosecutors who work on cases), Beggs says his position could lead the office in a new direction. He says he’d start with expanding the office’s current efforts around “smart sentencing,” a move also recommended by the Regional Criminal Justice Commission in its draft report. The goal is to create an assessment to be used at various stages of the justice system in order to analyze how likely each offender is to reoffend and what programs will best reduce that likelihood. Beggs says he also would also create a process of ana...continued on next page
NOVEMBER 21, 2013 INLANDER 13