Over half of sexual assault cases in King County end in plea deals

Then her phone buzzed with a text from her legal advocate with the nonprofit King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. He was wondering if Jay would support a deal in which her abuser pleaded guilty to a less serious charge instead of going to trial.

She told him no. She and her family had repeatedly said they didn’t support a plea deal. But less than 10 minutes before her scheduled interview, she got another text: The interview was canceled. The prosecutor had decided to move forward with the deal, and the rape charge would be dropped.

Jay started to cry.

“I felt like I lost,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t get the justice I needed.”

A judge sentenced her abuser, Reginald Breaux, to 12 months in King County Jail on Friday, Sept. 13. This puts Jay, who requested to go by a nickname for this article, in a small minority of sexual assault survivors whose abusers are held criminally accountable. Most sexual assaults aren’t reported to police and even fewer lead to felony convictions, research shows. Only 25 of every 1,000 perpetrators end up in prison, according to national data analyzed by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the country’s largest anti-sexual violence organization that operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline.

But for those cases that do end in convictions, Jay’s experience reflects a common yet under-discussed outcome: Most end in plea agreements that can leave victims feeling unprotected and invalidated by a system meant to help them. Often, that comes after a drawn-out legal process.

Of 408 tracked sexual assault cases from 2021 to 2024 in King County, 60% ended with the defendant pleading guilty to a less serious offense, data released in March by the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center found.

This can mean that victims lose certain legal protections. When defendants plead down to a non-sex offense, for example, sexual assault no-contact orders are terminated and the perpetrator doesn’t register as a sex offender.

“Essentially what that’s telling the survivor is, ‘What you said is not true.’ Or that’s how it’s interpreted,” said Kate Krug, CEO of the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. “This sort of sets in motion a space where, essentially, the assault didn’t happen.”

King County prosecutors highlight that in many of the cases tracked by the resource center, victims supported resolving their cases with plea deals, which guarantee a conviction without the risks and potentially retraumatizing experience of going to trial. Yet as prosecutors try to balance victims’ input with their duty to uphold public safety, they can’t always approach cases the way victims want them to.

“When we resolve a case in a way that’s not consistent with a victim’s wishes, that is one of the hardest decisions that we have to make,” said Bridgette Maryman, chief of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s Gender-Based Violence and Prevention Division. “But at the end of the day, we also have to assess our ability to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt to 12 jurors.”

In an effort to raise victims’ voices in the legal process, Washington has passed new laws expanding victims’ rights and requiring prosecutors involved in sexual assault cases to receive specialized training. Last year, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office created a division focused on gender-based violence. King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion promised the division would bring a “trauma-informed, victim-centered response” to these cases, according to a January 2023 press release. 

To avoid situations like Jay’s in the future, victim advocates in Washington still want judges and prosecutors to prioritize victim input more in their decisions and to involve victims earlier in conversations about potential plea deals, including making clear to victims how much a prosecutor is willing to negotiate the charges.  

“Our criminal justice system is really set up for the defendant. And I won’t comment on whether I think that’s good or bad, but it is what it is,” said Renée Williams, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, a nonprofit that provides resources for crime victims. “The idea is to preserve the defendant’s rights, and the victims are really shuffled to the sidelines in all of these cases.” 

The long wait

Breaux was in his late 30s and temporarily homeless when he crashed on the couch in Jay’s home one spring night in 2012, according to Jay’s dad, Robert. 

Jay remembers Breaux, her distant cousin, creeping into bed with her early the next morning. He raped her, she later told police, although she was too young to understand what had happened at the time. (Breaux and his defense attorneys declined InvestigateWest’s request for comment through the King County Department of Public Defense.)

Eight years later, in 2020, Jay opened up to her parents about the assault. Robert reported it to the Pacific Police Department south of Seattle. After being interviewed by the police, Breaux was arrested that year and charged with rape of a child in the first degree  — a class A felony with a maximum possible sentence of life in prison and lifetime registration on the state’s sex offender registry.  

Then Jay waited. For about three and a half years, she and her family received few updates apart from court dates getting pushed back again and again, partially due to a backlog of cases during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

“We have had several conversations about the age of this case,” a judge said during a September 2022 hearing. “After two years, I think the court’s patience has run thin.” 

But another year passed, and still little progress was made. A defense attorney representing Breaux repeatedly asked the court to push back the trial, citing his heavy workload, according to audio of court hearings.

Data pulled from the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center in January 2021 found that a long wait is typical for sexual assault cases. Victims were waiting an average of about 19 months for their cases to resolve, according to the center’s report. In comparison, felony cases in King County take about five and a half months on average to resolve, according to a 2020 study of over 6,000 King County cases.

Jay, meanwhile, tried to carry on with her life. She graduated from high school and went to college to study criminal justice. Yet the case remained at the forefront of her mind, she said. 

Then in March 2024, the defense counsel finally scheduled an interview with Jay. That’s when her advocate texted her just minutes before the interview that it had been canceled. 

The prosecutor, Stacy Norton, had decided to move forward with a plea deal knowing that Jay was “likely not going to be on board,” Norton said. But Norton and her supervisors had to weigh the risk of going to trial, which could result in no conviction at all, she noted. 

Norton had become increasingly concerned that the evidence in Jay’s case, which relied heavily on other testimony corroborating Jay’s account, might not be enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The alleged crime occurred without witnesses and wasn’t reported right away — two common challenges in prosecuting sexual assault cases. Still, Norton had been planning to go to trial because Breaux was willing to plead only to a non-sex offense, an outcome that Norton said was “unacceptable for this case.”

Norton’s plan changed when the defense attorney suddenly said Breaux would plead guilty to child molestation in the third degree, a class C felony with a maximum five years in prison and 10 years on the state’s sex offender registry.

“Now it’s the difference between, am I going to roll the dice at trial with the concerns that we have that are evidentiary, knowing that I could hold this guy accountable?” Norton said. “I could make sure he has something on his record forever that labels him not just a sex offender, but a child sex offender. And that’s what tipped it for me.”

Norton recommended the standard range of 12 months in jail, 12 months of community custody and continued mental health treatment, according to the guilty plea statement.

Although it felt like a loss for Jay and her family, Breaux is facing more legal consequences than most accused sex offenders ever do. Many plea deals involve dropping from a sex offense to a non-sex offense or from a felony to a misdemeanor, the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center’s data shows. This means that some perpetrators’ criminal records are no different than if they’d punched someone in the face, Norton said.

“It sounds horrible coming out of my mouth, but what we got was exceptionally good for this particular case,” Norton said. “I don’t mean that as to say that it by any means makes the victim whole. Just from a legal standpoint, this is the best that we could have hoped for.”

Victims’ rights

When Jay first met Norton over Zoom last spring, she felt like Norton was advocating against her, Jay said. “She basically told me to not get my hopes up about winning the case.”

But a prosecutor’s job is to prosecute the case, not to represent victims’ needs, said Colleen Ingalls, director of victim services at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. 

“We advise victims that this is the state versus the defendant, not the victim versus the defendant,” Ingalls said. Victim advocates largely agree that this distinction is important, as it allows prosecutors to make decisions that prioritize public safety and are as unbiased as possible.

While defendants in criminal cases are guaranteed certain rights by the U.S. Constitution — the right to an attorney, to a speedy trial and to an impartial jury, among others — victims’ rights vary by state. All states have passed their own victims’ rights laws, and most have also amended their constitutions to include victims’ rights. 

Washington enacted its crime victims’ “Bill of Rights” in 1985, which gives victims a larger role in the criminal justice system by keeping them informed of court proceedings. In 1989, Washington enshrined some of these rights in its constitution.

Washington continues taking steps to expand victims’ rights. The Legislature passed a bill in March, backed by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, that gives victims of domestic violence and sex offenses the right to attend hearings remotely and be informed when charges have been filed.

Yet the implementation of these laws varies widely across counties and prosecutors, according to Riddhi Mukhopadhyay, director of the Sexual Violence Law Center, a nonprofit law firm that offers legal aid to victims in Washington.

“The law isn’t very clear, necessarily, just how much can the victim provide input? And how much does the prosecutor need to take the victim’s input seriously?” Mukhopadhyay said.

Maryman with the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said the office asks victims for input early on in their cases. Those conversations can include how the victim feels about going to trial.

But in the end, it’s prosecutors and judges who decide.

“Sometimes I have to step back and work with my obligation to the state and to community safety,” Norton said.

Jay’s dad, however, felt like the plea deal was “just another case closed” for the prosecutor’s office, he said. “My viewpoint looking at the actions is that this prosecutor, it’s about her interest. She’s not about justice for the people. Because they made a statement, ‘Oh, we took this plea to get him off the street.’ Well, he’d been on the street for four years.”

Norton said that given the sudden timing of the defense attorney’s plea proposal, there wasn’t much that she could have done differently in Jay’s case. But she aims to minimize the chances of surprising victims with last-minute plea decisions in the future by repeatedly informing victims of all the possible outcomes and setting realistic expectations, she said.

“I do take this case with me everywhere I go,” Norton said. “We really have to tailor our communication with what the victim can handle and wants to handle.” 

The whole truth

At Breaux’s plea hearing in June, Jay’s dad, Robert, read a statement written by Jay expressing her opposition to the agreement. 

“The prosecutor’s office silenced my voice for a plea deal that does not reflect the harm that was done to me,” Jay wrote in her statement.

Not only does the lower-level charge mean that Breaux has a shorter sentence and less time on the state’s sex offender registry — it also isn’t true, Jay and Robert point out. Third-degree child molestation occurs when a victim is 14 or 15 years old, according to state law. But the rape charge initially filed against Breaux specifies that the crime happened in 2012 or 2013, when Jay was only around 7.

“It’s not the truth. He didn’t do that to a 14-year-old, he did that to a 7-year-old,” Robert said.

In what’s known as a Barr/Zhao plea, Breaux acknowledged to the court that the child molestation charge has no factual basis, and that the available evidence is sufficient to convince a jury of his guilt on the original rape charge. This type of plea is sometimes used for sexual assaults in King County, though not in the majority of cases, Maryman said. It enables prosecutors and defense attorneys to find a crime that appeases both parties, even if it’s not the crime that occurred.

In Jay’s case, changing the charge makes the crime less severe — and therefore more agreeable to Breaux and his attorneys — since sex crimes committed against younger children carry harsher sentences in Washington.  

Jay and Robert think 12 months in jail isn’t enough. Robert also told the judge that the recommendation for mental health treatment, rather than sex offender treatment, was “just another slap in the face.” 

The judge thanked Robert after he read his daughter’s statement. “It does make us make better decisions when we can hear right from the people impacted,” she told him. 

But Robert felt like it didn’t make any difference, he said. After changing some wording, the judge signed Breaux’s guilty plea. 

During Breaux’s sentencing three months later, a different judge ordered Breaux to obtain a sexual deviancy evaluation and follow the recommended treatment — a small win for Jay and her family. Still, they feel that their concerns with the factual inaccuracies of the plea went unaddressed. 

“So we’re just gonna ignore what really happened,” Robert said. “Yeah. That’s our justice system.”

InvestigateWest originally published this story on Sept. 18, 2024.