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Hiring more state and local law enforcement officers is central to a campaign plan that Bob Ferguson rolled out on public safety in this year’s governor’s race. Will it be enough to stanch criticism from Republicans? And will members of his party go along? David B. Owens, assistant professor of law at the UW, is quoted.

Three Tacoma police officers left a Pierce County courtroom Thursday acquitted of all charges in the death of Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old Black man who died after a chaotic altercation with them on a Tacoma street nearly four years ago. The trial marked the first test of a Washington law that provided prosecutors a lower bar for holding officers liable for using deadly force. David B. Owens, assistant professor of law at the UW, is quoted.

This week, a jury in Pierce County Superior Court found three officers not guilty of the 2020 death of Manuel (Manny) Ellis, a Black man, in their custody. David B. Owens, assistant professor of law at the UW, is interviewed.

David B. Owens, assistant professor of law at the UW, says he's not surprised by the acquittal of the Tacoma police officers in the 2020 killing of Manuel Ellis, and he explains further issues surrounding Thursday's verdict.

Members of law enforcement, community organizers and more weigh in on the trial of three Tacoma officers charged in the 2020 death of Ellis. David B. Owens, assistant professor of law at the UW, is interviewed.

Police accountability advocates question whether departments are moving fast enough to get officers through the program, which is required under a measure voters approved in 2018. David B. Owens, assistant professor of law at the UW, is quoted.

David B. Owens, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington and a partner at the Chicago-based civil rights firm Loevy & Loevy, said the public list is a welcome, but not radical, change. Other prosecutors in major cities like Brooklyn’s Eric Gonzalez and Baltimore’s Marylin Mosby also have published similar lists.

"I offer five quick points. In the end, while I had many fears about the scope of this decision beyond the question of affirmative action, the decision is more narrow than it may feel at first blush. The Harvard-UNC Cases are not as significant, for example, as Dobbs last term or other cases under the Roberts Court (like Citizens United, in my view) that have dramatically changed our society."

"As a 17-year-old kid, bring him to the police station and interrogate him for 14.5-14 hours," said David B. Owens, Wright's attorney. "At the end of the day, he signed a confession, we are done. And then he is criminally prosecuted and had a mandatory life sentence as a juvenile."

"The only evidence that ever existed against Mr. Wright was the statements that they said that he gave as a juvenile," said his attorney, David Owens, with The Exoneration Project. "There was no eyewitness. There is no forensic evidence. There's no bullet evidence. There's no nothing like that. It's just, 'Oh yeah, this kid after 15 hours of interrogation said this,' and that's all it was. So once we showed that the cops lacked reliability, that was part of it."

Wright was convicted on the sole basis of a confession he signed after a 14-hour interrogation during which he was abused and coerced by detectives, according to attorney David Owens.

Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington, David Owens, began the Teach-In by focusing on the renewed presence of activism that gained traction in 2020 after the death of George Floyd as well as the optimistic results of protests nationwide

David B. Owens, a University of Washington law professor who worked with similar police data in Houston, cautioned against drawing conclusions about the presence or lack of intentional bias or discrimination from a statistical analysis.

The Washington State Patrol this month announced a study had found “no systemic agency bias” in its stops and searches. But that’s not the whole story. David B. Owens, an assistant professor of law at UW School of Law, is quoted.

"It is an especially cruel, harmful thing that protests about police brutality are met with what? More police brutality," said David B. Owens, another civil rights attorney who is also representing Avery's family.