After more than four years of litigation in state and federal courts, including two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, four Seattle police officers who attended the violent Jan. 6, 2021, Stop the Steal" rally at the U.S. Capitol have dropped a lawsuit to prevent the release of their names.
As a result, their names could soon be made public.
Six off-duty Seattle officers attended the controversial rally — the largest known contingent from any U.S. police department — and sued in 2021 after Seattle resident Sam Sueoka filed a public disclosure request with the Office of Police Accountability seeking details and their identities. The lawsuit identified the officers only as "John Does 1-6" and sought to block the release of their names.
Two of the officers were identified after they were fired when an investigation showed they trespassed and stood by during what the department called an “active insurrection.” The department found the other four did not commit crimes.
President Donald Trump encouraged the rally and has since pardoned all but a handful of nearly 1,500 people who were criminally charged for their involvement in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to news reports. One rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot to death by police, and the event is credited for the deaths of several Capitol police officers and others who succumbed to heart attacks, a stroke, drug overdose and suicide.
One of Sueoka's attorneys, Neil Fox, said his client has defended his request for years now solely out of his belief that the public "should always have a right to know who is policing them."
"That right is even more important as we see every day dozens of videos of masked-anonymous federal law enforcement officers taking people off the streets and putting them into concentration camps like Alligator Alcatraz" — a newly opened detention center in the Florida Everglades — or sent to El Salvador's maximum-security Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, Sueoka said in a statement.
"This case coming to an end marks a victory for the public to know who is policing them and sends a message to police in general that 'the people do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,' a quote from the construction clause of the Washington Public Disclosure Act.
A telephone message seeking comment on the decision to dismiss the lawsuit left with Joel Ard, the Kingston, Kitsap County, lawyer representing the officers, was not returned Friday.
The dismissal came just a week after Sueoka filed a motion asking King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widlan to hold the officers in contempt of court and levy daily sanctions against them for refusing to amend the lawsuit title and documents to include their names. Both the Washington State Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have rejected the officers' pleas to remain anonymous.
With the dismissal of the lawsuit, OPA now must comply with Sueoka's public disclosure request, which will likely contain information allowing him to identify the officers and review their actions.
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