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.
Kelsey Turner
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