Judge: King County Sheriff's Office deliberately withheld emails on deputy's use of force

By Christine Clarridge

TACOMA — A judge on Friday sharply rebuked King County for deliberately withholding information on a sheriff's deputy's troubling behavior from the attorneys of a man left permanently brain-damaged when tackled by the deputy in 2009.

Calling the county's failure to produce three key documents "reprehensible," Pierce County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Arend issued a $300,000 sanction against the county and left the door open for the family of Christopher Sean Harris to possibly receive millions more in compensatory damages.

"This reckless indifference in its failure to produce these three documents — documents that were indisputably relevant — is the functional equivalent of intentional misconduct," Arend said of the failure to turn over the information after Harris' family sued. The county settled with the family for $10 million in January 2011 in the midst of a civil trial in King County Superior Court.

Harris, 32, of Olympia, was left brain-damaged, paralyzed and unable to speak after he was tackled and pushed into a wall by Deputy Matthew Paul in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood in May 2009. Harris had been wrongly identified as a suspect in an earlier bar fight.

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