Public defender suit says she was terrorized by serial stalker assigned as a client
A man with a history of stalking charges who had previously targeted a female public defender for unwanted attention was nonetheless assigned to another female public defender in a new criminal case, a lawsuit says.
That resulted in months of traumatizing harassment that will likely affect her for the rest of her life, as client “John Smith” left sexually charged messages on her work phone, tracked her to her vehicle, left lingerie on the windshield, hid in the back yard of her home, watched from outside as she dressed and undressed and even broke a bedroom window, says plaintiff attorney Sheila LaRose in the Washington state suit.
Filed Monday in Pierce County, the suit names as defendants King County and the Public Defender Association, reports Courthouse News. The article doesn’t include any comment from the defendants.
LaRose says in the suit that Smith began making harassing phone calls to her, telling her that he loved her and wanted to marry her, soon after she was assigned to represent him. After he was released from jail in 2013 the harassment allegedly increased.
Repeatedly, Smith appeared in the middle of her night outside her “glass divided” bedroom door, the suit says. LaRose “did not sleep for days due to fear.”
The suit says LaRose had never been trained in how to deal with such behavior and her direct supervisor “did not acknowledge that this was really a problem and that he had assigned her a known stalker.”
As LaRose eventually learned, Smith had also allegedly harassed another female public defender who had represented him in an earlier case, leading the earlier counsel to withdraw. A male public defender subsequently assigned to represent Smith had recommended that his future legal counsel be male, the suit says.
However, it was not until February 2014 that LaRose learned, from Smith’s earlier female counsel, of “his stalking of his prior female attorney and his reassignment to a male attorney,” the suit continues. “By then, Mr. Smith had been stalking Ms. LaRose and her daughter for nearly a year,” which required “removing her daughter to a safe house.”
LaRose is seeking compensation for lost wages, future wages, medical care and counseling, psychological trauma, pain and suffering and diminished enjoyment of life and retirement, Courthouse News reports.
Smith was sentenced to a seven-year prison term in January for felony stalking. The Courthouse News article does not make clear whether this criminal case is related or unrelated to his claimed treatment of LaRose.
