24/05/2026
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Winning the Wrong Cases
Ryan Swinburnson has spent five years winning cases against the Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office. He thinks that makes him the only person who can fix it.
I’ll be honest with you: walking into this interview, I knew the Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office mattered, but I did not yet understand how much of its work happens out of public view. I had done research, talked with my team, and asked around. But it was not until about twenty minutes into my conversation with Ryan Swinburnson that the stakes of this race started to come into sharper focus.
Swinburnson, 50, grew up in Blaine, went to Willamette University for law school, and spent the early part of his career cutting his teeth in a prosecutor’s office, first in Oregon, then in Benton County in eastern Washington. He switched to private practice in 2002, but kept one foot in prosecution and one in defense, sometimes simultaneously, in different jurisdictions. When he returned to Whatcom County during the pandemic in 2020, the county asked if he could take some overflow conflict cases. He agreed. The cases kept coming.
By 2024, the county formalized it: Swinburnson now runs a three-attorney conflict office, and he is in a courtroom every single day. He is also running to lead the office he has spent years opposing.
I had done enough research before we sat down to know that something felt off about his background. My searches kept telling me he had done both prosecution and defense work, and I could not make sense of it. He explained it plainly: different jurisdictions, different hats.
Then he said something that stopped me cold.
“Defense is winning,” he told me, “at an 80% clip, probably. And it really shouldn’t be that way.”
To be clear about what that means: Swinburnson is talking about felony cases in Superior Court, outright acquittals, dismissals, and cases that collapse before they ever reach a verdict. It is his estimate from the courtroom floor, not an official county statistic, but it is the kind of number that is hard to ignore when it comes from someone who has been sitting across from the prosecution every day for five years.
Here was a man asking voters to hand him the prosecutor’s office, telling me that the defense bar, his current side, is winning most of its cases. He said it without flinching. Almost like it pained him. That is when I started paying closer attention.
The central problem, he told me, is not ideology or money. It is mentorship, or the collapse of it.
“They’ve lost 17 felony prosecutors in the last three and a half years,” he said, “and when you only have eight to ten prosecutors at any one time, that’s a lot of turnover. What’s happening right now is you have a lot of young attorneys with a lot of good potential, but they haven’t been mentored, they haven’t been taught, they haven’t been cultivated.”
I am a blue-collar thinker. When he described the backlog, currently sitting around 1,500 cases, down from roughly 2,500 during COVID, I found myself thinking about a factory floor. If product is piling up and you keep losing workers, you do not catch up by throwing new people in alone. You put your most experienced hands next to the newest ones and work through it together.
Swinburnson made the same point in starker terms.
“The ones in supervisory positions, some of them are running against me, they’ll do an occasional trial here and there, but they’re not in court every day,” he said. “They don’t see what the issues are. You need to sit next to the younger ones, go through trials with them, read their briefs and give them constructive feedback. You have to cultivate that. The office doesn’t have trouble attracting attorneys. They have trouble retaining them, and I think that’s because of the lack of mentorship.”
Those opponents he is referring to are Dona Bracke, Erik Sigmar, and Jesse Corkern, all current or former members of the prosecutor’s office, who will face Swinburnson in the August primary.
The result, he said, is a justice system that feels arbitrary to everyone caught inside it.
“Why is it a roulette wheel? This prosecutor may charge something, or give a deal of 15 months. This one will not charge the case at all, or give three months. There’s got to be some consistency.”
He described sitting across from victims who have stopped believing the system is working for them.
“I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a victim say, ‘Why are you even asking me? They’re gonna get the continuance anyway, so it doesn’t even matter,’” he said. “That’s a disservice to the community.”
Part of the solution, he told me, is simpler than people might expect.
“When you send out discovery as an office, the police reports, everything you have, right on top of it should be an offer letter. Here’s where we’re going to start. This is the start of the negotiation. I’ve got cases that are a year, a year and a half old. Just give me an offer. Just give me something to talk to my client about, something that gets the ball rolling.”
On the bigger philosophical questions, how hard to push on crime, when to offer treatment instead of punishment, he was more nuanced than I expected.
“We do have recovery court and mental health court,” he said, “but they’re underutilized. The gateway to get into those isn’t big enough, and that’s controlled by the prosecutors. There should be a better opportunity for people that really want to avail themselves. It shouldn’t be a get out of jail free card, but it should be available to those who aren’t violent, who aren’t repeat offenders.”
He wants to add a veterans court as well, a program he helped build in Benton County.
“People that were in the military are used to the structure of military life,” he said. “When they get out and there’s no structure, they lose their way. You get them back into that structured environment, connect them with their services. There’s a real opportunity there.”
But he was equally firm about where compassion ends.
“I believe everybody should get an opportunity to reform,” he said. “That’s only two reasons we have a justice system. It’s either to punish or to encourage reformation. If they’re not going to reform, then you have to be ready to punish, and that punishment has to be consistent. It has to be equitable. It shouldn’t matter the socioeconomic position of the person, it shouldn’t matter the race of the person. There’s a reason Lady Justice is blindfolded.”
“People on the left want more programs,” he added. “People on the right want a heavier hammer. They’re both right. And they’re both wrong, to a certain degree.”
Near the end of our conversation, I asked him something I had not written down. It is a question I have started putting to everyone who wants public office. How should people hold you accountable if you win?
“The prosecutor’s office is designed to hold people accountable, that’s their job,” he said. “So my position is, how can you hold other people accountable if you can’t even hold the people in your own office accountable? You need to be visible. You need to be out there, able to talk to people. You have to take positions on things the prosecutor’s office should take positions on.”
He paused, then made his case in the plainest terms he had used all afternoon.
“If you think we’re better off now than we were ten years ago, don’t vote for me,” he said. “But if you don’t feel that way, you’ve already got a blueprint of what you’re gonna get from the others, because they’ve all been in positions where they could have made a difference, and nothing’s changed.”
The August primary will show whether voters are paying attention to an office that rarely gets the spotlight, but carries enormous power.
Article written by Greg Thames, BMN Citizen Reporter
