Lawyers for Washington Landslide Victims Accuse State of Fraud

Attorneys for victims and family members in the deadly 2014 landslide in Washington state have accused state lawyers of orchestrating a fraud to hide the truth by deleting emails between defense expert witnesses.

In a motion filed in late August, the attorneys say the state has spent over $3 million in taxpayer dollars developing the opinions of its seven-person expert team. They claim that undertaking, however, was started with a pact approved by the attorney general to destroy emails and deceive about what they were doing.

The plaintiffs say they obtained some of the emails sent among the state’s expert witnesses that were mistakenly spared from deletion. They allege the emails show that the experts were “constantly shifting their story in service of the state’s defense.”

A total of 43 people were killed in the March 22, 2014, slide in Oso.

The plaintiffs are requesting sanctions ranging from instructing a jury to draw a “negative inference” from the email deletions to a liability judgment against the state.

The suit set for trial this fall is expected to involve one of the largest tort claims in Washington history with the state as a defendant.