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Notes -
[previous discussion here].
Some important caveats to start with. The media coverage is not great, at best; this video (video runs at header in worst UI possible) seems to be the closest we have to the facts on the scene, and a lot of reporting doesn't match it well if at all. King County court records are more transparent than those of many other state-level environments (contrast Steven Ray Baca in New Mexico, which I'm following at @FCFromSSC's request, and might as well be written in Greek), but that's mostly damning with faint praise: even if you're willing to jump through the paywall, you're still trying to parse through information presented more fully through press release and insinuation than by open court filings, and more by closed-door decision-making than either.
There's not much present that wasn't in the original charging document, and while the final plea has its own darkly comedic elements -- there's nothing that says 'honest and forthright admission of guilt' like a scribbled-out summary with "lost" and "recklessly" thrown in at awkward angles like a bad editor's suggestion -- it doesn't really illuminate much.
There's no evidence or implication of political motivation, as in other higher-profile car attacks, nor of the clear provocation that was implied by the prosecutors after the initial arrest. About the only information not previously public is largely that Fernandez, with a history of past DUI and a previous assault both entirely unrelated to this matter, is not prone to making the best choices. Which might be weak evidence to support his claimed relationship to a police officer, but not particularly meaningful for evaluating this incident itself. In turn, there is no Even The New York Times moment, here: subreddit discussion back when this was new mostly talked about uncertainty, and there's nothing since to push one direction or the other.
There are no shortage of conservatives who see the case going this far as "bullshit", and no shortage of progressives who see this as getting a deal from a prosecutor.
Fernandez was originally charged with Assault 1: this has been widely reported as possibly resulting in a sentence of life imprisonment and/or 50k USD fines, though a quick read of the sentencing guidelines (pg 270) puts it probably closer to 10-15 years (depending feel about the deadly weapon enhancement?). By those standards, surrendering a driver's license for a month and 24 months probation is a slap on the wrist.
But it's very far from clear how well the state would have been able to prove that case, given the available evidence. It's easy to think about how protestors (especially given the then-current discussion about Charlottesville trials) would be more likely to evaluate an unknown driver as an attacker, but in turn it'd be easy for a defendant's lawyer to credibly argue that that being surrounded by people who believe you were trying to run them over with a car could be dangerous enough to justify deadly force. There's a lot of good pragmatic arguments against the defendant's decision tree here, starting with the rolled-down windows, and they also aren't the legal ones.
The lengthy time before trial was attributed to "the 'large number of outstanding interviews' required to try the case", rather than intentional tactic, but even ignoring the speedy trial concerns that I'm apparently the only person on the planet to care about (including, since he was out on bail, likely the defendant here), that's not the sort of practice prosecutors take if they believe they have a slam-dunk case. There's no guarantee that, once at trial, the judge would have allowed a self-defense claim, but if allowed the model jury instructions are pretty defendant-friendly. Washington's self-defense law requiring payments to those shown to have been defending themselves or others is drastically unlikely to come into play, but it may have still been a further motivator.
The reckless driving plea is somewhat easier to evaluate as a matter of law. That law often acts intentionally as a general 'driving while wrong' statute, for better and for worse, and seems broad enough to pretty easily throw into court successfully. The statutory max penalty of 364 days and/or 5K USD does not look like it's something prosecutors consistently target, but there's no equivalent sentencing guideline sheet for misdemeanors as far as I can tell.
Which gives a general lack of easy answers or honest story, here. Trivially, prosecutors brought at least a not-slam-dunk case for three years; just as trivially, they eventually accepted a far-lesser sentence in a plea deal that's probably less of a problem for the defendant than his already-paid court and bail costs. And there's not really enough information even to draw comparisons with other King County prosecutorial decisions, no matter how poor they may be, especially as neither Dan Satterberg (the King County prosecutor at the time of charging) or Leesa Manion (the current one) specifically were exemplars for bail reform even at the heights of that movement where other Seattle offices did get a reputation. There's no blinding evidence that the defendant got a slap on the wrist because his brother was a police officer, nor that he got hit harder for suspected anti-BLM politic affiliation.
i don't quite understand what is happening in that video. he takes the corner quickly and almost hits the pedestrian but then there seems to be some people chasing the car. did the people start chasing the car when they saw him take the corner dangerously or were they already chasing the car?
No idea. There's been no earlier video that I can find, and no good reporting covering any claims in detail from witnesses.
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