Pierce County voters will decide on November 3 between a retired Superior Court judge and the office’s current chief criminal deputy to lead the prosecuting attorney’s office, a race that has turned into a pointed argument over why hundreds of felony cases are piling up in the courts and who can best manage a civil liability crisis topping $690 million. Bryan Chushcoff, 74, who served as a Pierce County Superior Court judge from 1996 until his retirement in 2025, is facing off against Coreen Schnepf, 45, the office’s current chief criminal deputy.
The candidates disagree over what the caseload figures say about the prosecutor’s office. Figures Bryan Chushcoff cites, reported by The News Tribune, show Pierce County felony filings fell from 4,934 in 2019 to 3,727 in 2025 — nearly 25 percent — while the average number of pending felony cases rose from 1,589 to 1,865, more than 17 percent. Chushcoff calls the buildup a failure of justice; Coreen Schnepf says the pending-case accumulation is the court’s backlog, not a prosecutorial failing.
Two Very Different Resumes
Chushcoff spent nearly three decades on the Superior Court bench before retiring in 2025. He has picked up endorsements from police unions in Tacoma and Puyallup along with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and civil litigation has emerged as a campaign issue.
Schnepf now oversees roughly 180 staff and attorneys within the prosecutor’s office. Robnett, the outgoing prosecutor, has endorsed Schnepf as her successor, according to the 31st Legislative District Democrats.
What’s Behind the Falling Felony Numbers
Schnepf attributes the decline in felony filings to changes made by the Washington Supreme Court and the state Legislature rather than any slowdown at the prosecutor’s office. The most prominent of those is the Supreme Court’s 2020 *State v. Blake* ruling, which struck down the state’s simple drug possession law as unconstitutional and forced courts statewide to vacate hundreds of thousands of drug convictions, reshaping felony filing patterns across Washington, as Hoodline detailed in its coverage of a related resentencing case…