The purpose of a pretrial hearing is to allow the parties ample opportunity to investigate their prospective cases, negotiate potential dispositions and determine how the case will proceed. The pretrial hearing is essentially a status conference designed to inform the court where the parties stand and what is to happen next.

In Seattle Municipal Court, a pretrial hearing is scheduled at the time of arraignment. The current policy in this court is to set the pretrial before an individual judge who will then preside over the remainder of the case from pretrial, through motions and to the eventual trial or other disposition. "Current policy" is an important distinction because Seattle Municipal court tends to change its procedures once every two or three years. One element of this procedural format is that the City Attorney’s office currently assigns prosecutors to individual courtrooms. This means that there is normally consistency in both the judge who presides over and the city attorneys who prosecute a particular case from pretrial through disposition. Again, "current" is relative as the Seattle City Attorney’s Office routinely changes the way it handles its case load as well.

Because the judge and prosecutors who handle your case from this point forward are unlikely to change, it is important to know as much about them as you can. Each judge has different expectations of you and different standards when it comes to making final rulings and judgments. Likewise, despite the fact that there are uniform standards within the City Attorney’s Office when it come to prosecuting DUI cases, not every prosecutor is the same.

Contact a Seattle DUI lawyer for more information on what to expect at your specific pretrial hearing. At Milios Defense, we are very familiar with this court and would be happy to provide you with more information.