laura thank you very much for coming in spend a dime this morning thank you so much for having me so start out tell us about the innocence project northwest and how you got involved with the organization sure's so innocence project northwest is a statewide organization were a nonprofit organization that represents washington state prisoners with viable claims of actual innocence so we're not talking about people who you know may say well i did it but i had a good reason it's just people who are actually factually innocent so that's one part of our work and the other part that i kind of head up is the policy reform efforts so we're trying to make the legal environment such that we can you know help identify prote prevent and rectify cases of wrongful conviction in washington state so i got involved with this work actually it's this kind of work and i case of wrongful conviction out of arkansas was the reason that i went to law school so i learned about that case back in the late ninety's the west memphis three case that i think a lot of people know about and a couple documentaries were made and that just really that case kind of floored me i had a very hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that our system could have so many alleged protections and yet this happens and especially in the late ninety's we didn't have any sense of the scope of the problem and i would argue we still don't have a good grasp on the scope of the problem but what we have learned is that there are these sort of patterns in the cases  wrongful conviction that are out there so we can tell where these frailties in our criminal justice system are and so my job is to try to figure out how we might do some policy reforms to try to make our system more reliable and some of the work you do in our legislature and advocating for changes there can talk about that a bit sure so my advice to anybody is that if you can make a policy change without going into the legislature you should absolutely do that is some reforms that we really had to have to go into the legislature to work on so my clinic i started my clinic at the law school in two thousand and eleven and the first issue we took on was to compensate the wrongly convicted in washington state that was the very first issue we took on didn't have any resources from the state in fact they sort of got less support than people who are actually guilty because at least they had community custody and sort of a person in the community who is tracking them and helping connect them of benefits but our system just wasn't set up to have actually innocent people out there released from prison so ted served his whole sentence and then was acquitted after a retrial based on the d n a larry and alan spent over seventeen years in prison each for something they didn't do and it was just the doors open and they got nothing including no official recognition and so in each of their cases as i said ted was retried but larry and alan you know the prosecutors didn't concede that they were actually innocent they just said well they've served seventeen years and we don't know if we can prove it so you know these guys are out there with really no recognition there's not the fanfare that i think some people imagine you know when somebody gets released from prison and they're on the basis of innocence there's this conception that they probably get a huge civil rights lawsuit and you know everybody's falling all over themselves to apologize and that just is not the reality and so what we knew we needed to do was put some mechanism in the law to try to help them be able to seek out some sort of compensation for what had happened to them and so that took us three years but in tw bill finally passed it was sponsored by representative teen or law from des moines who has been a really incredible champion on these issues and she she worked really hard to get it through and it took three years but that's in place now what we're finding is that in evidence points the other way and so it just seemed like the best plan to do that but what we're finding is that it's taking a long time for those who qualify to get compensation and there's a lot of struggle to sort of convince the a g s office that these people are actually innocent so after they've gone through the whole period of incarceration that they have to fight again in the civil realm and so we'll be looking hopefully shortly to try to figure out how to fix some of that law that we already passed so that was twenty thirteen and in twenty fifteen we passed a law to preserve biological evidence that's collected from crime scenes so i think nobody really knew this i was surprised to learn it that you know you see all those t v shows and there's all the investigation and they meticulously collect this evidence and then there were no rules in place that required them to actually preserve that evidence after it had been collected and so we found that those convictions all of our cases we get them after their appeals are all final if somebody is still in the process we don't they're not in our realm yet but we're finding in that post conviction realm in something like thirty six percent of the cases that we identified as being a viable d n a case you know we can know more about what happened in this case and if this person actually did it if we have the evidence and take it for testing in thirty six percent of those cases the evidence had been lost or destroyed so these are potential cases of actual innocence that will never be able to prove because the evidence is just gone and so we knew we needed to do something to just pardon the pun stop the bleeding and get them to just you know stop throwing the stuff away because of the clear value that it may have and so we got that law passed in twenty fifteen and it's not perfect it only requires the preservation of biological material that is sort of prepared for testing in one way or another so it has to be you know a cutting from a shirt or a swab or a slide that they've kind of prepared it whether or not it's been tested but it doesn't include things like you know the clothes that a victim was wearing a sexual assault for example and that's that's something that we know is probative and could be really  d be really important evidence to hang on to so but we got through what we could and it's a big step in the right direction so that's where we are you have a sense for what the motivation would have been destroying evidence well i think it probably varies based on the case but in general it's probably a space concern or just a matter of habit you know i think before the advent of d n a post conviction d n a testing it was just the habit once the case is over the peels are final there's no reason to hang onto it any more what you know what possible value could this have it served its purpose during the trial and i think just like with so many different systems practices in the criminal justice system change slowly and it takes you know i think it was sort of mindless in a lot of cases we talked to a lot of evidence people in different jurisdictions around the state who kind of went oh wait of course we shouldn't be throwing this away i had you know didn't even occur to me i didn't even think about this and so it's just been i think it's been a matter of just educating and helping people to understand what the value may be in these cases that again in other jurisdictions we've had cases where while the appeal was still pending the evidence was destroyed and you kind of have to wonder why that would have happened so it's likes the criminal justice system is just different jurisdiction by jurisdiction there are so many practices that are up to that individual jurisdiction to determine how they do it and as a result we get the astley different practices across the state so a lot of what my work is is is trying to find the areas where we need to standardize conduct where the same issues are going to be present no matter where you are in the state for example d n a you know d n a has value is the same no matter which jurisdiction you're n and no matter what you know what practices that evidence technician has we need to standardize that practice and so that's that's one of the pieces of my work in our current legislative session you had some potential legislation being worked on to talk about that sure absolutely this one is this one's been a labor of i don't know if i want to say love at this point but this we've been working on the issue of snitch testimony for the last six years so this was our sixth year working on it  think as just for a little bit of background you know i think we all seem t v shows where this guy's going to get a deal because he's going to testify against somebody else right and that is a i think a much more common practice in our system than most people realize so it's this is a time when if some person is charged with a crime they can sometimes be offered a deal either a reduction in the sentence or a good sentence recommendation or maybe even maybe even a dismissal of those charges in exchange for their cooperation in a different case so if they're willing to testify against a different person or claim that they have information about that person then they can get a deal in their own case that is as you might imagine tempting to to accept and so we have this system where that is sort of happening much more regularly than most people i think realize frankly much more regularly than i realized it's all talk about in a second but what we've learned over the years of working on this issue is that and a and studying wrongful convictions in general is that false testimony by these witnesses who are given a deal in exchange for their testimony that kind of testimony is a major contributing cause to wrongful convictions it's really one of the five primary causes of wrongful conviction this is consistent when you study the more than two thousand cases nationally that have been identified this is one of those primary factors and in fact in death penalty exonerations nationally this kind of testimony false testimony by somebody getting a deal for themselves was a factor in really half of those exonerations from death row nationally and that's one hundred more than one hundred sixty cases since the one nine hundred seventy s so it's clearly a problem and i think what's what's crazy about this problem is it's one that everyone understands you know if someone is getting paid in one way or another for their testimony there's a clear bias there there's a clear risk that that person is going to testify in whatever way the person paying them wants them to testify right and i think we have this added dynamic that that testimony is being offered by the state that's being offered by the government so i think how that looks to a jury is that well it's the you know it's the prosecutor that's offering this testimony they wouldn't think i mean i've not been a juror unfortunately i'd love to be but i think the process they've got to be thinking as well if the state's putting him up they're not going to put him up there if they think they're lying right and so what we have is a system where there's all these incentives to provide false testimony if someone didn't know anything truthful about that circumstance there's all these incentives to lie and no disincentives and what i mean by that that is we don't very very rarely are the deals that these people made revoked if it turns out that they made false testimony so a really good example of this from from spokane valley it's one of our exoneration cases from innocence project northwest there were arthur we had three clients from spokane valley who were convicted of armed robbery actually they were charged with a string of drug rep robberies in the spokane valley area based on the testimony of a single person who was one of the actual perpetrators of those crimes what was interesting about the circumstances that he said yeah i did it but i did it with these three these three guys who are our clients robert larson tyler gasman impulse tyler yeah i did the crime and i did it with them when in fact he had done the crime with three other people and so this was a scenario where the jury was hearing from one of the admitted actual perpetrators yeah i did it and i did it with those three people in exchange for his testimony he got seventeen months in a juvenile facility instead of the thirty to forty years he was facing based on the charges that they had against him we were you know each of those three guys served almost five years in prison each before and you know when they're young they're in their early twenty's to late twenty's at the time they were convicted so they're spending these really formative and important years in prison for something they didn't do and we were ultimately one of our attorneys fernando torres was able to uncover work records from the victim that established that the crime had to have happened on a day that two of them the three had alibis so it couldn't have been them this was a frustrating case and a number of ways just procedurally in terms of  prosecutor's office didn't believe that they were innocent they were believe that they were still guilty maybe that you know they had all kinds of theories to come up with the attorney general's office fought their compensation the trial court actually denied them compensation because they applied the wrong standard of actual innocence so they they all timidly appealed they were ultimately awarded compensation under the statute or at least said they were entitled to but in the meantime they had gone and sued in federal court for federal civil rights claim and actually won that so they ended up with two point five million dollars which is about three times the amount they would have gotten under compensation all because the tourney general's office chose to fight that case and didn't believe they were actually innocent so they just had a fight after fight after fight after fight and the senator from that district senator mike patton is not known for being perfect particularly progressive on criminal justice issues really saw the value of this and the father of one of our clients to installers just a tremendous advocate on behalf of his son and really just talk the air off of every legislator in the spokane area and said look you've got to do something about this and so we've been working with doing for years trying to get a change in this area and senator patton since twenty thirteen has had a work session or a bill hearing every single year so he's been working on this trying to find the solution that will will work and so we ultimately came up with senate bill fifty thirty eight so that was the bill it's a bill that requires the prosecutors when they're going to incentiv somebody when they're going to give them a deal it requires a state to go out and look for some discreet pieces of information about that witness and about the testimony that they're going to give to try to make sure it passes the smell test like just some basic information to make sure that this testimony is reliable enough to put before a jury so this is for example how many times did this witness snitch for a deal in the past how many times that this person changed their story modify it or recant it you know just to fit the prosecutor's theory of the crime or or whatever what's their charging history that sort of thing just pieces of information that they that would really bear on the credibility of that witness and the reliability of the testimony it's not a duty to actually discover that information it was just a duty to look and so we really worked for years to say look if you don't find any of this information that's ok but we want you to look we basically want you to vet incentivised witnesses in the in the same way no matter where they are all around the state so that bill got out of the washington state senate last year when it was controlled by the majority coalition caucus so republican control got out of the senate forty six to three and then went over to the house and passed the house judiciary ten to three and then did not move off of the house floor so because we have this by any legislature the bill is still alive this year so we took another run at it this year and unfortunately the cut off in the senate just happened on wednesday and the bill did not was not put up for a vote so they just didn't have enough time to do this they would have had there been another thirty days in the legislature well you know it's hard to say i think i'd like to think that that would have happened that it would have kept it going there's a tremendous amount of opposition against this bill from prosecutors and law enforcement so it's a little bit their opposition is a little bit difficult to follow mostly in terms of the logic of it mostly because all of the information that would be required under this bill would be required to be turned over if they know it under existing federal law so we have this sort of system where yeah if that's that's helpful information to the defense if you know it you have to turn it over but if they don't know it then there's there's no law out there that says you've got to you've got to look for whether or not this person is reliable in this particular way it's sort of left to the full discretion of the prosecutor to decide whether this is reliable testimony or not and i think that that on its own as it is it's sort of it's own radio show you know how much discussion prosecutors haven't and how few checks there are on how they do their job right and so this is this is something that we had hoped would move forward because of that this year we have there was some renewed opposition new members of the legislature came in and sort of without having maybe the six years of experience that we have had working on the bill and trying to get the right language had some concerns with it so i'd like to think that it would move forward with a little bit more time but it's difficult to say prosecutors and law enforcement of incredibly strong lobbies in washington state so it sounds like just willful ignorance on the part of prosecutors that they're choosing like i don't want to know when the more i think in some cases it might be i think we would be the first person to say our prosecutors and public defenders have really high workloads so there's a lot of work to be done there's you know the jobs are not easy of course you know one of the objections that the prosecutors made to the bill was well we we just never know when someone's telling the truth or not we can't really know that and our answer to that is well i guess you can't really know if everyone is telling the truth but when you've got these particular kinds of witnesses that have an incentive to say whatever it is that you want them to say then we need to treat them with more care and you know to their credit they acknowledge there's been a big knowledge meant that this is an issue we should do more with that we need to try to be more careful with this kind of testimony and all that unfortunately that counterproposals that they were sending us really did nothing to provide to put more factual information about these witnesses into the system so there was some sort very late in the game counterproposals that were offered that that we just couldn't agree to because they simply wouldn't prevent wrongful convictions so i have the impression that  prosecutors have a drive towards having a lot of successful prosecutions that's how they move up the food chain so again you would just think that you would want to be double checking your work to make sure you have a solid prosecution before you and pursue those ones that are solid and throw the rest you know to the side if you're you know pressed for time you one would think so and i and i think that what you just said invites so much so much discussion about so many different things i mean the first point being prosecutors are just the way that their offices are set up and how things work you know they're not rewarded by how much justice they mete out you know they measured by their conviction rate and i think that all on its own is something that should be reexamined right i mean if if the purpose of a prosecutor is to do justice not just seek convictions which it is it's in the ethical rules that govern our state's prosecutors and every prosecutor then they need to be rewarded based on doing the right thing in every case not just whether they're actually convicting someone and so i think that on its own is important the other piece of what you said that's really interesting is that yes we we should want we would imagine that they would want the most reliable evidence so that it's you know sort of protected from appeal and won't be overturned right the problem with this particular kind of evidence one of the reasons that this evidences this kind of testimony is so permission in the system is that it's extremely challenged difficult to challenge on appeal and the reason for that is it's very often just a he said she said or a he said he said kind of situation so if at the trial level the jury believed that person's testimony there's nothing you can do to challenge that testimony post conviction unless like in the statler case there's some new evidence that was not available at the time that shows that that testimony was false so it's on appeal that the court's going to say well the jury determined the credibility of this witness and they decided that this person was credible who are we to question that they had the best information in front of them they had the arguments being made they decided this person was credible who are we to challenge that and so for the actually innocent defendant for any defendant but for especially grave for the actually innocent defendant once that jury has made a determination that that witness was credible whatever they said becomes a fact for that case on appeal and it's not something they can challenge without new evidence so basically if you can get past the conviction point then in most cases prosecutors probably pretty safe unless there's some sort of evidence that clearly should have been turned over that's later somehow miraculously learned by the defense  which is the other piece is that you know it's sort of a black hole that the that the defense is working with they don't have access to a lot of this information that would have been required under the bill so it's really very one sided it's the prosecutor deciding to charge deciding what to charge and deciding what information to turn over to the defense and we're trying to break that open a little bit and say look in the interest of transparency everyone in the system benefits from knowing whether this person has a motivation to lie whether they have a history of lying everyone should want to know that especially the prosecutors and so we're still trying to understand the opposition and trying to figure out how to counter that and just maybe will never be able to get them to agreement but i strongly feel that we should be able to do that but sticking with the example of your case with the three people from spokane i mean in this situation knowing where those three wrong but the three who were actually guilty were still  out you know doing their business absolutely and i think this is this is frankly the public safety argument to work on wrongful convictions you know every single one of us in the society no matter what your role is if you've been a crime victim if you  are a criminal defendant if you're a prosecutor no matter who you are if you're law enforcement we all have an interest a fundamental interest in protecting the innocent and making sure the actual perpetrators if anyone's going to be held accountable that it's the actual perpetrator and that is simply because those actual perpetrators especially if they are you know inclined so inclined to commit other crimes they continue they will continue to do so and we actually know this from the three hundred more than three hundred fifty d n a exonerat nationally we have actual perpetrator data you know think half of the d n a that half of the time the d n a that exonerated the innocent person identified the actual perpetrator and we now know that while the wrong person was in prison that person went on to commit the actual perpetrator went on to commit scores of other crimes and we're talking you know more than seventy rapes and a tremendous number of murders i mean this is these are serious crimes that that only happened because we got it wrong the first time and so i think that we are to the extent that we can learn something from the cases of wrongful conviction that we know what the where the weaknesses are based on these cases we have in my opinion have a an obligation not just a moral one but a public safety one to make sure that we are trying to plug those holes and do something different i mean this is a roadmap for reform if at the very least of some could argue that we need to completely dismantle the system and start over maybe that is the answer i don't know but at the very least what we need to do is address these weaknesses in the system that cases of wrongful convictions so clearly lay out for us you know maybe in the the math they use for prosecutors scorecard could include in the numerous crimes that occurred after when they didn't when they chose not to pursue the people that appeared to be the actual guilty parties i mean i think i think i to make sure that i say this because i genuinely believe this i don't think that any prosecutor goes forward prosecuting someone they believe is innocent and so i really don't believe that and if that's happening we've got a whole different problem that is probably outside the scope of any law that we could pass right i don't believe that people do that i think that the problem as that we had there so much there's so much about our criminal justice system that relies on fallible human judgment there are so many aspects of it that rely on this person believing that this is the person who did it sort of allowing this sort of confirmation bias to come in where if you fight you see information that confirms your theory you pay attention to it and if you find some find information that that is contrary to what you think happened you have a tendency to ignore it this is a very human thing so we can't expect prosecutors to be superheroes and we don't this is the point right we we expect them to be human but that means acknowledging that they might make mistakes yeah i know myself how easy it is to gravitate towards what you believe is you know stories or or items let's say on social media that support your current theory about what's going on in the world right so we've only got a couple minutes left i don't know can you pound through quickly what the other four primary reasons for convictions sure i mean the very the primary cause in d n a case spread the leading cause a wrongful conviction by leaps and bounds when you look at just d n a exonerations is mistaken eyewitness identification so that one is critically important others are false confessions a lot of people don't realize this twenty five percent of d n a exonerations involve someone who falsely confessed or made false incriminating statements and that has a lot to do with how law enforcement doesn't vest a geisha ins and sort of the techniques that they use that can especially more vulnerable populations like juveniles and mentally ill people those are people experiencing trauma which if you were involved or witnessed or it was a someone known to you you can be much more susceptible so false confessions mistaken eyewitness id bad forensics so this is just either testimony about what the biological evidence showed that is just not defensible or the the science has evolved and we know now that what we thought was true couldn't is not is not good science where microscopy microscopy is a really good example of that used to be you could people thought that you could have his hair and say oh this hair from the crime scene matches this source to a scientific certainty you know they're microscopically identical and we now they know that this is just junk science you know bite mark evidence and saying oh that bite mark that clearly showed this is this is junk science these are not sciences they've not been peer reviewed they don't have standardized techniques so all of these these pieces those are just a few factors that that we know lead to wrongful convictions but sort of the silver lining if there is one is that we can do something about all of this there we can prevent wrongful convictions by increasing knowledge of this by finding policy solutions that will change practice but they have to be the ones that actually change practice on the ground we can't have we can't have policies that are you know able to get around we need to actually find out more information about your going to zation in the innocence project northwest no thank you so much so i urge people to go to i p m w dot org which is our website i think that this is the the constant plug we're not the innocence project that's a large organization based out of new york city we are washington state organization fully independently funded as all of the organizations are around the country that bear that name we share the same mission but we're all independent of the one in new york although it's a fantastic resource for all of us peter thank you very much for coming in and spending time with us again this morning thanks for making it possible so start out tell us a little bit about the fish company and the puget sound salmon commission right well we're just lucky fish company is our small family business we've probably got six or seven people that work in the business and my son fish is my other son ran the business for a while we we marketed co ops up and down puget sound do the farmer's markets here in  seattle we do some midwest co ops so it's all direct marketing high quality handling on the boat and i feel good as a fisherman taking responsibility for that fish all the way from the water to the to the consumer it just makes me feel good to treat those fish with respect that piece of sound salmon commission which i'm not speaking for today but i am a long time commissioner in the washington state department of agriculture that's actually a commodities commission that does things to enhance and augment our small boat fisheries here in puget sound we do toxicology studies we actually found out that the local keita salmon are very clean we education we've got a website at sound catch dot org so it's a it's a good group it's self funded by the small boat gill netters here in the non treated gill netters here in puget sound they paid two percent of their kids to a fund this program all right so we have just had developments this week in regards to legislation regarding a facility a major facility that collapsed this last august you were on then to talk about that but maybe you can  update on us update for us what occurred in august with the cook aquaculture correct only well first of all this is really exciting what's going on in libya right now we actually got powerful legislation passed in the senate and the governor has expressed his support and right now we're trying to we're fighting the battle in the house basically to phase out the the farming of this exotic species atlantic salmon canada they're actually global called cook aqua culture i think the privately held i think i think i read that they're about a five billion dollar corporation i might be overstating but i think it's a bar they paint themselves as a mom and pop shop  know i saw a picture of their c e o testifying someplace and he had on like a farmer's cat like he was straight from kansas or something as it's not the case they've had a lot of issues on the east coast of the u s i'm sorry the east coast of canada and they operate in other places they're actually doing some land based facilities they're funding on the on the east coast of canada which really is the only ecologically sane way to do what they're doing which is raising these domesticated in atlantic salmon currently i mean the way this industry operates they they set up these open net cage pens out in the wild ecosystem and then the feed that they feed those fish are an antibiotic stay throwing or any pesticides that all goes out the ambient marine environment and of course affects all the other organisms wild fish even in the birthplace of this industry the farm salmon industry which is in norway big movements in norway to try to remove these things from the water because they're destroying their native stocks over there so i was coming back from alaska in the middle of august when i heard the news that there'd been this collapse at cypress island which is just north of the anacortes and  it was initially it was right at the time when there was an eclipse and and the company claimed all was because of the eclipse and and of course this was the first of many excuses that that turned out to be totally bogus that they threw out the first they said it's just a few fish it's not much gee we had no idea this was happening then they said it was i don't know maybe one hundred thousand and now apparently the number of escapees is doubled so there's just a litany of misrepresentations that this company has put out and also it turns out that they had a heads up that this facility was collapsing  some time earlier in because they had a bunch of maturing fish thousands inside this pen they just they just figured well screw it will just go ahead and not do anything and just harvest these fish well  bingo it did they didn't make it turned out that the the net pants that they had were just covered in muscles huge title resistance the tides weren't even that extreme and it was just a it was just a complete collapse  and and so we've seen what what's happening now which is that these fish the fish farmers say well what's the problem with exotic species you've got clams you've got mussels well they don't have tails and these fish within a week  leaving had were being picked up one hundred fifty miles north of british columbia now as recently as about a month ago we found escape in lenox way up in the skagit river so it's very very serious threat to the marine ecosystem and it's it flies in the face of a the treaty commitments that we have with native americans that they signed those treaties gave away this land down here in exchange for fishing rights and the courts have ruled that fishing rights have no meaning if you have no habitat if you have no fish and so they have rights to protect their resource and they're using them and all twenty three of the of the treaty tribes have come out in favor of removing these pens from from our ecosystem i mean salman's critical to the tribes of course  critical to the whole the whole ecosystem we've got here and in that sound after the last ice age ten twelve thousand years ago when the glaciers receded in the land was barren it was the salmon that came back from the ocean that began to fertilize the streams and and regenerate the ecosystem so salmon wild salmon are absolutely critical not just as a food source for humans but in terms of you know we're finding their signatures they bring chemical signatures from the ocean and we find them in old growth trees so it's it ties the whole web together it's absolutely central to our our ecosystem so to put an invasive species in the livelihood and you're going to put that at risk for some short term jobs you know and just a handful of jobs so it doesn't make sense you know and this is that these are the kinds of battles that that fishing dependent communities are fighting all the way from bristol pebble mine all through british columbia we've got the first nations that are that are leading the fight against these invasive net pens people like alexander morton up there who've who's done all the lot of the science research on it  and then you've got people in iceland norway other places that are fighting ireland we we just find chile all over the world were were resisting this sort of blue revolution which is not really about feeding people it's really a by generating money from a first world clientele that's the whole goal for these companies well another of the myths that cooke floated early on was that the these farmed atlantic salmon wouldn't survive on their own once they got past that right that eroding fence that they had felt they continue to claim that that there is no evidence that these fish can colonize and successfully establish themselves there's been research done in british columbia on vancouver island by john volpi who's a professor university of victoria and he found i can't member the percentage i think was around twenty to twenty five percent of the streams he survey had evidence of successful atlantic colonization now of course one thing the companies will say is that well gee was your department of of fish of fisheries here in washington state you they intentionally tried to release atlantics forty fifty years ago to create a sport fishery which says something about their mentality but they weren't successful at that time but the difference now is that many of these streams are underpopulated by wild fish and it takes repeated attempts before these invasive species sometimes can take and why take that risk you know and it's not just the colonization that these atlantics may perform in our streams probably most important and most frightening is the potential for disease transmission and this has become one of the central issues in this fish farming technology is that i mean it's just like a feedlot with cattle or it's just like a bunch of kindergarteners all together when kid gets sick they all get sick and here you've got ten thousand fish in a football field and we've there they are tracking viruses which their genetic muscle inflammation and the death of the fish and huge problem in norway and they haven't yet documented what we call h s semi hearts and skeletal muscle inflammation in the wild fish yet but they have documented and strongly correlated to seen real virus which is ubiquitous in the pens in the wild fish in british columbia and the correlations are really strong the closer the wild fish population is to the net pin the higher percentage of what we call p r v infected fish you find and then they tracked these fish up into the upper reaches of the fraser and they found that the percentage of virus infected wild fish dropped radically which is not a good sign because what that means is that the fish that had it were not fit and couldn't make it to the upper reaches and and so this is this is brand new research just got published in  s about a month and a half ago it's called the effect of exposure to farmed salmon pacino or for real virus infection in fitness and wild pacific salmon it's a long title but the import of the research which is over a thousand fish they surveyed is a very strong correlation between the presence of fish farms and the presence of this new disease in wild fish and that spreads like wildfire sure that companies say oh they can't survive in the wild well there's been lots of documentation in british columbia and you know one of those fish doing up in the skagit river what is this almost six months after the escape or not six months maybe five months they're not feeding well somehow their their metabolism must be doing something to survive so but in any case it's inappropriate you know if you want to if you want to do this kind of domesticated agriculture put it up put it on land where you can control your extra analogies instead they don't want to do that because it raises their their costs so instead they want to be subsidized by the destruction of the wild ecosystem and so i mean these are just a just a quick and dirty summary of the major problems with this industry well and similar to industrial hog farming these farmed fish facilities don't they crank out an incredible amount of waste that  is just going to regulate of the water there right when divers go beneath these pens these you find a dead zone oftentimes i mean you can if you watch some of the some of the documentaries on you tube about this like say salmon confidential is a good one there's another one called fillet o fish that was done by the europeans about toxins and in farm salmon but if you watch those they will actually have footage underneath those pens of just basically dead zones that are that are just loaded with detritus and and so yeah there's there's no containment everything goes out into the ambient marine ecosystem the feces the uneaten feed whatever toxins you're using to treat for pesticides you know that kind of thing so yeah that's and the irony is that had this escape in cyprus not happen really foregrounded this in terms of the public you'd be seeing a massive expansion in washington state of this industry right now they had cook had applications into the department of natural resources to radically expand their footprint out in the streets  awkward culture and so they have they had federal tail wind they didn't seem to have any opposition and but we've known for years about the disease problem but it didn't reach critical mass in terms of public awareness till now and talk a little bit about the economics both financial and environmental of supporting farm salmon doesn't it really take i mean they're carnivorous don't they really and  in other words no net loss of protein they say you know we're getting one pound of farmed salmon for one point two pounds of feed what they don't tell you is how many pounds of wild fish it takes to get to that one pound of feed you know it now  have done studies on this in two thousand and five two thousand and four there's there was a foundation called the tear em foundation t e r r a land foundation that actually looked at the feed conversion efficiency of farm salmon and their conclusion was that it takes about nine point nine pounds of wild captured fish to make one pound of farmed salmon on the other end of course the industry's going to dispute that but they did a lot of of six or seven years ago so yeah it's it has a protein reduction it's worse than cattle i mean cattle essentially you're you're you're dumping in massive amounts of water and grain corn and of course they're switching over the farm salmon industry to to more land based grains to reduce their costs of course as they do that you may get three levels in the salmon flesh decline as well so but but still it's a protein reduction fishery and they will they will baldfaced tell you well we're into this to deal with problems of world hunger you know as if they're going to sell this farm salmon in the poor colonized sections of the planet you know in latin america africa asia but put that out there it sounds good it's a good sound bite like they do with jimmy genetically modified organisms right exactly of which salmon was the first one approved by the f d a you know it was it was basically rammed through and now they're actually selling genetically modified fish where they've they've transplanted and they're putting them out and and of course in our country we do not have labeling which requires them to label it as genetically modified you know we came closer in this state but we got sabotaged by illegal campaign contributions by the grocery stores i don't know if you recall that or not yeah so anyways there's there's really no there there's there are ancient forms of culture which you could argue are sustainable i mean the chinese for for ilands have raised fish on farms but it's always conversion of grain or i recalled for a waste into into fish flesh and you know there's a role for that there's a role for that but that's not what this is about you know there's a role for shellfish off work culture which actually helps to clean the sound the filter feeders this is very different  this is this is a bunch of carnivorous fish that you're having to go out and send fleets out to harvest and chavez you know other other other feed and bring him in reduce them to a pellet and then feed them to these fish  all to sell it to you know first world clientele that's what it's about so since that accident in august and the media attention on it then there has been some  movement here in washington state yeah i believe hillary france made the first official step to try and we've we've got it turns out we have a commissioner of public lands that has some backbone and the first the first lease that she cancelled was at port angeles because they were allowing styrofoam to disintegrate they were anchoring outside of the released area you know and the whole industry is paying the state just a pittance for that stuff i mean we're spending way more regulating it that we're getting  and then i think was about two weeks ago maybe a week and a half ago she came out and canceled their lease at the cypress island site just it turned out that they they didn't pick up any of the wreckage it turned out that they hadn't cleaned the nets that they were  island county he represents san juan islands and also i think mount vernon area he wrote a very good bill and he's been a very good legislator down there pushing this issue and it just came out of his committee when on the floor of the senate and this week it got passed thirty five to twelve with republican support it was bipartisan unfortunately it's not as clear cut in the on the house side on the house side this bill was introduced actually the most radical bill was introduced by two republicans from the coast they want to any media shutdown of this kind of interesting seeing republicans on the environmental side you know it used to be plant up there but you know now we're looking at national republicans and it's you know it's trump and the e p a and their own doing all this stuff but still at the local level you find you know i don't care for democrat or republican if they're connected to their constituents they can look at this and say this is shouldn't be happening so we had two republicans promote the promoted and immediate ban which probably would not have stood the test legally and and then we had turned out christina lytton blake who's a conservative democrat from southwest washington and he essentially along with some help from seattle democrats he essentially gutted that bill and took out the provisions that would have phased out at salmon and and so it's called house bill twenty nine fifty seven and you know if you're in joe fitzgibbons district like i am you need to contact him and express your displeasure with him because he actually supported getting that bill as did eric pettigrew in the rain or valley you know but it was and so it came out of committee gutted and there was a minority that opposed the gutted bill within the committee including christine linton so the hope now is that this thing following the senate passage of the ban and the governor's statement which was very strong that these don't belong here  we need to focus attention on the house side in and you need to call your representative it's house bill two nine five seven right now it's just a study bill but we want to do amendment add back in that language than phase of these exotic species out of puget sound so so that's kind of where we're at right now i've actually met with cookoff we're culture about two weeks ago myself and another fisherman we were down at the association of washington business and we were hoping they would stay neutral and so we sat down there and you know we really couldn't find any common point of agreement the association of washington business of well why should you fishermen care if these net pens operate and he said you know the resource is dying from a thousand cuts you know you've got all the runoff you've got the culverts that haven't been fixed you know we've got endangered species the chinook are listed as a federally endangered species if any fish is going to pick up disease from the net pens in puget sound it's going to be the resident fish that are here longest which are the chinook and so all these things impinge on our ability to harvest this public resource and bring it to the public i mean we should be thinking about a future which is more of a utopian future where we actually  celebrate and augment the tremendous natural resource that we have here i mean puget sound is not just a platform for water skiing that's a garden out there and so you know how do you how do you explain that to the association of washington business and in a fifteen minute meeting i mean but that's why i mean that's that's why basically we're i mean it's interesting looking at the political fault lines in terms of who is the commercial fishing side it's primarily that the non treaty small boat gill netters who are there who are politically active you don't hear too much from big salmon processors or the larger bo fishermen that fish for them in yell so it's kind of sad you don't really hear much from sport fishermen either you know there's a few there's some good sport groups like trout unlimited but by and large they haven't been present down there and in so it's a coalition of it's a pretty good coalition and it's it's it's actually worthwhile going on t v w and looking up some of the hearings on the house egg or senate egg committee hearings because there's some powerful testimony especially that the tribal testimony very powerful we've also got our resident orca whales that are literally starving yes there's not enough salmon for right that's it you know and their primary focus chinook salmon you know that maybe they'll switch anita a kido once in a while but it's primarily chinook and so to have these invasive species potentially disease transmitters and by the way there was a report came out from the department of natural resources looking at the cypress island fiasco and all four of the scaped lennix that they sampled had that disease that were worried about pissing or through a real virus and so and that was buried on page ninety eight of that report in a footnote so there's some real concerns here you know we need to get this thing under control all right and the bill again that you're recommending people respond to it's called house built two nine five seven you know you can go to the legislative hot legislative site and type in your address and it will give you your representatives and you need to you need to e mail them and tell them that house bill twenty nine fifty seven the provisions for atlantic salmon phaseout need to be restored there needs to be amendments to that bill that basically we want to see a parallel bill to that just passed by the senate and endorsed by the governor all right well with that we are enforcing out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us again well i want to thank you mike for all the great work you've done here hold