Under the Washington Public Records Act (PRA), chapter 42.56 RCW, the news media has been given a special exception to receive copies of records related to public employment and licenses that are otherwise exempt from disclosure to the general public. Who or what is considered news media is an issue of general concern, especially with the rise of independent citizen journalists.

In Green v. Pierce County, the Washington Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether an individual who has a YouTube channel but is not affiliated with any news organization qualifies as news media—a case with implications also for journalists under Washington’s Shield Law. Last month, the court held by a vote of 7-2 that an individual was not considered “news media” as defined by the Legislature in the PRA.

I’ve had some requests to subscribe to the blog and given how technologically challenged I am in this area, it took me awhile to research this. BUT, I think I finally figured out how to do it! There’s now a popup sign up form when you first go to the site. Just enter your email address, and if I’ve done this correctly (a big if), you should get a notification when I publish a new post. Let me know if you have any issues with it, or you can send me an email and I can add you manually on my end. Thanks for reading!

Last week, the Washington Supreme Court decided In re Dependence of G.J.A., involving the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and the Washington equivalent (WICWA). The opinion is remarkable for a number of reasons. I tweeted about some of those reasons last week. For this post, I wanted to focus on something we hear a lot about and is the title of this blog post: representation of diverse voices on the bench.

In this case, the court held the state wasn’t using “active efforts” to reunify G.J.A. with his mother and reversed the lower court’s decision to terminate the parental rights of G.J.A.’s mother. This 9-0 opinion, authored by Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Isleta, is notable for all the historical, cultural, and legal context it provides in explaining the decision for the court. As I said in my tweets last week, this wasn’t just a “here’s the statute and here’s how we interpret it” kind of case. This opinion goes further to explaining why the policy exists in the first place and how the historical traumatic treatment of Native populations impact tribes and their members today. She provides a richness and context to an opinion that could’ve easily been a dry statutory interpretation opinion.

Whenever I’m asked why it’s important to have an appellate lawyer on your case, I give two reasons: (1) your appellate brief can make or break your case and you want someone who knows how to write to appellate judges, and (2) if you don’t know the Rules of Appellate Procedure well, you can ruin your client’s chance at appeal. The second reason is the subject of this post.

Last July, I wrote about an unusual move by the Washington Supreme Court to put out an order recalling the mandate and reversing a decision it made in 1916. The order cited the explicit racism and bigotry of the opinion in which the majority opinion badly mischaracterized, belittled, and insulted Native Americans, their treaty rights, and their culture.

There are a lot of things that are debatable in the law. In those cases, a judge may rule against your client on an issue, but as long as you understand how and why the judge reached the result they did, you shrug your shoulders and move on. On the other hand, sometimes you run into a case where you think to yourself, “What on earth was that judge thinking?” I had that reaction yesterday when reading an unpublished opinion out of Division II of the Washington Court of Appeals in Caldera v. Parsons. In that case, the trial court excluded plaintiff’s expert witness from testifying at trial because the expert was disclosed two months after the discovery cutoff.

I’m trying to catch up on writing about important Washington Supreme Court cases, so today I’m going back to a decision from January 28, 2021. In Mancini v. City of Tacoma, the court held 8-1 that under state law police officers can be sued for the negligent execution of a search warrant. This case is a great example of how state courts, operating under state law, can do things differently than the federal courts. It is also a great example of perseverance by the plaintiff and her attorney.

What happens when the Washington Law Against Discrimination crashes headlong into the 1st Amendment right of religious employers to choose workers who reflect their beliefs? Last week the Washington Supreme Court decided the answer is “it’s complicated.” In Woods v. Seattle Union Gospel Mission, a decision that took a year and a half (yes, that’s a very long time for this court) to release, the court issued 62 pages of opinions with a majority, concurrence, and a dissent in part, and includes two justices who haven’t been on the court for at least a year. Plus, the case features approximately eleventy billion amicus curiae.

If you live in the Northwest, you might recall the sad case of the police shooting of Charleena Lyles in 2017. She called 911 to report a burglary. Two officers responded and said she came at them with a knife, so they shot and killed her. She was pregnant. Her three children were home when it happened. Charleena Lyles was Black. The officers are white. Charleena had a history of mental illness, which was known to police. There were questions about why the officers didn’t try to use less lethal force given Charleena Lyles weighed only 100 lbs. A police review board found the shooting was justified.

Even though this article is from July 2020, I just ran across it for the first time and I thought it merited a blog post. It features (among others) the two newest justices of the Washington Supreme Court—Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis (who is the first Native American on the court) and Justice G. Helen Whitener (who is the first black woman on the court).

The past several months I’ve been in the process of setting up my own firm and life has gotten in the way of blogging. But now that it’s 2021, I hope to get back on track! There’s lots of interesting things happening in the Washington appellate world that I’d love to share with you. So stay tuned!

Back in March 2020, 5 prison inmates who reside at different correctional facilities around the state sued the Governor and the Department of Corrections (DOC), seeking a writ of mandamus to force the government to release certain categories of prisoners who are at high risk for Covid-19. In late April, the court denied the petition for mandamus after a hearing, but did so in a brief order that contained no analysis, except for a short page and a half dissent from the four dissenters. (This is not the normal way of things, but the court recognized time was of the essence.) In a 5-4 opinion released today, the court now explains its vote and analysis.

In a highly unusual move, the Washington Supreme Court last week issued an order to recall the mandate involving an opinion it issued in 1916 in the case of State v. Towessnute, 89 Wash. 478, 154 P. 805 (1916). Mr. Towessnute was a member of the Yakama Nation, fishing in the usual and accustomed waters of the Yakama Nation without a state-issued fishing license. The Yakama Treaty, ratified by the US Senate in 1855, protected the Yakama Nation’s right to fish in the places the tribe has historically fished.