While the state’s nonunified court system allows flexibility at the local level, research shows the patchwork of approaches often results in inequities and ‘justice by geography’

By Moe K. Clark, InvestigateWest

Moe K. Clark is a collaborative investigative reporter at InvestigateWest, covering Washington’s criminal justice system and other topics. Her work is supported by the Murrow News Fellowship, a state-funded journalism initiative managed by Washington State University.

This story was originally published by InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to change-making investigative journalism. Sign up for their Watchdog Weekly newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

During his years as a Yakima County District Court judge, Dirk Marler always started his court hearings off the same.

“I called the entire calendar at the beginning so that I could weed out the people who were in the wrong freaking building that needed to be down the road,” said Marler, who served as county court judge from 1988 to 2003.

He knew it was easy for members of the public to get confused about how to navigate the convoluted court process. In Yakima County alone, a person could be summoned to Superior Court, Juvenile Court or District Court — or to one of the nearly dozen municipal courts spread across the county. 

Each court operates differently than the next as a result of Washington’s nonunified court system, which allows courts — and judicial officers — throughout the state to function largely independently of one another. Across the U.S., approximately 50% of states operate under a unified court system, although there isn’t one single definition for what classifies a court as unified, according to a bill introduced in the state legislature this year.

While a nonunified approach allows flexibility at the local level, the differences from court to court can create vastly different outcomes for people navigating the system, a phenomenon that criminal justice advocates call “justice by geography.” For example, where a case takes place can impact whether or not a person is held in jail before a trial, if they are able to clear illegal drug convictions from their criminal record, or how much they pay for court fines and fees.

“Every judge gets to say, ‘Well, I want papers delivered to me in this way. I want to note it on the calendar this way’ — these specific things that, while I understand that it makes their life a little bit easier, it makes it impossible for someone to navigate who is not a system player,” said Corey Guilmette, the co-executive director at Civil Survival, a legal aid organization.

There have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to unify Washington’s court system over the last three decades to create more consistency across the system, including a bill — House Bill 1909 —  that was introduced at the state Legislature this year that sought to study the issue. But each attempt has failed, in part due to budget constraints and opposition from some municipal court judges, powerful judicial associations, prosecutors and elected county clerks. 

“They all have their own little local fiefdoms where they have control, and people don’t like giving up control,” Guilmette said. “It’s an uphill battle.”

“If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing that would make us able to serve people better, more effectively, it would be unifying the courts,” he added.

Bill fails to make it out of committee

This year’s effort at the Washington Legislature to study the issue was led by Rep. Jamila Taylor, a Democratic state lawmaker representing Federal Way and the co-sponsor of House Bill 1909. She told lawmakers during a committee hearing in February that the effort to unify the courts was long overdue. 

“Court rules are creating barriers that are unnecessary, and this is just the beginning of a conversation to examine where we can find solutions that actually allow folks to access the courts in an efficient way, to get consistent outcomes and be able to really serve the people of Washington,” Taylor told lawmakers.

The bill would have created a 36-member task force to analyze Washington’s court system and identify ways to improve consistency and court outcomes by looking at technology adoption and funding. The task force would have included judges, prosecutors, public defenders, people formerly incarcerated, unrepresented litigants and victims of gender-based violence, according to the bill. 

Rep. Hunter Abell, an Inchelium Republican and the assistant ranking minority member on the committee, commended Taylor for tackling the issue, but ultimately voted against moving the bill forward.

“I will be a very soft no on the bill,” said Abell, who is also a lawyer. “I think there is a benefit to this type of process, but my preferred approach would have been to build this legislation around identifying voluntary efficiencies that could be adopted by the various jurisdictions.”

Esperanza Borboa, the chair of the Washington State Bar Association’s Access to Justice Board, testified in support of the bill. The board was established by the Washington Supreme Court in 1994 to try to address the systemic barriers low-income people face within the court system.

“We know that when an individual moves through the court system, the stress, trauma and uncertainty can be overwhelming,” Borboa told lawmakers. “The process is confusing, filled with potholes and inconsistency.

“When a person must move through more than one local court, the rule changes or additional fees often create barriers for those seeking justice,” she added. “A task force to research and explore better alternatives for a more efficient and equitable court system benefits everyone, especially those living in rural areas or in poverty.”

The bill received a second public hearing in late February in the House Committee on Appropriations but didn’t receive a vote before the legislative cutoff date, rendering the effort dead.

When Marler heard the bill didn’t move forward, he said it felt like deja vu given Washington’s current budget deficit.

“That’s what tipped it last time,” said Marler, who led the court services division at the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts until his retirement in 2024. “It may well have been that legislators are more focused on trying to preserve other things than they are creating new efforts and new work.”

Early 2000s effort to regionalize the courts

The closest Washington came to unifying its court system occurred in the early 2000s with the formation of a statewide task force focused on funding. The two-year effort coined the “Justice in Jeopardy” campaign — which involved more than 100 people, five work groups and many subcommittees — led to a key recommendation: that the state pay 50% of the cost of trial court operations, according to a 2007 report. 

“We recognized that this would require a long-term, incremental approach and that we have a long road ahead,” wrote then-Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerry Alexander. “The more we reflect on the Task Force recommendations, the more firmly convinced we are that we have developed the best approach in the nation, that a shared responsibility between state and local government is imperative.”

Before 2005, Washington state funded approximately 15% of the cost of trial courts, which equates to .5% of the state budget — the lowest percentage in the U.S., according to the report. At the time, counties were struggling to keep up with court costs, leading to many having to close periodically throughout the week, budget cuts to probation departments, unwieldy public defender caseloads, lengthy civil trials and barriers for low-income residents to access legal aid depending on where they lived, according to the report. 

But the majority of the recommendations, which included other modernization efforts such as centralizing certain administrative aspects of the courts, never came to fruition. 

“Municipal court judges as a group, and particularly the part-time municipal court judges, were really adamant that they wanted to hold on to their structure and their turf,” said Marler, who participated in the task force. “And they had the numbers, and they had the votes.”

Today, local governments still provide most of the funding for the state court system, except for half of the salaries of Superior Court judges, which are paid for by the state Legislature. Municipal courts are funded exclusively by cities.

What ultimately tanked the Justice in Jeopardy effort, according to Marler, was the cost of overhauling the state’s court system during an economic downturn.

“The bottom fell out of the economy, and we were in a mode where we were cutting everything, trying to hold on to what we had, rather than trying to build something new,” Marler said. “The Board of Judicial Administration then completely reversed its course on the whole philosophy for regionalization, and frankly it just died.”

Guilmette, with Civil Survival, sees a lot of the same issues outlined in the 2007 report in courtrooms across the state. He estimates that more than 50% of his attorneys’ time is spent navigating the intricacies of each court, not necessarily practicing law.

“There are some courts, still, that will say you have to file things in person, which is crazy,” Guilmette said. “It’s 2025, and there are courts that only take things via fax. There are courts that only take things via mail. There are courts like Pierce County, where every single judge does things differently.” 

“We need to have a 21st-century court system. And right now, we have a 20th-century court system, and there’s no reason every court needs to have its own ways,” he added. “It’s a regressive way of doing things.”