This election, Spokane voters are choosing three people to decide cases in the city’s municipal court. One judge, Kristin O’Sullivan, is running unopposed. Two of her seat mates, Gloria Ochoa-Bruck and Mary Logan, have challengers.
Mary Logan has been a judge in Spokane’s municipal court since 2009. She was first appointed while serving in the city’s public defender’s office, then re-elected four times.
"I hope to be able to continue to support a justice system that creates room for everyone, that has access to justice as its emphasis as it moves forward, and that does not stomach special interest groups that try to convince us that Spokane is dying and that the only salve for that wound is incarceration," Logan said at a recent NAACP candidate forum.
Municipal court is the least sexy of the local courts. It handles everything from parking tickets to misdemeanor criminal cases. And because it’s not often in the news, Logan believes it is underappreciated.
"I think the problem that the municipal court has is really one of image. And that is, unfortunately, there is that thought that somehow we're some lesser department as opposed to an equal branch of government in the city. And as a result of that, how we're looked at is that we're not considered because we're across the river and we're not in City Hall. And so it's difficult for us to get a place at the table," he said.
Logan is perhaps best known as the judge who presides over the city’s community court "which is for those people that are unhoused, and probably the most chaotic and the most difficult, because housing is at such a shortage," she said.
"We absolutely wrap treatment around them, they absolutely are held accountable to engaging in that treatment and going through testing, but where they end up is under the bridge, because there's no housing that's made available for them.
The court convenes every Monday at the city’s Central Library. Logan sits at one end and hears cases while court staff members mingle with attorneys and their clients and try to determine what they need.
"What we've learned, what I have learned, is that if you give someone the opportunity, if you give them their voice in the courtroom, that they are much more receptive to whatever sentence it is or whatever determination that you make on their case because you've given them an opportunity to be heard," she said.
Critics say community court is too lenient and that some of the people whose cases are heard there are people who make downtown unsafe. One of those is former Spokane city attorney Lynden Smithson.
"The reason I'm running is to bring back I want to bring back the public's confidence in community court. We have a community court in downtown. The downtown core is suffering. The businesses in the downtown core are impacted by this. I want to bring compassion and accountability. I want to get people out of the cycle of addiction and out of homelessness and improve public safety in the process," Smithson said at that same forum.
To be clear, Smithson says he believes in the mission of community court and the city’s other therapeutic courts.
"In mental health court, there was a woman that had schizophrenia. She had severe mental health issues. She was using methamphetamine to keep the voices from telling her not to go to treatment," he said.
"Once we got her onto her prescribed medications, she stopped using, she started doing treatment, she established herself in housing, and she graduated in 24 months, and she was a model of what can happen, but it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of compassion, and it takes the judge to understand that we need to be leading people somewhere, and we can't just let them spiral and be on a hamster wheel, if you will."
Smithson and Logan agree the city needs to do a better job of funding its municipal court. But if that doesn’t happen, "we're going to have to figure out ways to address the shortfalls. We're going to have to find ways either if nonprofits can come in and help us, or if we can figure out another way to give the same level of service that we've been given for the past 18, 20 years. But we're going to have to do it in probably new ways going forward until the economy turns around and tax revenue starts increasing," he said.
This year, local lawyers participating in the Spokane County Bar Association poll rated Mary Logan as exceptionally well qualified and Lynden Smithson as well qualified.
