Voters in the city of Spokane will choose three new city council members during next week’s general election. They’ll also pick three people to serve as municipal court judges. One incumbent, Kristin O’Sullivan, is unopposed. Two of her seat mates have challengers.
Today, we’ll focus on the race with candidates Gloria Ochoa-Bruck and Sarah Freedman. You can find a deeper dive into the race between Mary Logan and Lynden Smithson here.
Ochoa-Bruck was first elected to Spokane’s municipal court bench in 2021.
Hers is the prototypical American immigrant success story. She was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. with her family while still a baby. They settled in Pasco and opened a retail business. Ochoa-Bruck worked through high school, and earned first a bachelor’s degree at WSU’s Tri-Cities campus and then a law degree at the University of Idaho. She became an American citizen in the process.
Ochoa-Bruck’s legal career includes service as a prosecutor and defense attorney and as a judge in the Spokane and Kalispel Tribal courts.
"One of the things that I strongly believe in is that it's important to take a balanced approach to criminal justice," Ochoa-Bruck said at a recent candidate forum sponsored by the NAACP.
"It's important to give people the opportunities for rehabilitation through restorative justice practices, connected to services. But it's also equally important to hold people compassionately accountable, because the foundation of recovery is accountability," she said. "Also, it's important not to forget that there are people that are harmed when crimes are committed."
"One of the things that is really driving me on trying to find innovative ways to find rehabilitative pathways for individuals is breaking that cycle. Seeing somebody, I rarely get to see it, but I always look for, I call it the bright spot of my week, and I look for that one person that comes back and has made strides," she said.
Ochoa-Bruck argues it’s important for judges who deal with a wide variety of people to recognize that each has an individual story. And she says it’s important for judges to understand their own individual biases.
"All of us have different experiences through our families, through experiences that we've had. And those can taint and color the way that we react and respond. And so I think it's important for, specifically for a judge, to make sure that we're very self-aware, and that we do a lot of self-retrospective analysis and work on us, and knowing, are we being fair? And if equally situated people, would I react the same way?"
Ochoa-Bruck’s opponent, Sarah Freedman, is a defense attorney in private practice.
"What I see every day in this community are people who are being treated differently based on socioeconomic status, based on things that were mistakes they made an awfully long time ago. And that's why I'm doing this," she said during the same forum.
"I'm doing this because I live here in Spokane, and I love this city. And I want to make our justice system a better place," Freedman said. "Empathy and accountability do not have to be mutually exclusive. And I think that the justice system just gets better when those two things work in tandem."
New York native Freedman graduated from Seattle University’s law school. She says she would work to expand the city’s therapeutic courts, those that specialize in helping people with substance abuse or mental health problems. She says those have proven to be effective in helping people with the problems that lead them to commit crimes.
"I do have a rather unique perspective to bring to the bench in terms of access for justice for all, in that I don't think we have any openly neurodivergent judges right now," she said. "I have severe ADHD. And unfortunately, I've had to become rather public about that in the last two years. And along with that comes sort of a hypervigilance when it comes to inflated sense of justice."
One thing Freedman and Ochoa-Bruck agree on? The city court system should be better funded. Freedman says there aren’t enough public defenders to represent clients.
"More people are going to have to be getting contract public defenders, and that is generally more expensive overall. So we're going to have to have more people whose cases are going to be continued, which is going to cut into the amount of time that they're being in the system, which is more court dates, which is more court resources," she said.
Spokane County attorneys polled by the local bar association rated Ochoa-Bruck as well qualified and Freedman as qualified.
