Washington Courts: Press Release Detail

Seattle Municipal Court’s Probation Office and Members of Appellate Language Access Committee Make Up This Year’s Innovating Justice Recipients 

Four Innovating Justice Awards were given out on Friday, October 20 to a group that includes Seattle Municipal Court’s (SMC) Probation Office, two Supreme Court clerks and an Appellate Court Judge.

The award is given to individuals or groups who have provided exceptional leadership in helping courts deliver innovative and responsive justice by promoting race equity and access to justice, provide exceptional leadership, go above and beyond what is expected and apply innovative and community-driven responses that significantly impacted and resolved critical court system needs.

The first recipients was the staff of SMC’s Probation Office, for their work on the, “Probation Evolution Project,”  an effort focused on improving client outcomes and minimizing disproportionate impacts probation has on women and people of color.

“This is great work,” SMC Judge Willie Gregory said. “It's important to help our court realize our vision, and that vision that we have is to become a people's court that provides fair, equitable and innovative delivery of justice. With our probation evolution, we intentionally moved away from traditional reactive approaches towards an approach that is more hopeful, equitable and supportive of client success and growth.”

One major change SMC made was replacing a risk assessment tool believed to be rooted in bias and institutionalized racism, with a new three phase method that ensures all probation clients — regardless of race or gender — have equal opportunity to limit mandatory meetings with their probation counselors to six months.

Other changes include standardizing case management, so that clients can co-create individualized plans that address specific needs and include personal goals, revamping their non-compliance policy in a way that should lead to fewer revocations for technical violations and increasing training requirements for probation counselors in a way that should result in equitable, personalized responses for different situations.

Tangible improvements are already being shown from Seattle Municipal’s dedication to making their probation system more equitable. The number of review hearings for probation is on pace to be 30% less in 2023 compared to 2021, and the number of probation activities imposed on a client fell from 6.8 activities per client in 2017 to 3.3 activities per client in 2022. 

To learn more about the project, read SMC’s recent newsletter on the topic.

The rest of the award recipients were Court of Appeals Judge Michael Diaz, Supreme Court Clerk Erin Lennon and Deputy Supreme Court Clerk Sarah Pendleton for their work on an ad hoc committee formed to advance language access in the appellate courts.

“These three individuals played a key role in developing a language access plan for the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court,” Court of Appeals Judge Rebecca Pennell said. “Until this year, none of the appellate courts in Washington have ever had a language access plan. In fact, only a few appellate courts in the United States have had such plans.”

“I'm sure everyone in this meeting recognizes language access is a critical component of racial justice for our courts … and this issue has not received sufficient attention,” Pennell said. “Now that has changed and that's thanks in large part to the recipients of this award.”

Diaz is the chairperson of the Washington State Supreme Court's Interpreter Commission and has been a Division I Court of Appeals judge since 2022. With his extensive experience in language access issues in the court system, Diaz's leadership was critical to developing the content of the language access plan and the details of the rollout to the court system.

Pendleton, who has been the deputy clerk since 2021, spent extensive hours conducting research on language access plans throughout the country. She also played a primary role in the drafting of the statewide proposed language access plan.

Lennon, who was sworn in as the 11th ever Washington Supreme Court clerk in 2021, was the first to question what appellate courts were doing to foster language access and what can be done to create a policy going forward. She then shouldered the responsibility of recruiting the ad hoc committee to tackle the issue.

Together, the three recipients took on leading roles on the committee, conducting national research on language access in appellate courts, creating a strategy for improving language access in the appellate courts, drafting a state-wide proposed language access plan for the appellate courts and leading efforts to get the plan approved by the appellate courts.

Federal law and court rules require that courts provide language access, but the appellate courts have a legacy of not addressing language access issues.

In the short term, the language access plan provides immediate language access state-wide for those needing an interpreter to participate in appellate court hearings or needing translated letters from the clerk’s office in order to understand the next steps in their case.

In the long term, the language access plan sets up a committee overseen by the Interpreter Language and Access Commission that will continue to review and expand the plan to make it more comprehensive and keep up with best practices for language access, as well as keeping the plan anchored in the guidance and expertise of the commission and its community representatives.