WA civil legal aid organizations mourn state funding cuts: ‘It’s a gut punch’

Read More

Legal assistants Analesa Mason, left, and Alondra Maqueda, right, work in their shared office at The Way to Justice in Spokane. (Photo by Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest)

An unexpected slash to a small corner of Washington’s state budget has civil legal aid organizations scrambling to plan for a future without financial support.

Both the House and Senate biannual budgets put forth by state lawmakers this year included around $5 million to support the legal aid organizations that are critical in helping to vacate unconstitutional drug convictions across the state. But after the two budgets were reconciled in the final days of the legislative session, the funding had disappeared. State lawmakers put forth a balanced $77.8 billion budget on April 27 after months of debate and amid an anticipated $16 billion budget shortfall. The final budget is now awaiting Gov. Bob Ferguson’s approval.

“It’s a gut punch,” said Camerina Zorrozua, the legal director and co-founder of The Way to Justice, a nonprofit legal aid organization based in Spokane that has relied on the funding since 2021. “The rug was just pulled out from under us.”

Since 2022, three Washington legal aid and advocacy organizations — Civil Survival, Living with Conviction, and The Way to Justice — have relied on state funding from the Office of Civil Legal Aid to help people vacate convictions on their criminal records that became constitutionally void after a 2021 Washington Supreme Court ruling known as State v. Blake.

The Supreme Court found the state’s simple drug possession law to be unconstitutional because it lacked language related to intent, the cornerstone of the U.S. legal system. The historic decision not only made Washington’s law void but also made hundreds of thousands of past misdemeanor and felony convictions dating as far back as 1971 eligible to be wiped from a person’s criminal record, and for any financial costs incurred eligible to be refunded by the state. ​​A new law criminalizing drug possession, coined the “Blake-fix,” went into effect in July 2023.

But the process to vacate the cases is not automatic and has to occur in the court where the conviction was made. While some courts have been proactive in identifying and vacating eligible cases, others have left it up to the impacted individuals to navigate the convoluted system and initiate the process independently. That’s where legal aid and reentry organizations have worked to fill in the gaps.

“These are unconstitutional convictions, and the state has an obligation to make people whole for unconstitutional convictions,” said Corey Guilmette, the co-executive director at Civil Survival. “Cutting the funding for the organizations that are doing that work is unacceptable.”

The cuts caught the Office of Civil Legal Aid — the state agency that has historically received the funding — by surprise.

“The first we heard of it was when the budget came out,” said Philippe Knab, the office’s reentry/eviction defense program director. “There was no warning, no opportunity to advocate for the work that the contractors are doing.”

While the $5 million that was cut from the Office of Civil Legal Aid’s budget is minuscule compared to the state’s overall budget, the impact of those cuts will be monumental to the legal aid organizations that run on shoestring budgets, Guilmette said.

“We’ll be reduced by just under $1.1 million of annual funding,” he added. “For an organization with a $2.7 million budget, that’s close to 40% of our funding that just got wiped out.”

It will be challenging to provide effective representation for their current clients given the cuts, Guilmette said.

“I don’t have money to pay our staff after July 1, and that’s what we are scrambling to do,” he said.

A long way to go

The cuts to State v. Blake funding come as there’s still a long way to go to vacate the eligible cases throughout the state. As of January 2025, the Washington State Patrol reported that about 18% — or 114,567 — of the estimated 600,000 eligible cases identified by the Administrative Office of the Courts had been vacated statewide. The vacate process can be complicated, time-consuming and varies widely from court to court.

Guilmette said that in March, his organization began representing nearly 150 new Blake-related cases, which still barely scratches the surface. The last time his organization opened its public-facing intake form on its website, it received two years’ worth of cases in only two months.

His team specifically focuses on helping clients obtain reimbursements for costs related to their illegal conviction, including attorney fees, drug treatment costs and other court fees.

He said that while the state is working to administratively vacate cases en masse through a recently established process by the Administrative Office of the Courts, that process doesn’t address people’s refunds. There is another state process for that called the Blake Refund Bureau, but for jurisdictions that aren’t taking a proactive approach to first vacate their cases — which is the first step in the process — legal aid organizations are necessary to help fill in the gaps.

“I understand it’s a difficult budget year, but this problem is not going away,” Guilmette said. “The state has to, one way or another, vacate these convictions.”

“So we can’t just kick the can down the road,” he added. “This is expertise that will vanish, and it will make it harder. It will cost more in the long run to be able to do this work.”

Ultimately, he fears that undocumented people who have unconstitutional convictions on their criminal record will be impacted the most since the conviction could be grounds for deportation.

“I think that’s tragic, and I think as a state, I don’t think you can say that you’re really protecting immigrant communities if you are knowingly cutting these resources,” he added.

Katrin Johnson, the deputy director for operations at the Washington Office of Public Defense, said her office, which helps lead State v. Blake efforts statewide and receives funding from lawmakers to do so, didn’t budget for having to support the three organizations previously funded by the Office of Civil Legal Aid. But she said their role is critical.

“We’re going to have to regroup and see what we can do, but we certainly aren’t going to have the flexibility to fund them at the same level they were funded before,” Johnson said. “We don’t even know that we can fund them.”

But she hopes the organizations can find funding given the unique role they play. “They are closer to the communities than we are,” Johnson said. “We’re a state agency.”

“Losing them in the Blake efforts is going to be a huge setback,” she added.

‘That feeling of justice’

When David Anderson got three of his four cases vacated under State v. Blake in 2024, he said he finally felt free. Since getting out of prison in 2001, he had been diligently paying $20 every month toward his court fines and fees.

“We leave incarceration, then you have these financial straps on you,” said 72-year-old Anderson. “And it’s these financial straps that keep people coming in and out of the system.”

In 2024, his court bill stopped coming. He panicked, thinking he would be arrested for nonpayment. When he went to talk to the county court in Spokane, he learned he was eligible to get his cases removed under State v. Blake — and potentially get his money refunded.

He was told that the court was inundated with cases and that it might take a while before his case could be looked at, so he was referred to the nonprofit The Way to Justice.

The legal aid organization helped him complete the necessary paperwork to get three of his four eligible cases vacated and removed from his criminal record. Then three months later, he received a refund check from the state of Washington in the mail, and the rest of his debt was swiftly eliminated.

He now keeps a framed copy of the vacate order and check hanging in his living room, surrounded by his artwork and photographs of his seven children and 14 grandchildren. As a thank you for their work, he donated $100 to The Way to Justice. Any chance he gets, he tells his friends and neighbors about State vs. Blake, even passing out flyers in the neighborhood to people who might be eligible for relief.

“I thought I’d have that chain on my neck for the rest of my life,” Anderson said. “If that clerk hadn’t passed me that pamphlet, I would have never known anything about the Blake program.”

Zorrozua, with The Way to Justice, said she’s determined to keep doing Blake work despite the funding cuts. She co-founded the organization in 2020 and was initially fiscally sponsored by the Martin Luther King Center in Spokane. “We had free office space in their old day care center that was originally a firehouse up on the South Hill, but we eventually got our own 501(c)(3) status,” Zorrozua said.

“It was the Blake case that gave us the ability and the funding and the resources to be able to take our work statewide,” she added. “That’s another reason why it hurts, because Blake was the door that opened legal aid to The Way to Justice, and helped us to grow to what we are today.”

She said it “stings” that Gov. Ferguson’s $100 million budget request to create a grant program to hire more local law enforcement was approved by state lawmakers, while the $5 million in funding to provide Blake support was cut.

“They’re building up this apparatus to criminalize folks and to put them through the (criminal justice) system, but at the same time removing the resources that we need on the back end of the system to help make people whole again,” she added.

Zorrozua said that getting to work with people like Anderson is what keeps her going.

“You can tell just by talking to someone like David what a weight is lifted and just that feeling of justice,” she said. “You can’t really describe it, but you know it when you see it.”

“He’s a perfect example of someone who historically was caught up in the war on drugs,” she said. “People were dismissed and stereotyped and forgotten. And the Blake case brought us back to reality. We have the opportunity to make it right and to humanize the people who are impacted.”

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.

This post was originally authored and published by Moe K. Clark, InvestigateWest from Washington State Standard via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.