King County Superior Court welcomes five new judges to the bench in 2009, including one who was thrust into action in October soon after her outright election in the August primary. We hope these brief profiles do them justice.
Regina Cahan
Judge Regina Cahan stepped into the breach at the beginning of October after winning a bare 50.8% majority in her three-way primary election. She assumed the Department 10 seat that was left vacant when Judge Glenna Hall retired after 12 years on the bench.
Since being sworn in, Judge Cahan has been handling a plea calendar in the criminal department and has assumed many of the cases previously assigned to Judge Dean Lum, who has moved to Unified Family Court, according to Assistant Presiding Judge Helen Halpert. Judge Cahan soon will be assigned to the criminal trial calendar.
It is a fitting appointment for Judge Cahan, who spent the last 19 years in the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the first 10 of those working on some of the office’s most serious felonies, murders and sex crimes. Most recently, she was a senior deputy prosecuting attorney in the Labor and Employment Section of the office’s Civil Division.
Judge Cahan earned her law degree, as well as a Master’s degree in Social Work, from the University of Wisconsin. Her first legal job in 1988 was as an associate in a boutique plaintiffs’ civil rights firm — Julian, Olson & Lasker — in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1989, she moved west and joined the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, where she quickly earned a reputation as one of the office’s most formidable courtroom practitioners, specializing in prosecuting sex crimes and homicides, and serving as a founding member of a homicide response team — the Most Dangerous Offender Unit (MDOU).
During her 10 years as a criminal prosecutor, Judge Cahan appended her name to some of the state’s most important appellate decisions. She helped pioneer the use of DNA evidence in Washington courts by joining an elite group of attorneys in litigating the first DNA Frye hearings in King County and successfully defending DNA evidence before the Washington Supreme Court.
Fifteen years ago, Washington courts did not commonly allow DNA evidence. Prosecuting two of the earliest DNA cases, Judge Cahan earned guilty verdicts and successfully defended those verdicts on appeal before the Washington Supreme Court. These cases — State v. Copeland, 130 Wn.2d 244 (1996), and State v. Jones, 130 Wn.2d 302 (1996) [along with State v. Cannon] — settled the law in Washington.
Judge Cahan also successfully defended the 1990 Community Protection Act — the state’s then-novel sex offender registration law — before both the trial court and the Washington Supreme Court [State v. Ward, 123 Wn.2d 488 (1994)]; investigated, as a member of the MDOU, and later — in a five-month jury trial — prosecuted Robert Parker for the brutal murders of two women; and served as the sole member of the office’s Sexually Violent Predator Section from mid-1992 to 1993.
When she’s not in court, Judge Cahan — a happily married mother of two — volunteers for the Northwest Women’s Law Center, Anti-Defamation League and King County Sexual Assault Resource Center.
Mariane Spearman
Judge Mariane Spearman has a last name familiar to most King County lawyers. Her husband of 17 years is former Superior Court Judge Michael Spearman — they have two teenage children, Samantha and Mike. But she won’t be resting on his laurels; Mariane Spearman comes to the bench with her own set of sterling credentials.
Elected outright to the new Department 53 seat in a two-way race in the August primary, Judge Spearman has served as a lower-court judge for the past 13 years, including the past eight years in the King County District Court, West Division. She most recently served as presiding judge there, as well as a three-year term as the Domestic Violence Court judge, plus stints on the court’s Executive Committee and as chair of the Personnel Committee.
Prior to that, she was the presiding judge in Kirkland Municipal Court from 1995 to 2000. She also served as a juvenile court judge in Superior Court during 2002–03. She will put those skills to work as a Superior Court judge in Unified Family Court in Seattle, Judge Halpert said.
Judge Spearman earned an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Rutgers University in 1981 and graduated with her J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law in 1984. She cut her legal teeth as a public defender with The Defender Association, where she represented low-income people in criminal cases. She tried more than 75 felony and 30 misdemeanor cases to verdict. In 1992, Judge Spearman went into private practice where she focused on family law and criminal defense.
In 1995, the City of Kirkland established its own municipal court and appointed Judge Spearman as the court’s first judge. In partnership with Lake Washington High School, Judge Spearman initiated a Student Traffic Court program in which high school students were allowed to preside as judge and jury in student traffic infraction cases. She also established a mentor program that matched youth in need with community volunteers and implemented a day-detention program to offer non-violent offenders an alternative to jail.
The latter program proved to be an effective sanction for criminal behavior while at the same time saving tax dollars that otherwise would have been spent on incarceration. Another time and money saver for both the court and citizenry that she introduced was a program that allowed drivers to have their traffic infractions heard by mail.
When she’s not on the bench or spending time with her family, Judge Spearman is an active community volunteer. She has served as co-president of the Lowell Elementary PALS/PTA, as a volunteer parent at Lowell and Montlake elementary schools and as a volunteer judge with King County Kids Court.
Tim Bradshaw
Tim Bradshaw comes to the Superior Court bench with a reputation as a criminal prosecutor that precedes him. Judge Bradshaw spent 20 years in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, handling both civil and criminal cases. But it was as the prosecutor in a number of high-profile murder cases that he made his mark.
For sheer notoriety, none surpasses the murder of The Gits’ lead singer Mia Zapata, a pioneering, punk member of Seattle’s groundbreaking music scene, who was strangled and left along a Seattle street in 1993. Her murder went unsolved for more than a decade. In March 2004, a King County jury found Jesus Mezquia, a Florida fisherman, guilty of first-degree murder. The key to closing the infamous cold case was a trace of DNA evidence.
Ten years ago, Judge Bradshaw made headlines when a dog’s DNA helped crack a difficult case — it was the first time such evidence had been allowed anywhere in the U.S. (The case was recently featured in Animal Planet’s “Animal Witness” series.) The DNA came from one of the victims in a multiple shooting — a pit bull owned by two men who were gunned down at a South Seattle house in 1996. The dog’s blood was found on the jacket of one of the two men eventually convicted in the murders. At the time, Bradshaw called it “the most probative evidence and the most objective evidence that the defendants were present while the crime was committed.”
A South King County native, Judge Bradshaw earned a Bachelor’s of Arts degree from the University of Puget Sound in 1984 and his J.D. from its school of law (now Seattle University) in 1988, from where he stepped right into Norm Maleng’s office. He eventually tried more than 100 Superior Court cases.
Judge Bradshaw, who won his seat in the November general election, takes over in Department 1 — the seat occupied for many years by Judge Charles Mertel, who served out his final term after announcing his retirement from the bench early last year. Judge Bradshaw says he is “honored to succeed — but not replace — Judge Mertel.”
Upon taking the bench, Judge Bradshaw will return to his civil roots, working in the Civil Division in Seattle.
Holly Hill
As a child growing up in the Chicago area, Judge Holly Hill learned early on about the concepts of justice, fairness and equality as she rode the bus through upscale neighborhoods and tenement districts. This experience and others would evolve into a determination to fight inequality that was reflected, in part, in her recognition of the critical role of education.
Following her graduation from Vassar College, Judge Hill moved back to Chicago and attended Northwestern University School of Law where she worked with a small storefront firm that handled criminal and family law matters to support major pro bono civil rights litigation. Impressed with her work and her enthusiasm, the law firm accepted her as a partner after graduation.
One of the most controversial, complex and challenging cases that the firm took on was Hampton v. Hanrahan. Fred Hampton had been the Illinois chair of the Black Panthers. In 1969, he was killed in a police raid while sleeping in his home. Judge Hill worked on discovery — first as a law student and then as a lawyer — where she took charge of developing the ballistics and pathology evidence, in addition to handling depositions of lay and expert witnesses and parties. It was an experience that she often spoke about publicly and one which had a deep and profound influence on her, both personally and professionally.
In 1977, Judge Hill moved to Seattle to work at the King County Public Defender’s Office. There, she handled misdemeanor and felony cases, which led to a role as part of a trial team defending a capital murder case. In addition to her trial work, she argued appeals, including one that established the right of criminal defendants to present psychological expert testimony in support of a diminished capacity defense.
She was hired as a trial attorney at the Seattle office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1980, where she became a key member of a trial team litigating a class-action case on behalf of female employees of General Telephone. In an historically sex-segregated industry, women worked in the office and men in the field, which was the only route to management or other higher paying jobs. In 1987, Judge Hill left the public sector to join a small employment and labor law group, Frank and Rosen (now Freed, Frank, Subit & Thomas) where she continued to work on employment discrimination matters as well as labor arbitrations.
Judge Hill eventually established herself locally, nationally and internationally as a trial advocacy instructor. Before her election to the bench, she served as an adjunct faculty member of the University of Washington School of Law for more than 20 years and also enjoyed a long association with the National Institute of Trial Advocacy for which she served as a regional director.
Judge Hill also won her seat in the November general election. She takes over in Department 22 from Judge Douglas McBroom. Interestingly, Judges Hill and McBroom both are Northwestern Law School graduates and were colleagues at NITA. Judge Hill has been assigned to the Civil Division at the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, where she hopes to focus on dependency matters.
Barbara Mack
It was truly an election year for members of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office as Judge Barbara Mack joins two of her colleagues on the Superior Court bench this month. Judge Mack spent the past 22 years in the prosecutor’s office, including 11 years in the Fraud Division, investigating and prosecuting complex organized criminal activity and civil forfeitures, and serving as lead prosecutor in Drug Diversion Court.
In both the criminal and fraud divisions, Judge Mack worked with victims and police to protect vulnerable citizens and keep communities safe. Her work in Drug Diversion Court helped offenders whose crimes were motivated by addiction to obtain treatment instead of going to jail or prison, reducing the occurrence and costs of those crimes to the community, and helping the offenders become contributing members of society.
Judge Mack holds an undergraduate degree from Boston University and earned her J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law in 1986. Between colleges, however, she enjoyed a stellar career in public service, capped by her service in the Carter Administration as a deputy undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Interior under Cecil Andrus. She worked on offshore oil development and leasing policy, water rights conflicts, Indian resource management and resource development policy.
In 1972, she co-founded the national Environmental Policy Center, where she worked on national energy and coastal zone issues, wrote legislation, testified before Congress, and organized grassroots coalitions. She also has taught seminars on environmental and energy issues at the JFK Institute of Politics at Harvard, and on natural resources and social justice at the Institute for Policy Studies. Judge Mack continues serving her community today as chair of the Board of Directors of Children’s Trust Foundation.
The mother of a teenager, Judge Mack is a Mariners fan (hoping they have the kind of year in 2009 that the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office had in 2008), and likes to spend her leisure time hiking, playing racquetball, gardening and listening to music.
Judge Mack assumes the Department 37 seat vacated by Judge Nicole MacInnes. She will begin her judgeship in the Civil Division in Seattle.
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Judges Spearman, Hill, Bradshaw and Mack will officially assume their posts on January 12. There will be a swearing-in ceremony on the 15th. The judges will then participate in a two-week internal orientation program being coordinated by Chief Civil Judge Paris Kallas, followed by the statewide judicial college, where they will be joined by Judge Monica Benton and the court’s two new commissioners — Jacqueline Jeske and Julia Garratt.
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