2025 Retrospective: KCBA In the Appellate Courts
“The King County Bar Association’s mission is to connect and serve our diverse legal community, promote professional and judicial excellence, engage in public policy, and increase access to justice.”
— KCBA Mission Statement
Kathleen Jensen, our wonderful Executive Director, wrote her column for this month trumpeting KCBA’s good work in 2025. Please don’t miss her piece, where you can read about all of the incredible achievements your membership has supported.
For this 2025 review, I’d like to focus specifically on KCBA’s appellate efforts. Although KCBA lawyers’ arguments did not always prevail, that is not the point. Theirs is the fight to develop the law in a positive direction and lend a voice to important issues. Their work is crucial.
As any baseball fan knows, a player who only gets a hit one out of every three at-bats is going into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. And KCBA appellate counsel had a better average than .333.
Records Project
The KCBA Records Project works every day to improve access to justice and defend the Constitution by assisting people in vacating criminal convictions. The Records Project did excellent work this year in that regard, including in the appellate courts.
State v. Ellis, 579 P.3d 37 (Nov. 13, 2025).
An 18-year-old committed a serious crime for which he received a long sentence. Years later, a point was removed from Ellis’ offender score, which entitled him to a full resentencing. At his resentencing hearing, he requested and was denied consideration of his youth in determining his new sentence.
The Court of Appeals held that although the trial court might have abused its discretion in refusing to consider his youth at resentencing, the error was harmless. On review by the Washington Supreme Court, Oscar Aguirre, public defender and former KCBA Records Project Staff Attorney, participated with numerous other amici curiae.
Our Supreme Court reversed, holding that although the trial court was not required to lower the appellant’s sentence due to the mitigating qualities of youth, the trial court was required to meaningfully contend with its discretion to do so.
State v. Danielson, No. 103627-2, 2025 WL 3548530 (Dec. 11, 2025).
Most lawyers at this point are well aware of the Washington Supreme Court’s 2021 decision State v. Blake, which struck down Washington’s simple possession law as unconstitutional. A slew of citizens moved to vacate their unconstitutional drug possession convictions, including their Legal Financial Obligations.
The State did not dispute its obligation to reimburse any cash payments made to satisfy an unconstitutional sentence. However, for people like the appellants in Danielson, full cash restitution was not made because they had satisfied part of their legal obligations by performing unpaid community service work. The work was credited toward their LFO balance.
The Danielson appellants argued that the refusal to reimburse them for their unpaid labor violated their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection and unjustly enriched the State. The Court of Appeals disagreed.
The appellants’ petition for review was granted by our Supreme Court. Oscar Aguirre participated in filing a brief of amici curiae arguing that the decision to simply pay LFOs in cash versus working off the obligations through unpaid labor creates a wealth-based disparity. Those who had the money to pay get fully reimbursed for unconstitutional LFOs, but those forced to perform labor because they lacked the funds do not.
Though the Supreme Court ultimately rejected the appellants’ position, attorney Aguirre and the other amici curiae brought an important perspective to the many ways in which our legal system impacts those with wealth and those without unequally.
Housing Justice Project
HJP has had a busy year advocating for tenants. This list is not exhaustive and only a sample of the appellate decisions in HJP-related cases just in 2025.
Sangha v. Keen, 4 Wn.3d 852 (May 22, 2025).
A landlord filed an unlawful detainer action and the tenant appeared pro se but did not file an answer. The landlord moved for and obtained a default despite an unambiguous statutory provision requiring a show cause hearing. Jay Kallaway, Christina Jaccard, Yuan Ting, Ashleen O’Brien, and Kaitlin Heinen fought for and won direct accelerated review of the decision.
Our Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion, reversed the trial court and vacated the default judgment, finding the 2019 amendments to the unlawful detainer procedural rules to unambiguously protect tenants who appear from being subjected to default for failure to answer.
Skinner v. InCity Props. Holdings, Inc., 2025 WL 3467512 (Nov. 4, 2025).
A tenant was unlawfully dispossessed from his apartment on the unsubstantiated ground he had engaged in criminal activity. The landlord evicted him, took his possessions and put them in storage, re-let the apartment, and improperly charged him for legal fees, repair, restoration, cleaning, dumping, and removal.
With the help of O’Brien, Jaccard, and Ting of KCBA’s Housing Justice Project, the tenant prevailed in a forcible detainer action. HJP also successfully defended against the landlord’s appeal, which raised numerous arguments for why the tenant’s case was legally and procedurally flawed.
Key Prop. Servs., Inc. v. Burnett, 34 Wn. App. 2d 1044 (Mar. 13, 2025).
HJP attorneys Ting, Jaccard, and O’Brien successfully obtained vacation and dismissal of an unlawful detainer jury verdict against a tenant. The unlawful detainer verdict was predicated on, in the Court’s view, the factually insufficient claim that the tenant violated a material term of her lease by making an isolated negative comment to a neighbor about the effects of smoking.
DV LEAD
Our DV LEAD lawyers do not often have occasion to take a fight up to the Court of Appeals. But last year, they prevailed in a case of vital importance.
Dela Llana v. Holiwell, No. 86474-2-I, 2025 WL 3067712 (Nov. 3, 2025).
Since March 16, 2022, an abuser was subject to a domestic violence protection order that included a firearms surrender provision. The legal team of Kim Todaro and Lauren Johnson of KCBA’s DV LEAD Program teamed up with Bellevue Attorney William Braun to protect the victims. But by January 2024, almost two years later and despite numerous contempt orders and even temporary confinement, he still had not surrendered or credibly accounted for his many weapons.
After nearly two years of him defying the surrender order, the trial court entered a final contempt order acknowledging his contempt but declining to jail him until he complied. Instead, the trial court imposed a sanction of $100,000 and said that he could purge the sanction by surrendering the weapons.
The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the trial court’s order was manifestly unreasonable and remanded for proceedings to incarcerate the abuser until his contempt was purged.
These cases represent a mere fraction of the good work that these programs — and all of KCBA’s pro bono services — do throughout the year.
Thank you to every single lawyer and staff member who fulfills KCBA’s mission in every capacity.
