Some of you may know that I like to play cards. I play Pinochle, Euchre, Hearts, Rummy, Cribbage and many others. I have a Cribbage App on my phone which I often play to relax and turn my brain off. It is a way for me to focus my attention away from emails, texts, and all the other daily pressures we face. 

The shorter days of this month hint at summer having passed by so quickly. We are just about halfway through the season and this provides an incentive to check off all those summer activities that are not yet complete or make the most of what is left of the season as autumn approaches.
 

KCBA CLASSIFIEDS

The King County Bar Association is pleased to honor Justice Mary Yu with the 2024 Outstanding Justice Award for her distinguished service to the legal profession, the judiciary, and the public.

The KCBA is pleased to announce Robert Chang as the winner of the “Friend of the Legal Profession” Award. This award was created to recognize distinguished and meritorious service to the legal profession and justice system. 

The recipient of this year’s King County Bar Association Pro Bono Award is Lianna Bash. This well-deserved award recognizes the many hours and deep experience Lianna has given to the Domestic Violence Legal Advocacy Project (DV LEAD) at KCBA.

The winner of this year’s Award is Destinee Evers. I was honored to present the Outstanding New Lawyer Award to Destinee at the Awards Reception on June 27, 2024. Destinee is an associate at K&L Gates, a member of their technology, sourcing, and privacy practice group. 

It was a packed house at the Washington Athletic Club’s Crystal Ballroom on the evening of June 27th for KCBA’s 2024 Awards Reception. 

Like taxes, getting older, and gravity, voir dire does not care how you feel about it. Potential jurors experience it as human beings with all the quirks and nuances of human psychology at play.

In a sprawling wooded grove, nestled between Discovery Park and Magnolia is the Fort Lawton Post Cemetery. Founded in 1909, the cemetery was an addition to Fort Lawton itself, an artillery center and defense base intended to defend Seattle and the Puget Sound coast from naval attack. Beyond its rows of orderly white headstones, a stately grave stands alone at the perimeter of the cemetery, a wide white pillar surrounded by metal fencing. It reads, Sold. Ital. Olivotto. The solitary grave is one of the only remnants of the largest court martial in United States history, the final resting place of Guglielmo Olivotto, an Italian prisoner of war lynched during a riot that occurred at the Fort Lawton Barracks in the summer of 1944. The murder of Olivotto resulted in the trial of 43 Black soldiers stationed at the fort, and the conviction of 28 of them, a story that took news cycles by storm as hearsay accounts of what happened that fateful night spread throughout Seattle and nationwide.1 A white man had been lynched, and Americans wanted answers. The violent altercation that occurred at Fort Lawton between Black Soldiers, white Military police, and Italian prisoners of war was the simultaneous product of racial segregation and nationalist fervor, exemplifying the larger societal belief that Black Americans were subordinate to even their war time enemies.