KCLL Klues: Washington State Legal Research

A new online training routine for non-professional guardians has been set up by AOC’s Guardian Program.  Individuals who wish to be appointed as guardians of another person or of an estate must register online with the Guardian Program, view a series of training videos and complete an exam for the specific videos dealing with guardianship of the person and guardianship of the estate.  This new routine was created in response to the passage of HB 1053 in Chapter 329 of the Laws of 2011.  AOC has also prepared a promotional flier describing this training and the recent changes to guardianship law in Washington State.  King County Superior Court’s Ex Parte committee will meet next week to determine how this new routine will be implemented in light of the existing guardianship training video already available on the Guardian Program’s web site.

The Washington State Law Library may have to close if it does not get adequate funding from the State Legislature.   Please see this editorial that ran today in the Tacoma News Tribune. It outlines the State House and Senate budget proposals, and tells how the Senate proposal would mean the end of the State Law Library.

The State Law Library has a complete set of Washington State Supreme Court and Court of Appeals briefs.  The library has a modestly-priced document delivery service.  You can borrow books — the library will send them to you.  Also, the State Law Library oversees the live chat reference service that this library participates in.  And, the State Law Library subscribes to a number of legal databases and will send materials from those databases to any Washingtonian. 

You can read about the State Law Library at its website.

A new bill introduced on Thursday, February 3, seeks to prohibit Washington cities from using cameras to fine people who run red lights.  House Bill 1823, which is sponsored by more than 30 legislators, modifies language in several sections of the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) to eliminate the phrase “and violations recorded by automated traffic safety cameras” when issuing a traffic infraction based on a vehicle’s identity.

For more information on this topic, you can go to the Seattle PI blog.  You can also set up Bill Tracking to track the progress of this bill by going to the State Legislature’s website here.  For general information about Washington Infraction and Traffic Law, you can search the Law Library’s catalog online.

A new article co-authored by Seattle Councilmember Mike O’Brien and Sahar Fathi takes on the topic of legal challenges that face local climate change initiatives and can be found at the Seattle Journal of Environmental Law’s website.  The article traces the decision by former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels to adopt policies consistent with the Kyoto Protocol in 2008 and how those policies are being challenged.  For more information about the legislation mentioned in the article, you can go to the Washington Legislature’s Website and click on Bill Information.  If you would like to do some additional reading on the topic of “Green Development”, you can check out our online catalog for titles that we have on the topic of environmental law and sustainability.

The Elections and Voting section of the Secretary of State’s web site has a convenient feature called My Vote which enables you to view the upcoming ballot personalized for your races, candidate statements and ballot measures.  My Vote is easy to use; simply enter your full name and birth date and the web site will present a screen that includes personalized information for:

• Your current voter registration data
• The current voter’s pamphlet with only the sections applicable to your ballot
• Your voting history from 2005 forward
• Contact information for the elected officials in your federal and state voting districts

You can also change your voter registration information from My Vote, provided you have the necessary data to verify your identity.

For those of you who are eager to read through the final version of the massive and hotly-contested Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act signed into law by President Obama on July 21st, here’s a set of useful links.

As of this writing, the text of Public Law 111-203 wasn’t available but the Library of Congress’ THOMAS web site has a wealth of information about the legislation, including the final text of the bill presented to President Obama and a Congressional Research Service summary.

The White House has also posted the President’s remarks about the new law and a brief Executive summary of its intent.

On June 18, 2010, Ronnie Lee Gardner is scheduled for execution in Utah by firing squad. Regardless of one’s stance on the death penalty, the idea of execution by firing squad (or hanging) seems rather archaic. However, it is interesting to get a sense of how the death penalty is applied across the US.

For as long as there have been organized societies, capital punishment has been used to punish crimes, real or imagined, and to suppress political opposition. In 1972, the US Supreme Court determined in the collective cases known as Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), that Georgia’s capital punishment statutes were arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause because juries were given no guidance to determine whether a defendant deserved execution. In the aftermath of Furman, the Court voided forty state’s death penalty statutes.

Many states immediately began rewriting their death penalty statutes to remove the “arbitrariness” by giving judges and juries guidelines for determining whether a case warranted the death penalty, and also introduced aggravating and mitigating factors. These new statutes were approved by the Supreme Court in 1976 in the Gregg decision, 428 U.S. 153 (1976). The Court thus determined that the death penalty, as drafted under Gregg, did not violate the Eighth Amendment and reinstated the death penalty.

Since the Gregg decision, there have been 1,215 executions throughout the US. Fifteen states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico do not have, or have rescinded their death penalty statutes. And two states, Kansas and New Hampshire, while not abolishing the death penalty, have not had any executions since 1972. This means that executions in the US are carried out in thirty-three states.

The means of execution are as follows, listed in order by frequency of use: lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, hanging, and firing squad. Oklahoma and Utah provide for execution by firing squad as one means of execution while Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington execution statutes provide for hanging as one means of execution. Washington’s second method of execution is lethal injection.

Although executions occurred here years before Washington became a state, the death penalty was enacted in 1904, abolished in 1913 and reinstated in 1919. It was abolished again under Furman in 1972.

In 1975, an initiative favoring the death penalty was passed by Washington voters. However, the state legislature enacted its capital punishment statutes in compliance with the constitutional guidelines approved by the Gregg decision in 1977. The current version of the death penalty statute was enacted in 1981, but has not been revised since 1998. Washington has executed a total of 109 in all, but only 4 people since reinstating its death penalty statute. And, in the time since the death penalty has been reinstated, one person has been exonerated.

Click the following links to obtain more information for or against the death penalty.

To read more about Mr. Gardner’s upcoming execution, click here or here or here.

To read more about the death penalty in Washington, click here or here or here.

To learn more about exoneration in Washington, click here.

Stay tuned for our upcoming podcast–an interview with former defense counsel Dan Riviera for convicted murderer Joseph Self.

This past March, the Washington State House and Senate passed into law SB6239, which makes technical changes to gender-based terms contained in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW)—that is, changing “he” to “he or she” and “his” to “his or hers”. This bill was signed by Governor Gregoire on March 10, 2010.

The affected statutes can be found here. These changes will go into effect on June 10, 2010.

On May 13, 2010, President Obama submitted the New START Treaty Package to the Senate. The treaty will need a two-thirds vote in the Senate before it can be ratified and take the effect of law in the US.

To read the White House Press Release on this treaty, click here.

To read more about the treaty ratification process in the US, click here.

To read the previous blog post on New START, click here.

Today in the Czech Republic, Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia signed the Nuclear Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (called New Start). This treaty is aimed at reducing the number of nuclear arms held by both countries. Together the US and Russia own 90% of the nuclear arms in existence.

The objective of this treaty is that each country will decrease nuclear warheads by 30% while decreasing by half the instrumentalities used to carry them. The additional goals are to improve relations between the US and Russia and put increased pressure on Iran as it attempts to develop its own nuclear weapons.

The US Senate and Russian Duma still will need to ratify this treaty before it can take effect.

To read news coverage on this treaty, click here or here.

To read the text of the treaty, click here.

To read a comparison between this treaty and previous nuclear reduction treaties between the US and Russia, click here.