By Joel Magalnick , Editor, JTNews
Should she win a seat on one of the state’s three courts of appeal, Pamela Loginsky will be looking at many of her colleagues from the other side of the bench. Loginsky, who is running in a crowded field of six candidates for the Court of Appeals, Division 2, District 2 in Tacoma has appeared as an appellate attorney before this court hundreds of times as well as before the state Supreme Court. She is currently scheduled to appear before the high court in October as a Jefferson County special deputy prosecuting attorney. She is also, she notes on her website, the only candidate in the race with extensive appellate experience.
As far as that goes, she has plenty. When we profiled Loginsky 10 years ago in her race for Supreme Court against Charles Johnson, which she ultimately lost, she’d had years of arguing before the appeals court then, and formed and headed the Kitsap County prosecutor’s office’s appellate unit. But in that race Loginsky brought sunlight to an oft-ignored law that negatively affected defendants who weren’t apprised of the ramifications of their guilty pleas. Johnson had been responsible for keeping the statute current.
“The court was two to five years behind legislation,” Loginsky says. The courts have kept current since then.
A decade later, the Port Orchard resident has much more to bring to the table. She has been staff attorney for the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, she teaches at the Washington State Patrol Academy, she has served as financial manager at Congregation Beth Hatikvah, and volunteers at the humane society and homeless shelter in Kitsap County. Also, she does “charitable knitting” for homeless people and sick children.
“I’ve spent my whole life in public service,” she says. “My congregation back in Skokie instilled in me a sense of a need to heal the world.”
But navigation skills may be more important than healing for whichever judge lands on this bench.
“We’re in unique times right now in that the U.S. Supreme Court has fundamentally changed sentencing law and confrontation clause law in the last three to seven years,” she says. “We’re still feeling our way in how to implement those decisions.”
This is where both her appellate experience and police academy work would be valuable in a judicial setting.
“I have more experience thinking through the consequences,” she says. “We’re still trying to figure out the answers and it’s still real murky.”
By appearing on behalf of the largest and smallest counties of the state — the Tacoma-based court handles appeals from the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas down to Southwest Washington — she has to understand how one law can affect the most rural and the most urban environments. When she’s training the state patrol, “I take very complex tests of the courts and translate them to something to a police officer that may not have any college,” who must make split-second decisions on the roadside while both protecting the citizens and their Constitutional rights.
Loginsky has received dozens of endorsements from the judicial community, including four retired state Supreme Court justices. The Tacoma-Pierce County Bar Association rated her as exceptionally well qualified and the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s Cardozo Society rated her as well qualified.
And the prospect of having to rule on cases where the attorneys she has argued against must now stand before her? “I hope they see me as someone who will have diligently done her homework prior to argument,” she says, “who will give them fair hearing, and give them rulings based on what the law demands rather than maybe my personal desires of what the law should say.”