By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
When the new Superior Court judges are sworn in this January, a trio of Jewish women stand a good chance of being among them. Regina Cahan won her seat outright in the August primary by garnering 50.7 percent of the vote in her race, while Barbara Mack and Suzanne “Sue” Parisien must face off with their prime opponents again on November 4.
Cahan will bring nearly 20 years of legal experience to the bench in January, in both civil and criminal trials, for plaintiffs and defendants. Cahan graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1988 with her law degree and a Master’s in Social Work, taking a job with a small Wisconsin law firm that let her pursue her passion for civil rights while her husband finished his own legal education.
Moving to Washington after his graduation, she went to work next in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
“I came to the prosecutor’s office in 1989 and that’s where I worked in Seattle,” says Cahan. “I was in the criminal division from ‘89 to ‘99 and I’ve been in the civil division from ‘99 to the present.”
Working in the King County Prosecutor’s office, she focused on prosecuting sex crime and homicide cases. A senior deputy prosecuting attorney until her election, she helped found the office’s Most Dangerous Offender Unit, a homicide response team that works closely with police to investigate and then prosecute murder cases. She also worked on the team that successfully argued for the use of DNA evidence in Washington courts, ultimately succeeding in defending DNA evidence before the Washington Supreme Court.
“I think I have pretty good listening skills and empathy. Also, when it’s necessary, I’ll be firm,” she says. “I’m well aware that people can do some evil things and they need to be held accountable for them. But there’s a lot of areas of the law where you can appropriately show compassion.”
Cahan and her husband have been members of Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation since her children were in kindergarten.
Barbara Mack has also worked in the prosecutor’s office since getting her degree from the University of Washington School of Law more than 20 years ago. But her public service extends even further back. After graduating with a B.A. in history from Boston University in 1970, she helped found the Environmental Policy Center in 1972, working there on national energy and coastal zone issues, writing proposed legislation, and testifying before Congressional committees.
Mack then served in the Carter administration as a deputy undersecretary under former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus when he was Secretary of the Interior. Her job there included work on offshore oil drilling policy, water rights conflicts, and Indian resource management. She also taught natural resources and social justice at the Institute for Policy Studies, and at Harvard University, where she gave seminars on energy and environmental issues.
As a prosecutor, Mack has dealt with cases ranging from misdemeanors to aggravated murder. She spent over 11 years in the fraud division, prosecuting complex organized crime and civil forfeiture cases. Her present assignment has her working in King County’s Drug Diversion Court, where non-violent offenders can get treatment instead of jail or prison. She says that protecting the Drug Court program in the face of looming budget cuts is one of the main reasons she has decided to run for judge.
While she makes no secret of being Jewish, Mack says she prefers to keep that aspect of her life private.
Like her counterparts, Suzanne Parisien, who commonly goes by Sue, has been a lawyer for close to two decades. Currently an assistant attorney general, she is the only one of the three who has not been a prosecuting attorney, a fact she points to as an argument in her favor given the large number of former prosecutors who go on to be elected judges in this state. Her legal career has been on the civil side, focused on in civil rights, employment discrimination, negligence and contract cases, and she has appeared in federal, state and appellate courtrooms from King County to Spokane and beyond.
Since graduation from Villanova University School of Law, she has represented both individuals and Fortune 500 corporations, first in Philadelphia, then here in Washington since 1997, taking on negligence, discrimination, personal injury and malpractice lawsuits.
“My proudest professional accomplishment is winning the Pro Bono award from the Philadelphia Bar Association for my work with foster care children and the Ronald McDonald House, and with a really great group called Manna, which was one of the first groups to be providing hot meals every day to AIDS victims who were homebound,” Parisien says.
She also served as the director of general liability for Nordstrom. Along with her courtroom advocacy, Sue Parisien has served as arbitrator on more than 75 cases.
Having spent the last decade defending the state of Washington in civil lawsuits, she says she had been thinking about running for judge for a while. A battle with breast cancer made her decide that now is the time.
“It really brought things into focus,” Parisien says. “Once you face a major illness, you think to yourself, ‘What are my goals, what are my hopes, what are my dreams, and what am I waiting for?’”
A mother of two daughters, Emma and Julia, she taught Sunday school at Temple Beth Am “for a few years, until the kids got too smart for me and I couldn’t answer their questions anymore.”
She is currently a board member at TBA. She just finished her term on their religious school board, and has been an active member of the PTA at her daughters’ schools on Mercer Island.