Bill makes it legal to slander women
OLYMPIA – The state Senate on Wednesday voted to repeal a 1909 law that makes it illegal to slander a woman “other than a common prostitute.”
“Obviously I don’t think it’s a good idea” to slander women, said Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle. “But we should make our laws constitutional, and that’s the issue with this outdated and archaic law.”
She said the law is patronizing, probably unenforceable and “a relic of the times” when women – other than prostitutes, apparently – were placed on a pedestal but denied equal rights, including the right to vote.
Nonetheless, it seems that local prosecutors occasionally dust off the statute and actually charge people with the crime. According to statistics compiled by the Board for Judicial Administration, at least 22 people in Washington have been charged with slander of a woman since 1985.
Of the 22 known cases since 1985, only one has resulted in a conviction, according to the Board of Judicial Administration data. That was an East Wenatchee Municipal Court case last year in which a fourth-degree domestic assault charge was amended down to slander of a woman.
The last such case in Spokane County was in 1997 and was dismissed. The charge is most widely used in Grant and King counties, each of which has charged five people under the law since 1991. All 10 cases were dismissed.
The vote in the Senate on Wednesday was 47 to 1 in favor of repealing the old statute. The lone holdout was local Sen. Bob McCaslin, R-Spokane Valley. There are lots of arcane bits of law still on the books, he said, and the Senate should be spending its time working on the state’s more serious problems.
“Of all the things we’ve got to do over here,” he said, “I don’t think that one should be on the front burner.”
Plus, he said he felt that the bill’s proponents “were saying, in effect, that it’s OK to slander a woman.”
Sen. Jim Honeyford, R-Sunnyside – who voted for the bill – said with tongue in cheek that he hoped Kohl-Welles would move on to revising archaic city ordinances. After all, Honeyford said, there are still local laws on the books in Washington that make it illegal for a woman to wear a hat in a theater and ban anyone, regardless of gender, from riding a horse into a tavern.