Our View: City’s judicial selection shows need for standards

With the city of Spokane installing three judges for the new municipal court, the chief concern is whether they are qualified. It would appear that all three are.

Tracy Staab was a federal public defender. Shelley Szambelan was an assistant city attorney. But a last-minute question arose about Mary C. Logan, who has been a public defender in Spokane since 1997. Logan got her law degree at Monterey College of Law, which is accredited in California but not by the American Bar Association. Washington state law says that municipal court candidates need only have a license to practice law, but City Hall upped the ante with the requirement that applicants come from ABA-approved schools.

Technically, that would disqualify Logan. Fortunately, it did not, as Mayor Mary Verner chose to stick with Logan, who is qualified to perform the duties of the position. When Logan ran for a district judge position in 2006, the Spokane County Bar Association gave her a “qualified” rating. Washington Women Lawyers felt she was “well qualified.” This year, the Spokane Bar Association deemed all three picks well-qualified.

In fact, Logan has the most legal experience of the three.

However, that doesn’t mean the city should shrug this off as a trivial misstep. Perhaps other candidates in Logan’s position declined to apply once they read the application and found that their legal education didn’t meet the minimum standards. When asked how many candidates she thought that might be, Verner was not pleased with the question. She added that she was mystified at why this challenge was raised, but a better question is how the city adopted a standard the boss didn’t think important.

This situation hearkens back to the time the city required the police chief to have a four-year college degree, then waived the standard for Roger Bragdon, then reinstituted it after he retired. Situational requirements are unsettling. That’s not to say officials should be slaves to the standards, but they ought to take more care in establishing them.

Bragdon’s predecessor, Alan Chertok, had advanced degrees but was ineffectual during his short tenure. In Logan’s case, what’s more important is the assessment of her rather than her college. If she weren’t up to the task, she would have been exposed by now.

We congratulate the three new judges, but the city did mess up the process. It is not the fault of those who pointed it out.