Legal

WASHINGTON — The House cleared bipartisan gun violence reduction legislation on Friday, delivering President Joe Biden a legislative victory ahead of his departure for Europe. 

Once Ketanji Brown Jackson had been confirmed as the U.S. Supreme Court’s first Black woman judge Thursday afternoon, news footage showed members of Congress standing in applause, recognizing her achievement.

HPM Corporation, which has held the occupational medicine services contract at the former nuclear weapons production plant in Benton County for a decade, applied for and received a $1.3 million loan from the federal government in April 2020 following passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Federal investigators allege that money sat in a bank account for more than a year, rather than being used to pay employees, rent or mortgage expenses or utilities. 

The former head of the Spokane County Public Defenders Office, and the man who's seen most of the federal criminal defendants in Eastern Washington for the past eight years, is stepping down at the end of the month after a career in law that began in the 1970s. Rodgers, son of former Mayor David H. Rodgers, said his pursuit of criminal defense was at odds with the wishes of his dad.

The Justice Department filed a civil action against Rick T. Gray of Prosser, and one of his companies, last month. The complaint alleges Gray hid the sale of about 14,000 bushels of wheat in 2015, claiming the lost crop to receive insurance indemnity payments totaling $540,028.

Vanessa Waldref will be the first woman to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in Spokane after the Senate confirmed the Spokane native Thursday, according to tweets by the Senate Cloakroom and the U.S. Senate Periodical Press Gallery.

The man bit by a police dog in a controversial 2019 incident will be paid $49,900 by the city of Spokane.

The Supreme Court on Friday declined to take up the case of a Richland florist who refused to provide services for a same-sex wedding, leaving in place a decision that she broke state anti-discrimination laws.

The former representative from Post Falls was ordered to pay nearly $680,000 in restitution and will be on probation for 3 years after his six-month imprisonment ends. He has appealed the sentence to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Bobbie Pflugrad’s partner hasn’t held their 16-month-old son since he was two weeks old.

Fifteen former members of a Washington State University fraternity were charged Tuesday in connection with the 2019 alcohol poisoning death of a student, according to a news release from the Whitman County Prosecutor’s office.

An attorney representing five anonymous inmates argued against the release of the records in a federal courtroom in Spokane on Wednesday afternoon. The Washington Department of Corrections has prepared the records for release, but Disability Rights Washington and the ACLU argue doing so would cause irreparable harm to the 149 incarcerated people who identify as transgender, particularly because some of the records sought are forms completed by transgender inmates seeking protection from harm in prisons.

In January 2019, a Libyan-born Portland comedian said he was traveling through Spokane on a bus ride home when U.S. Border Patrol agents wrongfully detained and interrogated him about his immigration status.

Footage of a Spokane County Jail officer shooting 70-year-old Nancy King sheds new light on the killing, which the Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office deemed justified last month.

On April 11, Spokane police found a 5-year-old girl laying beside her mother in their family’s garage, critically injured with stab wounds in her throat and several organs. When police reached her mother, Kassie Dewey, she was dead.

The wife of a Spokane County man killed by his neighbor in May 2019 has filed suit against Spokane County, alleging a sheriff’s deputy’s negligence allowed the killing to happen.

The Spokane neonatal doctor accused in dark web schemes of trying to hire someone to break his former colleague’s hands and kidnap his estranged wife will remain in jail, after a federal judge said Wednesday afternoon he poses too much danger to the community.