Judge Hired To End Long Wait For Divorces Estranged Couples Were In Limbo As Courts Pursued Criminal Cases

Jennifer and Jeremy Johnson’s divorce proceedings have lasted longer than their marriage.

Married less than two years, they’ve waded through nearly five years of divorce pleadings and hearings.

Like 3,000 other Spokane County couples waiting for a final date in court, the Johnsons are in legal limbo. Because Superior Court judges have been busy handling more pressing criminal cases, the queue of divorce cases has grown longer over the past three years.

To deal with the problem, the court has assigned Paul Bastine to become Spokane’s first family law judge, concentrating on marriage dissolutions and child-custody cases.

Since Jan. 4, when the change took effect, he’s handled 10 divorces. Bastine expects to resolve another 75 to 100 by the end of the year.

In the past, divorces were assigned to a variety of Spokane judges but routinely given low priority. Only 37 cases went to trial last year.

The Johnsons hope their long march toward dissolution will finally end in two months.

Jennifer Johnson’s attorney, Michael Price, has heard Superior Court administrators promising for years to find ways to move divorce cases through the system faster.

The court’s decision to have one judge hear family law cases full time makes perfect sense, Price said.

Bastine said it became clear that the old method of assigning dissolutions to individual judges - and hoping they’d squeeze them into their busy schedules - wasn’t working.

Initial hearings in a divorce are routinely heard by court commissioners. But disputes involving child custody or property have to be resolved through a bench trial with a judge.

Said Bastine: “When we talked to local attorneys and looked at our court statistics, we realized there was a problem. A lot of divorce cases, especially those involving child custody, were making little progress and taking too long to resolve.”

Many of the county’s 3,000 backed-up divorces include custody disputes.

“A year’s delay to a child can seem like a lifetime,” Bastine said.

The Johnsons married in 1992. The next year, their only child was born. She’s now in kindergarten.

After the couple filed for divorce in 1994, they went through an initial hearing that established temporary custody of their daughter. A trial date was scheduled for 1996 but then postponed.

In early 1997, the Johnsons’ divorce was assigned to Superior Court Judge Neal Q. Rielly. It was set for a two- or three-day trial later that year. The main issue: a final child-custody plan.

But then Rielly was assigned the Tom DiBartolo murder case, effectively forcing the Johnsons off his calendar. When the DiBartolo trial ended, Rielly was shifted to Juvenile Court for a year.

That left the Johnsons needing to find another judge or wait until Rielly finished his assignment.

By late 1998, stress was clearly affecting the estranged couple.

“I believe my daughter and myself have been denied substantial justice,” Jennifer Johnson wrote the court. “The passage of time waiting for this case to be completed is simply inexcusable.”

Jeremy Johnson wrote that he, too, was eager to resolve the custody dispute.

“I agree with her that something has to be done because (our daughter) will start school this fall,” he said.

The delays endured by the Johnsons are common across the state, especially in counties where a high volume of criminal cases push aside family law hearings.

The situation is serious enough to draw the attention of former Spokane attorney Richard Guy, now chief justice of the Washington Supreme Court.

In his recent “state of the court” address to the Legislature, Guy said too many families with legal problems are treated by the courts in a scattered, fragmented way.

Guy proposed widespread adoption of a “unified family-law court” that would create a one-stop judicial process for families.

“People need judges who will resolve their disputes with patience and fairness,” Guy told lawmakers. “The family court must unify all aspects of law involving family issues, from juvenile to dissolution.”

In such a court, parents going through a divorce and experiencing truancy problems with a teenage child would likely have all the cases heard by the same judge, instead of bouncing around to different courtrooms.

Bastine said the first step - designating a family law judge - is already pushing more divorcing couples to reach peaceful settlements.

“As attorneys here become more certain how a judge will handle these matters, they know going into these cases what will probably be the outcome,” Bastine said.

“That familiarity is certain to push cases faster to resolution.”

The court’s decision to assign Bastine to the divorce logjam has received good marks from Spokane lawyers, said family law attorney Mary Patricia Chavez.

“This can only help families who are going through very stressful divorces,” Chavez said.

Ironically, the Johnsons would likely have resolved their split sooner if Bastine hadn’t taken on his new role.

Last fall, Judge Richard Schroeder presided over an emergency hearing in Johnson vs. Johnson. Hoping to move the case to resolution, Schroeder spent nearly an hour shuffling his calendar to find two days to resolve their divorce.

He finally penciled them in for mid-February.

When Bastine became family law judge, however, the case was assigned to him.

The divorce trial is now scheduled for March 15.