Court to set date for West appeal at next meeting

The battle for the mayor’s office is shifting to Olympia, where the state Supreme Court will meet July 14 to decide when to hear Jim West’s appeal of the recall petition against him.

“The court does hear recall cases as expeditiously as possible,” said court clerk C.J. Merritt. The July 14 meeting is a routine scheduling session to discuss cases, he said.

Also Friday, retired Judge Philip J. Thompson resigned from a city panel appointed to investigate West, saying reporting in The Spokesman-Review had unfairly and incorrectly targeted him as a “potentially biased member of the panel” and made it impossible for him to continue. Thompson also said Friday that he plans to resign from the Diocesan Review Board, which looks into allegations of sexual misconduct against Catholic priests.

With regard to the recall petition, Spokane mother Shannon Sullivan – who is not a lawyer – won a Superior Court judge’s approval in June for the petition against West on the grounds that he improperly offered a city internship to a person he thought was an 18-year-old Ferris High School student.

If Sullivan gathers 12,567 signatures, city residents will vote whether to recall West, whose four-year term would otherwise last through 2007.

In reality, the purported high-schooler was a computer expert hired by The Spokesman-Review to confirm that West was using the Internet to solicit dates with young men. West says he was merely encouraging the man to apply, not offering him the internship outright.

West – who has resisted repeated calls to step down – filed his appeal on Monday with the Supreme Court. Sullivan said she would ask the court for a speedy review of the case.

The high court doesn’t usually hold oral arguments during the summer, although the justices continue to meet and issue rulings.

The court could decide to hold a special hearing this summer, or there might be no need for oral arguments at all. Merritt said that recall cases are often decided simply on the briefings and other paperwork filed by both sides. The timing of such a review, he said, is decided largely by how quickly the lawyers for both sides can file their documents with the court.

“At this point, all we know is what we may have read in the newspaper,” said Merritt.

Normally, the high court accepts only a small fraction of the more than 1,000 cases it’s asked to consider each year. But there are two types of cases – recalls and death-penalty cases – that the court cannot turn away.

The city’s investigation into the allegations against West is proceeding independently of the recall. City Attorney Mike Connelly appointed five people to the panel, and Thompson is the second member to resign since it was formed almost two months ago.

In his resignation letter to Connelly, City Council President Dennis Hession and Deputy Mayor Jack Lynch, Thompson said reporting in the newspaper “has created a situation that forces me to resign.”

“For some reason, which still remains a mystery to me, I have been targeted as a potentially biased member of the panel,” Thompson wrote. “The allegations given to support that conclusion are either false or incomplete.”

In a June 15 story, The Spokesman-Review reported that Thompson served with West for seven years on the board of directors for Morning Star Boys’ Ranch and was the chief Appeals Court judge when the court dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit against West in 1993. Thompson was not among the three judges who signed the dismissal.

In his resignation letter, Thompson criticized a published comment in Friday’s edition newspaper? by Editor Steven A. Smith.

In his Ask the Editors column, Smith said Thompson would have had to review and accept the court’s ruling in the West case.

On Friday, Thompson said he had no involvement in the case.

“A statement in my Friday Ask the Editors column mischaracterized Judge Thompson’s role and responsibilities as chief justice of the Court of Appeals,” Smith said Friday. “For that mischaracterization I sincerely apologize. While we acknowledge the judge’s insistence he played no role in the dismissal of a lawsuit filed against Jim West, we believe our stories on potential conflicts of interest on the panel investigating the mayor – issues raised by others and reported by our staff – were appropriate and we stand by that reporting.”

Two City Council members, Cherie Rodgers and Bob Apple, have criticized the panel’s appointments, saying they’re illegal because they weren’t approved by the council.

In his letter of resignation, Thompson said a result of the newspaper story was that he was subjected to a “three-hour tirade” on talk radio, during which he was accused of other improper actions.

“To be accused in any way of aiding pedophilia or condoning child abuse was so offensive to me it did push me over the edge,” he wrote.

Thompson is the second person to resign from the five-member board. Tom Trulove, a professor of economics at Eastern Washington University, resigned last week, citing personal reasons.

Connelly said Friday afternoon that he wasn’t sure what would happen next with the investigation, and that it wasn’t certain that both Trulove and Thompson would be replaced.

“There’s no magic number” for the panel’s membership, he said.

He said his purpose in forming the panel was to create an independent body to review the allegations, and that Thompson was “more than qualified” to serve in that role.

“I can certainly understand his reluctance to serve because of his treatment in the paper,” he said.

Thompson submitted a copy of his letter to The Spokesman-Review on Friday, but would not agree to an interview. In earlier stories, he said he didn’t consider the fact that he and West served together on the Morning Star board a conflict of interest, and said his dealings with West were minimal.

West’s attorneys, Bill Etter and Carl Oreskovich, issued a statement about Thompson’s resignation, writing, “Perhaps it was due to The Spokesman-Review’s unfair inference that he might not be impartial.”

The five-paragraph statement then noted that Thompson had once concurred in an appellate ruling in favor of The Spokesman-Review in a $200,000 defamation suit.

“Isn’t the public entitled to know of Judge Thompson’s decision favoring The Spokesman-Review given the paper’s role in the West controversy?” the statement asked. Managing Editor Gary Graham responded to Etter’s statement on Friday.

“Mr. Etter’s statement about a court ruling in favor of the The Spokesman-Review in which Judge Thompson participated seems a bit convoluted and off the point.

“The West camp continues to want to make the newspaper an issue in an effort to divert the focus from the mayor’s conduct,” Graham said. “The investigative panel was created to examine the mayor’s conduct in office, not the newspaper’s journalism.