Trailblazing Washington jurist Carolyn Dimmick dies at 96

When newly minted law school graduate Carolyn Dimmick passed the state bar exam in 1953, a headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer crowed: Pretty Blonde Water Skier Qualifies as Attorney!”

Her student adviser at the University of Washington had urged her not to go to law school, where he said she would “take up the space meant for a man.”

Dimmick took it all in stride. “We didn’t know any better,” she said in an interview. “I just took it as it came.”

Dimmick, the first woman on the Washington Supreme Court and the second in Western Washington to be elevated to the federal bench, died Dec. 24. in Seattle. She was 96.

Dimmick worked nearly 60 years as a judge in state and federal courts and shattered glass ceilings at every level of the state’s legal and judicial systems. She was a prosecutor in the Washington attorney general’s office and King County prosecuting attorney’s office, was appointed to a state district court, was a trial judge in King County Superior Court, and was a trial and chief judge in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington.

She also played a key role in the placement, design and construction of the 19-story U.S. District Courthouse at 700 Stewart St. in downtown Seattle. Among other duties, she picked the art and saw to the types of fabric and color schemes used in the courtrooms.

“Judge Dimmick owns so many ‘firsts,’ ” said Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice Debra Stephens, who noted that Dimmick’s appointment to the state’s highest court in 1981 by then-Gov. Dixy Lee Ray led to that position being held by a woman ever since, including herself.

When women gained a supermajority on the state Supreme Court in 2003, Stephens recalled, Dimmick joked that the court might no longer need a second restroom behind the bench – a reference to a complaint by a male justice when she was appointed that it would cost the state $50,000 to add a restroom just for her. Dimmick shot the idea down in short order.

“Not on my watch!” Stephens recalled Dimmick saying.

“She was there to do a job – which she did very well – and I think she knew that little problem would solve itself,” Stephens said. It did. Dimmick used another accessible restroom in the Temple of Justice.

Senior U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez, who worked alongside Dimmick for three decades, commented that “the word ‘trailblazer’ doesn’t even begin to describe” Dimmick’s role as an attorney and jurist.

“Exceptionally competent and possessed of a keen legal mind, Judge Dimmick was deeply respected by all who appeared in her courtroom – litigants, lawyers and members of the public alike,” Martinez said. “She was warm and personable, plain-spoken and always willing to help her colleagues, whether by giving her time, offering advice or simply serving as a thoughtful sounding board.”

Jack Hamann, a Pacific Northwest journalist commissioned to create video profiles of Seattle’s senior federal judges, said Dimmick was a hard worker with a brilliant legal mind, not a firebrand.

“She would blanch at the word ‘feminist,’ ” he said. “She had no big desire to change the world.”

Dimmick was born in Seattle on Oct. 24, 1929, also known as “Black Thursday,” the day of the U.S. stock market collapse that sparked the Great Depression.

Her father, Maurice Reaber, was a boatbuilder, fisherman and naval architect who eventually owned a moorage on the Ship Canal. Her mother, Margaret Taylor Reaber, was a schoolteacher. Dimmick attended Lincoln High School and was an accomplished athlete, which led to a brief stint as a professional water skier.

In her interview with Hamann, she recalled that a short film and newspaper feature highlighting her aquatic talents made the rounds while she was in law school. She said the dean called her in and explained “that if you’re going to be a lawyer, you’ve got to stay out of the paper in a bathing suit.”

Dimmick said she was one of three women in her law school class. She recalled it was “easy to get in” law school back then, but the failure rate during the first year was upward of 40%.

Dimmick said it was virtually impossible for a woman to be hired by a private law firm and that she was told by partners at several large firms that “we don’t think our clients would accept a woman giving them advice.”

Dimmick turned her attention to public firms, and got a job as a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, where she worked from 1953-54. There, she met Cyrus Dimmick, whom she would later marry. They had two children.

Dimmick joined the King County prosecuting attorney’s office in 1955, where she was assigned to divorce court during a time when it was necessary for a court to find legal grounds for a divorce. A newspaper article, once again, announced “Blonde U. Grad New Divorce Proctor.”

Dimmick took several years off while raising her children, leaving her “home and poor,” she recalled. That’s when friends pointed out an opening on the Seattle District Court bench, where she won appointment.

“I knew I was going to have to work double-time – as I did in every job – to satisfy myself I could do the job,” Dimmick recalled.

She spent 10 years as a district court judge in Kirkland when she was elevated to the King County Superior Court bench. There, she was a trial judge handling felonies and high-profile cases.

In her interview with journalist Hamann, Dimmick said death penalty cases “are a colossal waste of time” and that heinous criminals should be “put away and don’t let them out.”

In 1981, Dimmick interviewed with Gov. Ray about an opening on “an appeals court.” When she was appointed, she learned the job was actually a position on the state Supreme Court, making her the first woman on the state’s highest court.

“It was daunting,” Dimmick said later. “But I don’t think it was a big deal to anyone – I was just another person on the court.

While on the supreme court, she wrote the opinion upholding the conviction and death penalty of serial killer Charles Rodman Campbell, who was hanged after being convicted in Dimmick’s courtroom of murdering and raping three women in 1982.

In 1984, Congress approved a new U.S. District Court position for Western Washington. According to Hamann’s research, Washington Sens. Slade Gorton and Dan Evans didn’t care for the initial list of candidates. Dimmick appeared on a revised list, and then President Ronald Reagan nominated her the following year after a brief conversation. Dimmick was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 4, 1985, making her the second woman to be on the federal bench in Washington.

Dimmick was a chief federal judge from 1994 to 1997, when she assumed senior status.

Among the cases she presided over was a lawsuit filed against the Jim Beam liquor manufacturer by a mother who claimed the distillery didn’t do enough to warn women about fetal alcohol syndrome.

While the distillery prevailed in court, Congress the following year required all liquor distillers and brewers to include a warning against drinking during pregnancy.

Dimmick is survived by her son Taylor Dimmick (Sherri) and daughter Dana Dimmick Scarp (Bradley); grandchildren Christina Ray (Jordan), Nichole Jacobsen (Derek), Madeline Scarp (Peter) and Spencer Scarp (Molly); and six great-grandchildren.

The family said it will have a memorial service for Dimmick in January.