Navigating the court system as a defendant can be daunting and present an undue amount of challenges — from missing work to attend court, to traveling long distances to complete court-mandated obligations.
Blaine Municipal Court, despite not having the same number of resources as Bellingham’s court, is attempting to limit those challenges by creating a “one-stop shop” for defendants.
“It’s always been very important to us that people can actually do whatever they need to do while they’re at court and satisfy those obligations, rather than just create another hurdle to complying,” said Rajeev Majumdar, Blaine’s prosecutor.
Blaine Police Chief Donnell Tanksley noted the difference between municipal courts in Washington state, compared to those he experienced growing up in Missouri.
“When I lived in Ferguson, the municipal courts were money mills … people couldn’t leave without making some kind of cash payment,” Tanksley said. “The court here is much different — we’re not here to generate funds, we’re here to help people and to change.”
Blaine Municipal Court, similar to other regional municipal courts, enlists the help of Friendship Diversion Services, a nonprofit private corporation that provides jail and sentencing alternatives for some defendants.
These diversion services include community service, anger management courses and restitution to victims. The service also provides GPS and alcohol monitoring for those who are court-ordered to either serve time in home detention or satisfy other pre-trial monitoring obligations.
Blaine’s court is the only one out of Ferndale, Lynden, Everson and Sumas municipal courts to request Friendship Diversion Services to be present in their court sessions, following in the footsteps of Bellingham Municipal Court.
Bellingham’s court was the first to begin utilizing the services to prioritize rehabilitation over incarceration whenever possible, Judge Debra Lev said.
By applying Friendship Diversion Services in the northern city, defendants can satisfy some of their court-ordered mandates immediately after being sentenced, and save them a trip to Bellingham.
“I don’t know if they have access to a car or how easy it is for them to get to downtown Bellingham on short notice, or if they have the resources to get out of work to do that,” Majumdar said. “If you’re going to be enforcing law and justice in a community, you need to bring the resources to them.”
It can be difficult to affect “justice, equity and economic justice,” throughout Whatcom County when resources are so heavily concentrated in Bellingham, Majumdar said.
But, Blaine, Ferndale, Lynden, Everson and Sumas are taking some steps to close that resource gap in their court systems.
The five cities’ municipal courts pooled together their funding to hire a domestic violence advocate to be present in court proceedings and provide support to victims — a “creative” solution, Majumdar said, and something the courts likely could not have afforded individually.
A domestic violence advocate “adds so much to our justice system,” Majumdar said.
The judicial branch of government is often the easiest to neglect when allocating funding, Majumdar said, due to a hesitancy to provide resources to those accused of a crime.
“There’s not always a lot of care by the body politic for defendants, [but] I like to hope that our court system in [Blaine] take a different stance on that.” he said. “We put together a real special system here, and I’m really proud of it. I think it’s driven by our genuine love and care for the defendant.”
Blaine Municipal Court’s take on justice hasn’t scaled up to the superior level; Mujumdar said there’s room to instill the same philosophies in higher courts.
Whatcom Superior Court handles felony cases, in contrast to district and municipal courts which often address lower-level offenses and infractions. Yet, the superior court doesn’t provide pretrial monitoring to the same extent as municipal court and district courts.
It’s “rare” for the superior court to refer defendants to Friendship Diversion Services, said Adilene Calderon, manager for the organization’s Bellingham office.
When it comes to other diversion services and jail alternatives, Lev said the superior court’s “hands are tied to a certain extent,” due to minimum sentence requirements set by the Sentence Reform Act. The act, established in 1981, aims to provide consistency and predetermined sentence lengths for different offenses.
“Pretrial monitoring is a great way to intervene early and hold people accountable,” Majumdar said. “It’s interesting to me that there’s just a little more accountability in a lower level of courts.”
