By Lornet Turnbull
Special To The Medium
Growing up in a housing project in South Seattle, Judith Hightower never imagined herself a lawyer, much less a judge.
Back in the 1960s, little Black girls aspired to be nurses and teachers.
But she would not only go on to join the small circle of African American women in the state donning a judge’s robe, she remains the only modern write-in candidate to be elected to office.
“I had been told I couldn’t be a lawyer, I couldn’t get into law school, that I couldn’t be a judge,” Hightower said. “I never once believed any of it.”
First elected in 1991, she retired last October from the Seattle Municipal Court, which handles cases involving drunken-driving, assault charges, drug offenses and other minor crimes occurring within the city limits.
She believes she brought to the bench a level of compassion she often found missing when she was representing clients as a trial lawyer.
She worked to bring diversity at all levels of the judiciary and while some lawyers characterized her as too soft – “hug a thug,’’ was the occasional refrain – she said she strived to ensure that everyone was given a fair shake in her courtroom.
In 1999, she created the nation’s first mental health court, where trained professionals assess whether alleged criminal activity is related to mental illness and she worked with others on the bench to establish a program for domestic violence.
She held membership or chaired several legal professional organizations and in 2008 received the National Black Prosecutor Association’s Thurgood Marshall Justice Award, presented to those who demonstrate outstanding achievement through social activism and concern for human and civil rights.
Lem Howell, a longtime and semi-retired Seattle attorney, who said he knew Hightower before she became a judge, said, “She was always courteous to lawyers and pleasant on the bench and asked pertinent questions.
“Some of those judges seem to have a chip on their shoulders. It was always a pleasant experience to go before her,” Howell said.
Finding her way
After high school, Hightower received a full scholarship to attend Washington State University, but put college on hold to marry and start a family.
She took a job at what was then People’s Bank, where her duties included training managers, whom she soon discovered were earning more money than she.
When she inquired about the discrepancy, she was told the trainees had college degrees.
She didn’t.
So Hightower enrolled in the University of Washington, intending to pursue a business degree. But in her first economic class, she was dismayed by the professor’s declaration: “Economics determines the distribution of scarce resources; but we don’t care about that.
“We only care about profits,” added the professor.
Changing course, she began taking classes toward a degree in comparative literature and was casting about for what she might do with such a degree when a professor suggested law school.
Hightower said her husband, who didn’t much like the idea, left. And in 1979, as a single mother in her 30s, she enrolled in law school at the University of the Puget Sound.
She was a high-profile campus activist, speaking out against inequality and helping to stage major anti-apartheid demonstrations.
On a visit to the Monroe Correctional Complex, she said she was shocked to find many of the young men from her old neighborhood were incarcerated there.
“I started thinking something must be wrong with the Constitution,” she said. “I later learned there was nothing wrong with the Constitution. It’s just how it was applied.”
The Law and Politics
After law school, she joined the Associated Counsel for the Accused in Seattle, a public defender agency serving indigent clients.
She was over the moon: “I get to be a litigator; I get to go into a courtroom and argue on behalf of my clients. I loved trial work and I learned that I loved the Constitution.”
But she immediately noticed a pattern. The poor, unemployed, underemployed, she said, were trapped in a hopeless cycle, set up to fail.
According to Hightower, someone would get out of jail, get a job, pay their fine, but then would get re-arrested after missing a court date because they were working. And the cycle would start all over again.
Worse, she said, judges hearing these cases couldn’t relate to the people in front of them.
“They didn’t have that background, they couldn’t appreciate the circumstances that people were working under,” she said.
She believed that as a Black, single mother from a working-class background who had been on welfare, she could bring a “different perspective to the bench.”
But she’d discover that there’s a whole lot of politics involved in making the leap from lawyer to judge.
Open seats on the court are filled by mayoral appointments. The appointments are based largely on merit, characterized by a lawyer’s involvement in the legal community. To keep that position, appointed judges must seek and win re-election.
Early on as a trial lawyer, Hightower was not active in the bar or many professional organizations. In fact, she still bristles at the memory of being snubbed, when as a newly minted trial lawyer she’d attended an event for criminal attorneys only to be ignored by the room full of White men.
She eschewed all that to work volunteer in the local community, setting up legal-aid clinics to help the poor and working alongside other Black lawyers to help parents pursue disciplinary grievances in Seattle schools.
But none of that mattered when she applied for a municipal court appointment that year.
Denied an interview, she challenged the appointee in the general election, mounting a last-minute grassroots campaign that earned her an impressive second-place showing among a field of five candidates – a few thousand votes behind the incumbent judge.
The establishment took note and when two vacancies came up the following year, Hightower, who by then had become more active, was granted an interview.
But not an appointment.
And then something happened that raised eyebrows throughout the legal community. Within minutes of the close of business on the last day candidates could file for public office, the husband of a sitting judge filed to run for his wife’s seat.
The following Monday, the judge, Barbara Yanick, who 17 years earlier had become the first woman to be hold a seat on the court, announced she would not seek re-election, citing a cancer diagnosis. It would allow her husband to run unopposed.
Hightower’s decision to enter that race as write-in candidate sent county election officials scrambling for guidance on how that sort of thing even worked. And her campaign had to educate voters on how to vote for a write-in candidate.
But it worked. She received enough votes in that year’s primary to qualify for the general election, where she won by a three to one margin.
Tempering Justice with Mercy
Looking back, Hightower said she believes she did make a difference. In the beginning, she said, “I was a laughing stock. My platform was be tough, but fair, be compassionate. I had integrity. I gave people chances, but a lot of people also took advantage of that.”
That compassion, however, didn’t win her many accolades from prosecutors and the police.
In 1997, for example, she dismissed charges against a man who had held police at bay with a sword for 11 hours, saying he was not guilty of any crime because he was mentally ill.
“The lawyers complained about me all the time,” Hightower said. “But when members of the community feel they’ve been treated fairly, that’s when the process works.”
Frequently defendants wrote to her or came back to her court room to personally thank her for giving them a change.
“I remember one woman who said to me, ‘you were tough when I needed that and kind and compassion what I needed that. Thank you,’” recalled Hightower. “That stayed with me.”
Other cases stayed with her, too, like that of an African American man accused of assaulting a White woman.
“When he saw the all-White jury he told me he didn’t think he could get a fair trial,” she said.
Hightower encouraged the man to have faith in the system but it turned out he was right. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she said, the jury convicted him anyway.
“He didn’t get a fair trial,” Hightower said. “I didn’t overturn the verdict and I’ve always been sorry I didn’t.”
Every four years, when it was time for re-election, Hightower said she searched her soul: Had she become jaded? Did she still have compassion?
“There were times when I seriously considered getting out,” she said. “And every single time someone would come back and I’d know it wasn’t time yet.”
Last year she determined it was.
“I felt called to this work and I felt like my time had ended,” she said. “I really did love it. It was a hard decision to leave.”
In between spending time with her grandchildren, singing in two choirs and continuing to volunteer in the community, she speaks to school children about the law.
She encourages them to always believe in themselves and to dream big.
“I tell them if you don’t have a dream, get one,” she said. “Stop the negative self-talk and pursue that dream.”
“And have a plan B,” concluded Hightower.
