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By Venice Buhain
2026 marks five years since the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in State vs. Blake, known as the Blake Decision, which opened the door to the reversal of hundreds of thousands of drug convictions in the state. The decision had huge impacts on state drug policy, local courts and individual lives.
In 2016, an Eastern Washington woman named Shannon Bowman was arrested for felony drug possession after police found an almost empty bag of methamphetamine in her pocket. Bowman, charged under her former name of Shannon Blake, said a friend had given her the jeans and she didn’t know the drugs were in her pocket. Washington law at the time didn’t require proof that a defendant knowingly possessed drugs.
In 2021, the Washington Supreme Court sided with Bowman, saying that by making all drug possession illegal - even if the defendant didn’t know - the state law violated the due process clause of the state and federal constitution. The vote was 5 to 4 in Bowman’s favor, including retired Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu, who said the question comes down to the prosecution having the burden of proving criminal intent.
“The principle is that when you're charging somebody with a crime, you know you have to have a mens rea or state of mind, and that is criminal intent. You have to intend to commit this act. And this particular case, right, the facts were these drugs were in the little pocket of the jeans that had been given to her that actually were purchased at a secondhand store,” Yu said. “The burden should always be on the state to prove something, not the defense, to prove anything.”
The ruling overturned Washington’s felony drug law and set the stage for the possibility to clear hundreds of thousands of drug convictions dating back 50 years to 1971. Official state estimates vary on how many cases could be affected by the decision — anywhere between 330,000 to 600,000. However, it’s not automatic: people have to initiate the effort to get their charges cleared, so only between a quarter to a half of the cases — 155,000 of them — have been vacated since 2021.
In the five years since Blake, courts and justice organizations have been chipping away at the backlog. Yu said it should be a priority for the courts to clear these cases.
“You can be denied housing because of a conviction. You can be denied certain public assistance. You can be denied access to be a volunteer in your children's school, because they'll simply say somebody with a criminal felony record cannot volunteer here,” Yu said. “So the collateral consequences, or even the direct consequences of a conviction like this will follow somebody for a very long time.”
The ruling also led to a new drug law in 2023, known as the “Blake fix,” which made use or possession a gross misdemeanor, instead of a felony, and added the word “knowingly” to the statute. It also put a new emphasis on pre-trial diversion programs as an alternative to criminal charges.
Shannon Bowman told the Associated Press in 2021 that she was glad that people in her situation would have a second chance. She died in 2023.
Richard Lechich, of the Washington Appellate Project, represented Bowman in her appeal. The Blake case wasn’t the first that tried to challenge the felony drug possession law, but the facts of this case, a change in the Washington Supreme Court’s makeup and changes in attitudes around simple possession contributed to Blake’s successful appeal.
“At this point, Washington actually was the only state with a strict liability drug possession law in the books that made it a felony,” he said.
And this case made a strong argument that it was unfair and unconstitutional for a defendant to prove their innocence to be acquitted.
“I guess people always thought that was unfair, but maybe it gained some valiancy in recent years,” Lechich said.
“The best outcome we could have possibly gotten was for the court to declare the statute unconstitutional. It certainly had the broadest impact, and has given a lot of people a second chance,” he said.
Yu said five years later, there still seems to be a resistance to making sure that the court’s ruling is followed.
“But I'm surprised at some of the resistance. I'm surprised that the lack of funding to provide lawyers and those complicated cases. I'm surprised that some of our judges are saying, ‘Hey, I got a lot of stuff to do. And you know what, this is at the bottom of the list.’ And I keep thinking, why not put it to the top of the list and just get it done?,” Yu said.
