Andrew Van Winkle has unseated incumbent judge Timothy Hennessy, winning 52% of the vote in the race for Spokane Superior Court Judge Position 11.
In July 2024, a Spokane-based civic organization called People for Effective Government hosted a public forum. They invited all candidates for this race to participate, and Andrew Van Winkle was one of the two candidates who came. We made a video highlighting portions of Mr. Van Winkle’s comments from that night as he responded to questions from the moderator and audience members.
Our perception of Mr. Van Winkle is that he is humble, curious, and willing to continue learning. These are important characteristics for any public servant.
An article by The Center Square that covered this race included this information about Mr. Van Winkle: “An experienced prosecutor, Van Winkle has served as staff attorney to the Washington State Court of Appeals since 2019. His assignments have included advising judges reviewing cases from all counties in eastern Washington, including Spokane’s Superior Court. Van Winkle has also served over the last four years as a pro-tem court commissioner in Spokane County Superior Court and is familiar with the system from the inside.”
Partial Transcript of the Video
Below are excerpts of Mr. Van Winkle’s comments shown in the video above. Watch the full video for all of the context.
1. Alternatives to judicial dispute resolution
“I don’t think that there’s enough focus on mediation and alternatives to judicial dispute resolution. One of the things that makes it harder — and this is a double edge sword, I understand why the legislature did it — but in domestic violence cases the court can’t order the parties to mediate unless the person who is deemed the victim of domestic violence consents to it.”
“The definition of domestic violence is extremely broad, and it’s a very low bar. So you’ll have lawyers who will try to drum up an act of domestic violence — no matter how old — so they don’t have to mediate. So what do you do? You get to charge your client more. So cases don’t get resolved. Or meditation happens on the eve of trial instead of earlier in the case. You go to trial and the parties haven’t even decided who gets the silverware.”
“In Washington part of what’s going on is that our court rules are not set up to encourage alternative dispute resolution. It’s there on paper. The window dressing is there. But as far as actually having the rubber hit the road, we haven’t implemented it the right way yet. I’m not saying that I know the right way to do it — I don’t. But I do know that what we’re doing is not working too.”
2. Domestic violence
“It is a low bar [to bring domestic violence considerations into the case] and it was intentionally set low because for decades this state and the country as a whole had turned a blind eye to domestic violence and pretended it didn’t exist. For decades as a husband you could beat your wife and it wasn’t a crime…”
“We are dealing with centuries and centuries of untold abuse and trying to deal with what’s the best way to even the field. Washington has been a leader on this nationally in having laws responding to domestic violence, but we haven’t found the magic sauce yet. Maybe we’ve gone too far. Maybe we do need a tweak. But I’m hesitant to hold back and pull back. But I’d be curious to know what the domestic violence laws are of those other states that have the 50/50 [default parenting presumption] and how that compares to Washington.”
3. Figuring out who’s telling the truth
“The hard thing is — what courts do is we have to figure out who’s telling the truth and not. We get lied to all day long, every day. And we do get hoodwinked. We do get the wool pulled over our eyes, and we do get it wrong. I wish I had an answer on how to be a better truth detector. We do the best that we can, but I’ll be the first to admit that we get it wrong and I get it wrong too.”
4. When judges ignore the law
“Every lawyer takes an oath of attorney. Part of that oath of attorney is the same as the oath judges take: to uphold the laws and the constitutions of the United States and the State of Washington. But there are judges who sometimes ignore the law and they want to make a stand. You see it where judges say, ‘Well, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and if you don’t like it, appeal me.’ And they don’t appreciate the expense that comes with an appeal, and that an appeal is an imperfect remedy and often comes too late. It’s too little too late.”
“You need judges who understand that even though they’re the last stop — sometimes the first stop — often they’re the only stop, and there is no effective remedy…”
“If a judge is willing to just ignore black letter law, willing to ignore a binding contract that he already found on record to be binding, you wonder what’s going on.”
5. Feuding adults can still make great parents
“People get divorced for a reason. Sometimes it’s abundantly clear they can’t make it work, especially if it’s a contentious divorce. But just because they can’t be in a room together without it devolving doesn’t necessarily mean that either parent is a risk to their child or is going to abuse their child physically or mentally. Sometimes there are parents who can’t be in the same room as their former spouse, but with their child they’re the best parent in the world. So it’s incumbent on judges to do that record-making. Listen to all the evidence. Review it critically. Have a good guardian ad litem, which is another issue altogether…Oftentimes there are two parents who are a physical threat to each other, but neither one would ever hurt a hair on their child’s head.”
See also: Exonerations of imprisoned men in Washington and their 275 ‘lost years’