“He was relentless”: For Leadership Amid COVID, Judge Rogers Gets State Bar’s Highest Award
The Hon. James E. Rogers was the King County Superior Court Presiding Judge when a virus prompted the state Supreme Court to order courts across Washington to shift into emergency mode.
The steps Judge Rogers took to preserve access to justice in the days and months that followed earned him the Chief Justice Mary E. Fairhurst Award of Merit from the Washington State Bar Association.
“From Day One he made it clear that we were going to keep the King County Superior Court open so that we could provide justice for all,” said Judge Mary Roberts, Assistant Presiding Judge of the King County Superior Court.
King County Superior Court Judge Ketu Shah said Judge Rogers was strategic in figuring out how to keep the court operating safely during the crisis and emphasized the court’s strengths.
“Judge Rogers always had a dogged vision of, ‘We can make this work.’ Whenever there was a new hurdle that came up, he would get us together and problem solve, and then overcome that barrier, and then go on to the next problem, and solve that,” Judge Shah said. “He was relentless.”
King County Superior Court is the largest court of general jurisdiction in the state and serves the 12th most populous county in the nation. It was among the first courts to be confronted with the emergent public health crisis of the novel coronavirus, as it was called at the time.
“For us, it was about March 10, and we suddenly realized we had to go into crisis mode,” Judge Rogers said.
Together with Superior Court’s Public Health Committee, Judge Rogers sought guidance from the University of Washington School of Public Health Professors Scott Meschke and Marty Cohen, who helped the court establish and refine its Public Health Plan in response to changing conditions and new data.
“We resolved to stay open and fully reopen as soon as we possibly could, using some brand-new innovative methods,” Judge Rogers said.
The most notable of these methods was conducting matters by phone and videoconferencing, including Zoom jury selection and Zoom civil bench trials. Superior Court also received national attention for setting up a pop-up courthouse at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, where cavernous ballrooms were turned into courtrooms for civil trials in which participants could be spaced six feet apart. This left more room in courthouses for physically distanced criminal trials (Because of the important liberty considerations, the presumption is that criminal trials will be held in-person unless that right is waived by the defendant.)
Eventually, Superior Court was able to hold civil jury trials entirely via Zoom, freeing up all available courthouse space for criminal trials.
King County Superior Court tried more cases than any other court in the nation during the period from March 2020 to November 2021.
Judges, bailiffs, and staff were committed to innovating to keep the court open during the pandemic, Judge Rogers said, because “they knew this was an important moment in court history.”
Judge Rogers accepted the Chief Justice Mary E. Fairhurst Award of Merit from the WSBA Board of Governors. A video of the award presentation is available here.
Judge Rogers was Presiding Judge from 2019 through the end of 2021. He served as Assistant Presiding Judge from 2017–2018 and as Chief Criminal Judge during 2014–15. He has served as a Superior Court judge since 2005, when he was elected by the voters of King County.
The Chief Justice Mary E. Fairhurst Award of Merit is given to an individual for a recent, singular achievement. It may involve an individual who has displayed exceptional courage in the face of adversity, thus bringing credit to the legal profession.
