Washington Supreme Court Rules Anti-SLAPP Statute Unconstitutional

The Washington state Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state’s broad anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statute violates the constitutional right to a jury trial, Davis Wright attorneys Bruce Johnson, Eric Shahl and Ambika Kumar Doran wrote in a blog post. The Thursday decision in Davis v. Cox is the “first in the nation to hold an anti-SLAPP statute unconstitutional,” the post said. “The court held that the requirement that a plaintiff ‘establish by clear and convincing evidence a probability of prevailing on the claim’ meant that the trial court had to weigh and decide disputed factual evidence, which is the purview of a jury,” they said. “Other courts, in Washington and elsewhere, have held that this provision is akin to a summary judgment procedure,” they said. Davis Wright represented the defendants in the case brought by members of the Olympia Food Co-op against co-op board members “because of their stance on a boycott of Israeli goods,” the blog said. The case will now be sent back to the trial court, they said. The attorneys called the decision significant because the statute “cannot be applied in any circumstance,” so for now “media defendants and others have lost an important protection against baseless lawsuits targeting their First Amendment activities,” they said.