Tarra Simmons: Washington State Representative and Lawyer

We were honored to host Tarra Simmons, a Washington State Representative and civil rights lawyer who was told she could not sit for the bar exam because of her record, as our June 2024 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. She told us how she got that reversed, and what she has done with the seat she won since. You can watch the full recording above.

If you have lost a professional license, or you are waiting to learn whether you will, this is the hour to give her. Tarra was not turned away from the bar over her convictions. She was turned away over her attitude toward them, in words familiar to anyone ever told they are not sorry in the right way.

What court fines and fees do to a minimum wage paycheck

Hers was a Washington state camp rather than a women’s federal prison, though the dead time and the strip search after every visit with her children will be familiar to many of us. She came home to work release and a job at Burger King, grateful she was no longer scrubbing toilets for 42 cents an hour.

Nine months in, the arithmetic stopped working. Rent, her kids, and a paycheck garnished for court fines and fees before it ever reached her.

I can’t live off this Burger King paycheck, they’re garnishing my paycheck to pay my court fines and fees.

So she started working out how to commit another financial crime. Then how to sell drugs, telling herself she would not use them this time. Her own thinking frightened her badly enough that she walked into her recovery meeting and told on herself, out loud, in front of everybody. Most reentry talks leave that part out. She says it on tape, to a room of people who have had some version of that thought and never said it aloud.

What a board means when it says you are not remorseful enough

By the time she stood before the board that decides who may sit for the bar, she had graduated magna cum laude with the Dean’s Medal and won a Skadden Fellowship, one of thirty a year, almost always given to Ivy League graduates and never before to a formerly incarcerated person. She had taken random drug tests for five and a half years to prove her recovery, and carried more than a hundred letters from prosecutors, judges and professors.

The board said no. One reason it gave was that she seemed too proud of her progress. The other:

they felt I wasn’t remorseful enough for my past behaviors and I felt entitled to become a lawyer

Anyone who has faced a licensing body, or any of the other collateral consequences of a white collar conviction, knows that trap. Everything you build to show you have changed gets read back at you as proof you never thought you needed to, and the research on second chances finds the same shape in colder terms, that the chance tends to arrive with the punishment still attached. Nobody in Washington had ever successfully appealed one of these decisions, and no process existed for trying. What her lawyers built instead became the first bar admission case the state Supreme Court had taken up since 1934, and she fought the bar to keep the hearing public so the next applicant could use the record. The justices ruled that same afternoon, unanimously. Opinions there normally take four or five months.

What she has changed for people leaving prison, and what she cannot

Freshman bills usually rename a street. Hers restored the vote to every person in Washington on the day they walk out, whether they are on community custody, in work release or in jail.

As long as your head isn’t on a 24-hour, state-issued pillow, you can, um, vote in my state.

She has since moved more than $200 million into reentry in a state that had never funded a reentry nonprofit at all, and abolished court fines and fees unless the money is restitution owed to an individual victim, which is most of what our members carry and is not the same obligation as forfeiture, however often the two get used as one word. She left prison with $40 and a bus ticket. People walking out in Washington today leave with a six-month housing voucher, $300 and case management on the other side.

She is blunt that the politics are not what our members assume. Reform has passed in states run by both parties, the First Step Act among them, which Louis L. Reed helped push through after nearly fourteen years in federal prison himself, and she calls out her own caucus when they drop people first language for someone whose politics they dislike. Her case for education and apprenticeships inside is plain, that a way to support yourself is what moves recidivism. So are her limits. Her own record was cleared under a state law with no federal equivalent, and she says she is sorry for those of us who will need a pardon instead.

What she was proudest of the night she spoke was not a bill. It was a phone call she had taken that morning from the middle school that expelled her.

About Tarra Simmons

Tarra Simmons is a lawyer, a civil rights activist and a national leader in criminal justice reform. Raised in Bremerton, Washington, she worked as a registered nurse before her incarceration, and in 2011 was sentenced to 30 months in prison for theft, drug and firearm crimes. She graduated from Seattle University School of Law with honors in 2017. When the Washington State Bar Association would not let her sit for the exam, she challenged its rules in the Washington State Supreme Court and won unanimously, and was sworn in as an attorney on June 16, 2018. She was elected to the Washington State Legislature in 2020 and serves the 23rd Legislative District.