Real Change News | Renter wins right to edit unlawful eviction record

September 9, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 40

Short Takes

Renter wins right to edit unlawful eviction record

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

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Chalk one up for renters: A state appeals court ruled Aug. 31 that renters do, in fact, have the right to remove their names from court records in cases where a landlord has filed an illegal eviction against them — a precedent-setting case brought by the Northwest Justice Project on behalf of tenant Ashlee Rousey.

In March 2008, the management company at Rousey’s Federal Way apartment complex filed eviction papers against her after her boyfriend threw a rock at her window (“Tenant fights being blacklisted by landlord,” Aug. 20, 2008). But the eviction wasn’t legal: State law prohibits landlords from evicting victims of domestic violence. After Northwest Justice Project attorney Eric Dunn pointed this out in a letter to the management company, it dropped the case, but Rousey was left with a publicly accessible eviction filing, Dunn says, that could lead landlords to deny her housing in the future.

With Dunn’s help, Rousey, the young mother of a three-year-old boy, filed a motion in Superior Court to edit the record in the court’s SCOMIS database so that the eviction would be listed only by her initials, not her full name. The court rejected the motion, saying it didn’t have the power to seal the file. But the appeals court said it does. “[It’s] a positive decision for Ms. Rousey and for Washington tenants,” Dunn says, because it establishes that “SCOMIS can be redacted the same as any other court record and [that] protecting the housing opportunities of a domestic violence survivor can be a compelling privacy or safety interest sufficient to justify redaction.”

The ruling doesn’t mean that redaction is automatic, but it does establish the grounds for asking: something that Rousey will get a new try at when the case goes back to Superior Court.

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