State v. Bash

Washington Supreme Court

Decided November 7, 1996

Washington Supreme Court · decided 1996-11-07

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“statute, but Mr. Walt Freser was killed by the attack of the dogs. Surely the majority did not wish to make this a”

quoted by 1 later decision, including State v. Bash

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1996-11-07

How this case has been cited

Cited by 34 later decisions — most recently June 2015 · most notably Cockle v. Dept. of Labor and Industries (2001), State v. Roberts (2001)

33 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Dolliver, J.

¶1(dissenting) — I dissent. Regardless of the elaborate and sometimes tendentious argument of the majority, I believe the statute is definitely a strict liability statute. The majority attempts to convert this into a "second bite” statute, but Mr. Walt Freser was killed by the attack of the dogs. Surely the majority did not wish to make this a "second death” statute.

¶2We may have serious objections to the method which the Legislature chose to resolve this problem, but we are not platonic guardians. If we were to take on every instance of disagreement with a legislature that drafts its statutes in a manner unpleasing to us, we would have a full-time job. It is not the prerogative of this court to pass upon the desirability of a statute. The Legislature has perceived a problem, written a statute, and now it must live with the consequences. It is not our duty to do otherwise.

¶3 *615Smith, J., concurs with Dolliver, J.