Every person who shall willfully and unlawfully remove, alter, mutilate, destroy, conceal, or obliterate a record, map, book, paper, document, or other thing filed or deposited in a public office, or with any public officer, by authority of law, is guilty of a class C felony and shall be punished by imprisonment in a state correctional facility for not more than five years, or by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or by both.
RCW 40.16.010
Injury to public record.
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case O'NEIL v. City of Shoreline (2008)
Most recently applied in 3 Wash. 3d 614 - In re Recall of Weyrich (August 2024)
2003 c 53 s 214; 1992 c 7 s 34; 1909 c 249 s 95; RRS s 2347.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Washington State Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain Washington statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.