Carolyn Dimmick Final PDF.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Dimmick: Oh, good old Ed! I don’t remember ever reading that.
Hughes: Did you know Ed pretty well?
Dimmick: Yes I did. He was a very good friend of a community friend of ours, Tom Keith.
So we would all have coffee together and I got to know him. And of course I would go up
to the Teamsters’ luncheons all the time. … He was a supporter of mine when I ran for the
Supreme Court as well. So that was good to have somebody who was more or less thought
of as being on the other side.
Hughes: In the wake of that, with Ed’s intervention, did labor come back around and not
rattle its saber?
Dimmick: I never needed it again. It didn’t matter. (laughing) Apparently they must have
because I was elected to the Supreme Court.
Hughes: The classic notion of you is that you’re a law-and-order kind of person. Would
you take exception to that?
Dimmick: No.
Hughes: Some attorneys, prosecutors and judges have told me it was really disconcerting
to run into psychopathic, sociopathic kind of really –
Dimmick: Bad guys.
Hughes: Yes. Bad to the bone.
Dimmick: Sure it is because it’s hard for you to fathom that somebody could really be
rotten to the core. But there are people like that. They’re just built that way. I mean if
they took their brains apart I’m sure they were screwed up the wrong way. … And there’s
nothing we can do to change them.
Hughes: During that era on the Superior Court bench, did you ever have someone make a
threat against you or feel that you were in danger for being a tough-minded judge?
Dimmick: No I didn’t. I had generic threats, but nothing that alarmed me … I had one
when I was on this court that came through the mail from an inmate saying, “My cellmate
is going to get the judge and the lawyer on this case.” And so the marshals went over
and chatted with the guy and said, “If she dies of anything but old age, you’re history.”
(laughing) But he was in there for contracting a murder case. Then he wrote me a note
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