Ferguson File -- July and August 2023

I hope you had a wonderful Labor Day Weekend and return to school.

For some, the summer months are a time when the work slows down. For the more than 1,800 attorneys and staff in the largest public law office in the state, the legal work of protecting your rights never slows down.

Here are some recent highlights of our work on behalf of all Washingtonians over the summer:

• We filed a civil rights lawsuit asserting systemic discrimination and retaliation by national retailer O’Reilly Auto Parts against its pregnant employees. Pregnant employees should not have to choose between safe pregnancies and their livelihoods. You can watch the press conference announcing the lawsuit here.

• We announced a milestone in our initiative to track down and collect the DNA samples from offenders who were ordered to submit DNA as part of their sentence but fell through the cracks of the system: 2,000+ DNA samples collected. Collecting the DNA of thousands of serious offenders will help us solve more cold cases. This work makes communities safer and sends the message that we will use every tool at our disposal to bring justice to survivors and victims of these devastating crimes. Read more here. 

• July marked the one-year anniversary of launching an alert system to locate Missing Indigenous Women and People. Since it started, 63 alerts have gone out statewide and law enforcement located 52 individuals. The alert system was the law that my office wrote and proposed in partnership with Rep. Debra Lekanoff, D-Anacortes, and the MMIWP Task Force. Learn more about the task force here.

• I sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting he add Everett, Spokane and Yakima to an intelligence-driven Drug Enforcement Agency initiative aimed at combating violence and overdoses from fentanyl. You can read that letter here.

• We secured a legal victory on behalf of small businesses impacted by scams. A judge ordered EFile Business to stop targeting Washington businesses with deceptive text messages. Our lawsuit, filed in May, asserts the company targeted Washington’s small businesses and nonprofits with an illegal flood of hundreds of thousands of deceptive texts and emails to file reports with state agencies. The case is part of our office’s Small Business Protection Initiative that has recovered millions of dollars for small businesses that were targeted by these types of nefarious scams. Learn more about the case here.

• We led a coalition of 20 attorneys general to file a legal brief challenging Idaho’s restrictive law making it a crime for adults to help minors travel out-of-state for abortion care. Idaho’s radical and unconstitutional law not only endangers minors from Idaho, it also punishes residents and medical providers in Washington for helping them access lawful abortion care outside of Idaho. You can read coverage of the story here. My team also developed a guide for Washington state’s own laws protecting privacy and choice here.

We will continue to seek justice and protect the health and safety of all the people in Washington State.

Bob Ferguson
Washington State Attorney General