Advocates stunned as WA lawmaker helps slash funds for groups clearing old drug convictions

When Camerina Zorrozua learned in April that Washington had slashed its state funding of her Spokane-based legal aid organization, she frantically called state Rep. Tarra Simmons.

“I was so alarmed, and I asked her straight up, ‘What happened?’” said Zorrozua, the legal director and co-founder of The Way to Justice.

Simmons, the first formerly incarcerated lawmaker in Washington, has vowed to fight for other formerly incarcerated people and was the state representative who Zorrozua thought would have fought hardest against the cuts.

In 2021, Simmons, D-Bremerton, helped secure state funding to help hundreds of thousands of people vacate drug-related convictions from their criminal records, after the Washington Supreme Court deemed the state’s felony drug possession law to be unconstitutional in a ruling known as State v. Blake. In 2023, Simmons was able to vacate her own felony convictions. In media reports, she said it felt like she had been liberated from an “invisible prison.”

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/11/12/advocates-stunned-as-wa-lawmaker-helps-slash-funds-for-groups-clearing-old-drug-convictions/