Gene Johnson

The leaders of one of Washington state's most significant illegal drug operations have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms. They ran a backyard pill-pressing operation with fentanyl powder they ordered from China beginning in 2015 — just as the synthetic opioid was taking hold as a cheaper, more powerful and more deadly alternative to heroin.

Having rejected a half-billion-dollar settlement offer, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is taking the state's case against the nation's three biggest drug distributors to trial Monday, saying they must be held accountable for their role in the opioid crisis.

Gov. Jay Inslee overstepped his veto authority when he cut a sentence that appeared seven times in the 2019 transportation budget, the Washington Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

A metallurgist from Auburn pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.

The company that runs a for-profit immigration jail in Tacoma, has suspended its detainee work program, rather than pay the detainees minimum wage for cooking, cleaning and other tasks. A federal jury last week ruled that the GEO Group must pay the detainees minimum wage instead of $1 per day.

A private prison company has been ordered to pay more than $23 million over lawsuits that accused it of running its for-profit immigration lockup in Tacoma on the backs of detainees.

Detainees who clean dishes, floors and do other work at Tacoma’s ICE detention center must be paid Washington state’s minimum wage. That’s according to ruling handed down Wednesday in federal court. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the facility, had paid working detainees as little as $1 per day.

Rewards totaling $2.5 million are now being offered for information that helps solve the killing of federal prosecutor Tom Wales in Seattle 20 years ago. New Seattle U.S. Attorney Nicholas Brown announced Monday at a ceremony marking the anniversary of Wales' death that the Justice Department had doubled its reward to $2 million, in addition to $500,000 being offered by the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys.

An immigrant rights activist who had been facing deportation says she can now remain in the U.S., after the Department of Homeland Security agreed to drop her case. Maru Mora Villalpando, a Mexico City native who has been in the U.S. since 1996, said Tuesday that an immigration judge last week approved the decision.

Washington is facing its own COVID-19 crisis and has little capacity to help neighboring Idaho deal with an overwhelming surge of cases driven by unvaccinated people, state hospital executives and doctors said Monday.