InvestigateWest

Tomas Keen had been leading a wildland firefighting crew outside Spokane when his lawyer emailed in May about his petition to commute his prison sentence. Over the last 15 years behind bars, Keen has been working hard to turn around his life, earning two college degrees an advanced paralegal certificate.

But his lawyer had bad news: Gov. Bob Ferguson had denied six people’s commutation petitions, including Tomas’s.

Since Ferguson took office in January 2025, the board he appointed has recommended early release for 15 of the 23 people who received commutation hearings. So far, the governor hasn't approved a single one.

Neighbors, bank employees, police and a hospital worker had all raised concerns to Washington Adult Protective Services that a woman could be financially exploiting 71-year-old Raymond Bell.

Yet the state agency closed nine reports as “inconclusive” or “unsubstantiated,” and it wasn’t until after the woman had orchestrated the sale of Bell’s house that an investigator determined legal documents giving her authority over Bell were forged, according to a lawsuit against APS on the man's behalf.

But a Washington appellate court recently tossed the suit against APS, finding the agency has no mandate to actually investigate reported abuse under state law and can't be sued for negligence.

If the ruling is applied more broadly, it could limit any legal recourse that vulnerable adults and their families have against the state when APS fails to act. And it comes as 11 current and former investigators for the agency say they're under pressure to quickly close cases.

When Isaac Berger overdosed, his mom Cyndy grabbed the bottle of pills she found in his jacket and rushed to the hospital, believing it might help doctors save his life.

The nurse opened the bottle, recognizing the blue fentanyl pills - and then she called police.

In most states, Cyndy’s effort to help doctors understand what her son had taken might have ended with treatment. But this was Idaho — one of at least nine states that automatically treat fentanyl possession above a certain threshold as trafficking, even if there's no evidence that person was selling or distributing drugs.

Since at least 2020, rural counties have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care involvement in Oregon, with some southeastern communities seeing rates three times higher than Multnomah County, the state’s most populous county.

“Rural areas have a harder time keeping kids out of the foster care system because of the lack of support,” said Jeremy Harle, executive director of Kairos NW, a youth mental health provider that also runs foster care programs in rural communities along the Oregon coast. “Removal becomes the default response because the community lacks the resources at home."

An Edmonds, Washington school district has voted to keep a former elementary school principal on the payroll through at least June 2027, despite community pressure to fire him and other administrators for their handling of a former special education teacher’s alleged sexual misconduct.

Emails show how an Idaho county probation department is helping ICE - including by combing through its case files to create a "foreign born list" containing the names of 82 probationers.

A federal judge has dismissed a nonprofit’s lawsuit claiming that an Idaho state agency violated the First Amendment by revoking funding in retaliation for speaking to reporters.

The Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition’s former executive director Jennifer Zielinski was one of more than three dozen people who spoke to InvestigateWest for a July 2024 series detailing how the founder of another anti-trafficking nonprofit, Community Outreach Behavioral Services, funneled clients into counseling sessions at a potentially fraudulent for-profit mental health agency run by her son. The series also scrutinized the state agency, the Idaho Council on Domestic Violence and Victim Assistance, or failing to properly investigate survivors’ complaints about COBS.

A 2021 Washington law expanded the state's power to strip cops of their certification, part of an effort to keep problem officers out of law enforcement. But Washington agencies have kept hiring cops accused of serious misconduct - and many manage to avoid a state investigation altogether.

One officer who was repeatedly accused of misconduct still earned a promotion to police chief, where he allegedly defrauded taxpayers. Another was charged with DUI and fled the scene of a car accident, but was never formally investigated by the state commission. A third remained certified in Washington years after another state revoked his certification amid a felony conviction.

At her sentencing hearing on Friday, an Oregon mom convicted of manslaughter over the death of her two-month-old infant opened up to the court for the first time about alleged domestic violence by the baby's father.

Deborah Albin said her ex-partner repeatedly choked and threatened her, destroyed her belongings when she tried to leave and once shoved her into his car to bring her home again. Her family asked the judge to reduce her sentence because of alleged domestic violence.

“There had been numerous times I thought he would kill me, and after a while, I gave up trying to leave.”