Comment: Disparity in rights of home owners vs. renters

Published 1:30 am Saturday, November 1, 2025

By Scott Crain and Matt Brady / For The Herald

As a homeowner with a mortgage, you may find the following scenario highly unlikely: You and your daughter go away for the weekend. You lock your home, leaving your personal belongings and household goods safely behind. You come home on Sunday night to find the locks changed and your property removed and thrown in a nearby dumpster. You soon learn that the bank holding your mortgage was unhappy with you personally and didn’t think you intended to return to your home. So, they locked you out and took all of your stuff.

Sound absurd? For a homeowner, yes. Yet this scenario plays out regularly for renters. When it happens to homeowners, we call it what it is: breaking and entering, theft, burglary. But when landlords illegally lock out tenants and dispose of their belongings, law enforcement typically dismisses it as a “civil dispute,” not a crime. That double standard makes a recent Island County jury verdict all the more remarkable.

Earlier this year, an Island County jury found landlord Nancy Griffin guilty on criminal charges of theft in the first degree, theft in the second degree and two counts of theft of a firearm. Her renter had gone away for the weekend and returned with his child to find he no longer had a home. Griffin claimed that the renter had abandoned the property, and that she had acted on the advice of a lawyer, but that same lawyer testified otherwise.

The jury returned a verdict that included findings for invasion of privacy, abuse of a vulnerable victim, abuse of trust and deliberate cruelty. The court sentenced Griffin to nine months in prison. She has appealed her conviction.

When a landlord illegally enters a renter’s home and removes their property, this is theft and burglary, and renters deserve the same legal protections as homeowners. To find otherwise is to violate a person’s basic right to security in their home and protection from unlawful seizure of their property.

Griffin’s guilty verdict is extremely rare. Her former renter’s experience of being illegally locked out is not. Renters are unlawfully evicted when their landlords cut off power, change locks while they’re away, or contact law enforcement to coerce them into leaving. There is no way to put a number on how many tenants are illegally evicted this way because few such court cases are filed; no criminal charges, no civil lawsuit, nothing. The renters subjected to this treatment are usually among the most economically vulnerable. They may live in substandard housing or have landlords who cut corners on the law in other ways.

Of course, not every illegal eviction is a matter of criminal conduct. Many are civil (not criminal) legal offenses in which Washington’s Residential Landlord-Tenant Act provides remedies when landlords violate eviction procedures. Renters can sue to get people back into their homes or recover damages; if they are able to afford an attorney or find free legal help.

Yet even when illegal evictions involve clear criminal acts, such as breaking and entering, law enforcement routinely treats these cases as “civil disputes” and declines to investigate or press charges. This reflects a troubling assumption: that renters lack the same rights as homeowners to security in their homes.

Ultimately, what these landlords and law enforcement don’t understand is that your home — including the home that you rent — is yours alone to occupy, a private space free from intrusion. Only a court can evict a renter by ordering the sheriff’s office to physically remove that person. No landlord ever has the power to unilaterally enter someone’s home and lock them out.

These should be acknowledged for what they are: crimes against the vulnerable and poor, who have no other home to turn to. There is no question that charges would be filed against someone who locks a homeowner out and steals their property. Why should renters be treated differently?

Scott Crain is director of advocacy at Northwest Justice Project, a statewide nonprofit legal services organization providing free legal advice and representation to people with low incomes. Matt Brady is managing attorney for NJP’s Everett office.