Libel, as every journalist knows, is knowingly writing something false about someone. Like if I published a story accusing Christine Gregoire of supporting the tunnel viaduct option after the society of mole people took her on a cruise in their underground kingdom where she promised to rig the bidding to award them the contract for the project, that would be libelous (unless, of course, such a thing actually happened). Usually victims of libel sue the author in state civil court. But in 2005, Allan Parmelee called the woman running the Clallam Bay Corrections Center “a man-hater lesbian” in a letter to then-Department of Corrections secretary Harold Clarke, corrections officials went after him under a Civil War era law allowing someone to be criminally punished for committing libel. At a jail-house hearing, corrections officials determined Parmelee guilty and sent him into isolation for 10 days. So he sued and last summer, the state Court of Appeals sided with Parmelee, saying the state’s criminal libel statute runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution.Today in Olympia, Senators Adam Kline (D-Rainier Valley) and Phil Rockefeller (D-Bainbridge Island) introduced Senate Bill 5147 [PDF] to repeal the law, which has been on Washington books since 1869.