Her inability to find employment—and to repay financial debts that had accumulated while she was in prison—led her to consider becoming a lawyer. “I just felt in my spirit: If I’m going through this, there are probably thousands of other people going through this and it is not fair,” she told me. “That’s what led me to law school, to try to change the laws to help people who have made mistakes, changed, and deserve second chances.”

Simmons graduated magna cum laude this July, having won two awards from her university and a prestigious national legal fellowship. She is also part of two Washington state governor’s councils on prisoner reentry. “Her accomplishments are extraordinary,” members of the state bar’s character and fitness board noted in a dissenting opinion accompanying their colleagues’ assessment. “It is as if she flipped a switch in about 2011 [when she went to prison], wherein she truly set out to become a different person.”

The majority of the board members, however, said that not enough time had passed since Simmons’ conviction to show a “consistent and proven pattern of positive conduct that outweighs her years of misconduct.” (Her bankruptcy, too, was an aggravating factor.) After months of preliminary hearings and briefs filed by her lawyers and civil-rights organizations, the state Supreme Court is slated to review the board’s original 6-3 vote Thursday and issue a final written decision in the coming months. If the justices uphold Simmons’ rejection, she will have to wait one year before she can reapply to the bar.

All states have some form of fitness standard for bar applicants, and Washington—which requires that the person prove through “clear and convincing evidence” they meet its requirements—is by no means the most severe. In Kansas and Texas, former inmates are blocked from applying to the bar for five years after completing a felony sentence. In Mississippi, there is an outright lifetime ban for most felony crimes. In Connecticut, there is an automatic presumption that a felony record makes someone unfit to practice and, as in Washington, the burden is on the applicant to prove otherwise.

But advocates and lawyers I spoke to say that proving one’s fitness can be difficult. According to Washington’s rules, applicants must show they meet the state’s standards pertaining to “honesty,” “fairness,” and “trustworthiness.” Yet there aren’t any concrete guidelines for doing so, nor is there state-documented precedent showing how others successfully demonstrated rehabilitation—omissions that advocates and lawyers said make the process opaque.

“It is pretty traumatic to have the bar dredge up every bad thing you have ever done,” said Shon Hopwood, one of Simmons lawyers. “You have to rebut all of that, and you have no idea what your chances are ahead of time. You spend all the time working hard in law school, never knowing if you are actually going to become a lawyer—and that is just hard.”