State Seeks Murderer’s Health Records Newspaper Says Double-Killer In Line For Liver Transplant

State Attorney General Christine Gregoire says she will go to court to seek the release of medical information on double-murderer and former death row inmate Mitchell Rupe.

The Department of Corrections has refused to release any information on Rupe’s medical status, citing privacy laws. A newspaper reported that Rupe could be in line for a liver transplant.

Gregoire said she will file a complaint today in Thurston County Superior Court asking the court to outline how much information the Corrections Department can disclose about Rupe’s medical condition and treatment.

Gregoire noted that Rupe, in federal court hearings last year to overturn his death sentence, alleged that the Corrections Department could not constitutionally execute him because of his weight, which once reached 411 pounds. At the hearings Rupe’s lawyers introduced substantial medical evidence to support his claim that he could be decapitated if he were hanged.

“Mitch Rupe already has made his medical condition a matter of public record,” Gregoire said. “He can’t have it both ways.”

Rupe was brought from the state penitentiary at Walla Walla to the state reformatory in Monroe on Dec. 14.

He was moved to the reformatory “in part because of medical needs, and in this case an evaluation,” Corrections spokesman Veltry Johnson told The Herald of Everett. Reports circulating at the reformatory are that Rupe, 41, may need a liver transplant.

He apparently is being seen at the University of Washington Medical Center, The Herald reported.

Rupe was convicted of aggravated murder in the 1981 shooting deaths of two bank tellers at a Tumwater State Bank branch in Olympia.

His death sentence was overturned in September 1994, when U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly ruled that during the penalty phase of his trial, the state court wrongly excluded lie-detector results from a witness who Rupe claimed was the real killer.