Prosecutor Still Seeks Death Penalty For Rupe Reversals Don’t Change Her Mind About Case Of 1981 Killings At Bank
After two court reversals, the Thurston County prosecutor said Friday she would again seek the death penalty for convicted killer Mitchell Rupe.
The death penalty is being sought for the third time in hopes of bringing closure to the victims’ families, Prosecutor Bernardean Broadous told KGY Radio.
The U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld the reversal of a previously imposed death sentence.
Without comment, the court turned away prosecutors’ arguments that Rupe, 42, was wrongly granted a new sentencing trial. A lower court had ruled that during the penalty phase of Rupe’s trial, jurors should have been told a key prosecution witness had failed a lie-detector test.
After the court’s decision last month, Broadous said: “Two juries before said Mitchell Rupe should die. Now I have seen nothing, absolutely nothing, that persuades me otherwise.”
Rupe initially confessed to killing two women during the 1981 robbery of a Tumwater State Bank branch and was convicted of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder. But he later recanted and blamed Monte Yovetich, a prosecution witness who testified Rupe admitted the robbery to him and hid the money and gun in Yovetich’s garage. Yovetich pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served eight months in jail.
Yovetich denied committing the bank robbery, but a polygraph examiner who questioned him before the trial said the denial was deceptive. The examiner later said the results were not entirely reliable, and they were barred by the trial judge.
Although polygraph evidence generally is not allowed in court, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a broader range of evidence about a defendant’s character, background and circumstances of the crime can be allowed during the penalty phase.
Rupe’s lawyer said the lie-detector evidence was relevant to counter prosecutors’ arguments that no evidence supported the claim that Yovetich was guilty.
The state Supreme Court overturned Rupe’s initial death sentence on other grounds, but it was reinstated after the sentencing phase was held again.
Rupe appealed in federal court, and in 1994 U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly again overturned the death sentence, ruling that jurors should have been told that Yovetich failed a lie-detector test.
In a separate appeal, Zilly ruled in 1994 that Rupe, who had grown to 400 pounds partly from prodigious consumption of candy bars and other junk food in prison, might be decapitated if he were hanged, violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The Legislature subsequently made lethal injection the state’s primary mode of execution.
Rupe has developed health problems in prison. Citing confidentiality restrictions, state officials have refused to discuss published reports indicating he might need a liver or kidney transplant.