Tommy Marks pleads guilty to gun charge
Thomas “Tommy” Stanko Marks, the eldest son of Spokane Gypsy leader Jimmy Marks, entered a “conditional” guilty plea Thursday to a federal firearms charge.
His plea, attached to his continuing legal challenge of an underlying state felony conviction, was the latest development in a federal firearms case against him filed in September 2002.
The case went to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and was rejected for consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court before it found its way back to Senior U.S. District Court Judge Frem Nielsen.
“This case has had a long journey,” the judge said at Thursday’s hearing. A sentencing date was not set, pending further legal arguments between Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Harrington and Assistant Federal Defender Steve Hormel.
Marks, 43, who now lives in California, was indicted in Spokane in 2002 on two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm and a third count of being a felon in possession of ammunition. A SWAT team was sent to arrest him, but since then he’s remained free without bond and hasn’t violated conditions of his release.
The three firearms charges were dismissed in 2003 by Nielsen, who said Marks’ constitutional rights were violated when he and co-defendant Stevie Marks were represented by the same attorney during a state criminal trial, posing a conflict.
That state trial grew out of a 1999 fight involving Tommy Marks and others and a sheriff’s deputy at the Marks’ family gravesite in Holy Cross Cemetery. Tommy Marks was convicted of second-degree assault in that trial but was appealing that conviction when other sheriff’s deputies caught him with firearms, leading to the federal charges.
Two of the firearms counts stem from a rifle and ammunition that sheriff’s deputies found in storage, when they were invited to accompany mortgage officers who were foreclosing on a vacant Spokane Valley house where Tommy Marks once lived.
Those firearms counts will be dismissed by the U.S. attorney’s office as part of a plea bargain.
Marks pleaded guilty to possessing a .45-caliber handgun he said he took in trade as a down payment for a car he sold on Nov. 26, 2001 – after he was convicted of assault in the state court case. The plea bargain allows him to retain certain appeal rights.
Marks told the court he met the prospective car buyer outside a Spokane Valley gun shop and took the handgun into the business where he sold it for $500. His inked fingerprint was on the bank check issued by the gun shop.
The state Court of Appeals last month upheld the constitutionality of Marks’ assault conviction in Superior Court, but Hormel said he and another attorney will now seek reconsideration or take the case to the Washington State Supreme Court.
The “conditional plea” in U.S. District Court also allows Marks to reserve the right to appeal whether the state sentence associated with the second-degree assault conviction meets the legal definition of federal firearms laws. They say a felony has to carry a sentence of more than a year in jail, and Hormel argued that under Washington law Marks would have gotten a sentence shorter than that.