Man Admits Killing, Gets Year In Prison

Thu., Jan. 9, 1997

By John Craig johnc@spokesman.com

A Colville area man whose 1990 first-degree manslaughter conviction was overturned because of ambigious language in an instruction to the jury has pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter.

Victor A. LeFaber was sentenced to a year in prison under a plea bargain this week which spared him another trial.

Stevens County Prosecuting Attorney Jerry Wetle had planned to charge LeFaber with first-degree manslaughter.

In 1990, a jury convicted LeFaber of manslaughter when he was tried on a second-degree murder charge. Superior Court Judge Fred Stewart sentenced LeFaber to three years in prison, but the defendant remained free while appealing the conviction.

The Washington Supreme Court overturned the conviction last March. The court said Stewart didn’t go far enough in clarifying ambiguity in the state’s standard jury instruction on the law of self-defense.

Stewart’s instruction left open the possibility that jurors would assume incorrectly that LeFaber had to have been in “imminent danger” when he shot Evan Stephens to death in December 1989. For self-defense, the law requires only that LeFaber had to believe he was in imminent danger.

Trial testimony indicated Stephens and LeFaber had been drinking at LeFaber’s rural home when Stephens became belligerent. Stephens was unarmed and on the other side of a locked door when LeFaber shot him, but LeFaber said he feared for his life because of Stephens’ reputation for violence.

In resentencing LeFaber this week, Stewart also ordered him to pay $100 a month in support for Stephens’ son, starting in July, until the boy turns 19 in about 1-1/2 years.

If LeFaber earns more than $1,000 a month, his support payment is to double. LeFaber also was ordered to pay $700 in funeral costs.

, DataTimes

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