Courts facing ‘pandemonium’

The Spokane County judicial system is facing an instant backlog of as many homicides as might normally occur in an entire year.

Nine state prison inmates are to be transferred to the Spokane County Jail next week for new court proceedings in their second-degree murder convictions. Fourteen more are expected early next year.

“I tell you, it’s pandemonium right now,” said Public Defender John Rogers, who anticipates that most of the prisoners will be his clients.

And these nine are just the first wave. They are among 22 prison inmates whose Spokane County murder convictions are invalid as the result of a state Supreme Court decision last month.

The court said in October 2002 that the state’s second-degree felony murder law was defective, and added last month that the ruling was retroactive to 1975.

The law didn’t specifically list assault as one of the crimes that could lead to a second-degree murder conviction if a victim was unintentionally killed.

Supreme Court Justices Barbara Madsen, Gerry Alexander, Charles Z. Smith, Charles Johnson and Richard Sanders ruled that legislators didn’t intend assault to be on the list. The Legislature quickly debunked that idea with emergency legislation, but the justices refused to reconsider.

Jack Driscoll, Spokane County’s chief criminal deputy prosecutor, was one of many prosecutors who blistered the high court’s decision to overturn the King County murder conviction of Shawn Andress.

“This decision affects public safety more than any other decision I’ve ever seen,” Driscoll said in October 2002.

Last month’s retroactive application of the ruling was expected, and Driscoll is resigned to reopening cases in which many of the investigators have retired.

“They’re all murder cases: You can’t just throw your hands up,” Driscoll said. “You’ve got to proceed forward and seek justice again.”

The work will be “resource intense” for prosecutors and police, and emotionally traumatic for victims, he said.

“The hardest ones are the child assault and murder cases,” Driscoll said, noting there are several. “All murders are very traumatic, but the death of a young child, I think, affects people the most.”

Like Public Defender Rogers, Driscoll wonders whether the additional work can be handled without asking county commissioners for money to beef up staffing levels.

Rogers speculated that the instant murder glut will be resolved with a variety of approaches.

“Some of them may have served so much time that they will just cut a slick deal and everybody will be happy,” he said. “Others may insist on checking on whether witnesses and evidence are still available, and some of them may get charged with other crimes.”

Indeed, Driscoll said, he will try to substitute alternate charges for those the state Supreme Court threw out. Because the suspects were convicted of a crime that didn’t exist, no double jeopardy results from filing different charges for the same event.

Driscoll hadn’t worked out all the details, but said he would ask a judge to vacate the convictions of the nine inmates who are to arrive next week so he can file new charges against them.

He’s not sure how judges will respond or how long the process will take because “this is a first, thankfully.”

Waiting in the wings are a dozen more prison inmates with pending appeals. Some of them have appellate issues beyond their invalid second-degree murder convictions, so Driscoll will wait for action by the Court of Appeals.

In a third group, all by himself, is James Roberts. He completed his sentence in July before his petition for release could be resolved. Presumably, Roberts now wants the conviction to be removed from his record, Driscoll said.

Elsewhere in northeastern Washington, prosecutors say the only other case affected by the Supreme Court rulings is in Stevens County. In that case, John Steinkraus got an 18 2/3-year sentence reduced to 10 1/4 years because of a state Supreme Court ruling that justices later reversed as a mistake.

A jury convicted Steinkraus of second-degree felony murder for shooting a woman in the back of the head with a shotgun in a drunken dispute in October 1995. The conviction was overturned because the Supreme Court had erroneously said a manslaughter conviction wasn’t an option in such cases.

Steinkraus then accepted a sentence reduction in exchange for a guilty plea to second-degree felony murder.