Lawyer says client should be spared, as Ridgway was

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Lawyers for a man convicted of killing his wife and two stepdaughters are urging the state Supreme Court to overturn their client’s death sentence since the Green River killer’s life was spared.

“The fact that the worst offender in the state doesn’t face the death penalty must make this court re-evaluate,” Todd Maybrown, an attorney for Dayva Ross, told the high court Tuesday.

It was the first time the Supreme Court heard arguments that a death sentence — and the state death penalty itself — should be overturned because Gary Ridgway escaped execution by pleading guilty last year to 48 murders.

Deputy King County Prosecutors Lee Yates and James Whisman maintained that Ridgway’s case was “unique in the history of the state of Washington” and can’t be compared with the Cross case.

“The nature and brutality of Cross’ crimes would rank very high on any scale of comparison with other aggravated murders,” they told the court.

Under state law, justices must compare aggravated-murder cases to decide whether a death sentence “is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty in similar cases.”

Cross was sentenced to death in June 2001 after pleading guilty to three counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of his wife, Anouchka Baldwin, 37, and her daughters, Salome Holly, 18, and Amanda Baldwin, 15, with kitchen knives in the family’s Snoqualmie home.

He said mental illness caused him to snap.

The Supreme Court is not expected to make a decision for months.