Man pleads guilty in beating death

A Spokane man who beat another man to death over a $75 drug debt has pleaded guilty to the crime after having his jury conviction overturned.

Michael Ray O’Neil, 35, was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison in February 1996 after a jury convicted him of second-degree felony murder in the April 1995 death of Gregory L. Cheatham. But the conviction was overturned last November by the Washington Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court ruled that scores of convictions, including O’Neil’s, were invalid because the state’s second-degree felony murder law was flawed at the time of the convictions. The law allowed second-degree murder charges if a victim died in the course of certain other felonies, but the law didn’t list assault as one of the qualifying felonies.

The Legislature quickly amended the law, but it was too late to preserve the convictions of about two dozen Spokane murder defendants.

Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins gave O’Neil a six-month sentence reduction, to 12 years, in exchange for his guilty plea Friday to a standard second-degree murder charge.

Court documents and trial testimony indicate the muscular, 6-foot-5, 250-pound O’Neil beat Cheatham and left him unconscious in the hallway outside Cheatham’s apartment at 720 N. Monroe St. Cheatham later died at Deaconess Medical Center.

At trial, witnesses said O’Neil had threatened to beat Cheatham if he didn’t pay his debt, but O’Neil claimed he didn’t intend to follow through. O’Neil said Cheatham attacked him when he attempted to discuss the debt, and he knocked Cheatham unconscious in self-defense.

Witnesses testified that O’Neil went to a nearby tavern and bragged about beating Cheatham, but O’Neil told jurors he was exaggerating.

“It was just the macho thing to do,” he said of his tavern remarks. “I didn’t think I hurt him that bad.”