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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Abuse of spouse brings prison term

A Spokane man was sent to prison Friday for 3 1/2 years for shattering his wife’s face while complaining that she was making him late for a domestic violence counseling session.

David Elliath Sukin’s sentence was the maximum that Superior Court Judge Greg Sypolt could impose and the least that Deputy Prosecutor Debra Hayes considered appropriate.

“He has absolutely no remorse, absolutely no regard for court orders, no respect for women,” Hayes said of Sukin.

She noted that Sukin, 48, had been arrested 25 times for alleged domestic violence crimes. A jury convicted him Sept. 27 of second-degree assault for breaking his wife Darla Campbell-Sukin’s facial bones in five places last May.

The jury also found Sukin guilty of violating a no-contact order. Because it was his third such conviction, what would have been a gross misdemeanor was turned into a felony carrying more prison time than the assault conviction.

Hayes successfully argued that the two crimes counted against each other for sentencing purposes, adding more than a year to Sukin’s sentence. Sypolt rejected Assistant Public Defender Ken Knox’s argument that Sukin’s 33- to 43-month sentencing range should have been lower on grounds that the crimes were part of the same “course of conduct.”

Sukin said only that he was sorry. His wife declined to speak, but Sypolt said he remembered her trial testimony “vividly.”

Even more vividly, the judge said, he remembered the testimony of the surgeon who told how unusually difficult it was to reposition pieces of the shattered orbital bone around one of Campbell-Sukin’s eyes.

Sypolt said he found it “indeed ironic” that Sukin attended a later domestic violence counseling session on the day of the attack and used his presence at the class as an alibi.

The other part of Sukin’s alibi, testimony that he was with a friend at the time of the attack, collapsed when Hayes presented satellite tracking evidence to prove the friend, a long-haul trucker, was on the road and nowhere near Spokane at the time.

Authorities are now considering whether to bring perjury charges against the friend, 57-year-old Ray Edward O’Donnell.