Supreme Court: Adult book store murder conviction stands

OLYMPIA — The man convicted of murdering the owner of an adult book store in Spokane won’t get a new trial just because the person who tested his DNA on the murder weapon was later fired for incompetence, the state Supreme Court ruled today. A unanimous court rejected the appeal of Julio Davila convicted in 2012 of killing John Allen, who was beaten to death in his East Sprague adult book store in 2007. Another man was initially convicted of Allen’s murder in 2008, but investigators found fingerprints in the store and DNA on the bat used to kill Allen that they couldn’t trace at that time. When Davila’s DNA was collected in an unrelated felony conviction several years later, the Washington State Patrol got a “match” with samples from the Allen case. Davila was tried and convicted of second-degree murder of Allen and sentenced to 16 years in prison. But prosecutors never told Davila’s attorney that the DNA samples collected from the crime scene were originally been tested by Denise Olson, a forensic scientist who later was fired by the patrol for incompetence. The state was required to reveal that, and Davila should have been able to present that to the jury, his attorney argued. The high court agreed with Davila’s lawyer should have been told, but said those omissions weren’t enough to grant Davila a new trial. A supervisor at the lab had retested the DNA sample from the bat and confirmed the two matched, the court said. Fingerprints found on a glass counter close to where Davis’s body was found matched Davila, but he had claimed he had never been in the store and didn’t know Davis, even though he lived behind the store at the time of the murder. “The defense failed to develop facts showing that Olson’s ineptitude and termination were material in this case,” the court said. It agreed with the trial court and an appeals court panel that Davila isn’t entitled to a new trial where a jury could be presented with that information. After Davila was convicted, the man originally convicted of Allen’s death, Jeramie Davis, was released when prosecutors couldn’t link him to Davila. Davis pleaded guilty to stealing items from the store after he entered it and discovered Allen was dead, something he had admitted when first arrested, and had already served more time than the standard sentence for robbery.