WA state Supreme Court prohibits mandatory life without parole for young adults
The Washington State Supreme Court found mandatory sentences of life without parole unconstitutional for young adults and ordered two Pierce County men to be resentenced in a split ruling Thursday.
“Just as courts must exercise discretion before sentencing a 17-year-old to die in prison, so must they exercise the same discretion when sentencing an 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old,” Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud wrote in the lead opinion, signed by Justices Mary I. Yu, Raquel Montoya-Lewis and G. Helen Whitener. “... We remand each case for a new sentencing hearing at which the trial court must consider whether each defendant was subject to the mitigating qualities of youth.”
Pierce County jurors convicted Dwayne Earl Bartholomew of aggravated first-degree murder in 1981 and Kurtis William Monschke of aggravated first-degree murder in 2003.
Court records said at the age of 20 Bartholomew robbed a Tacoma laundromat and shot and killed the attendant, 18-year-old Paul Turner.
Monschke and friends associated with a white supremacist group, court records said, and at the age of 19 he helped attack a homeless man with a baseball bat in Tacoma. The man, 42-year-old Randall Townsend, later died.
State law says those convicted of aggravated murder must be sentenced to life without parole or to death, and the high court previously found the death penalty law unconstitutional.
Bartholomew and Monschke filed personal restraint petitions, asking the court to consider the constitutionality of their sentences.
“Specifically, they ask us to decide whether the constitutional requirement that judges exercise discretion at sentencing, which forbids such mandatory LWOP sentences for those under 18, also forbids those sentences for 18- to 21-year-old defendants,” Gordon McCloud wrote. “Modern social science, our precedent, and a long history of arbitrary line drawing have all shown that no clear line exists between childhood and adulthood.”
Bartholomew and Monschke argued mandatory life without parole “is unconstitutionally cruel when applied to youthful defendants like themselves,” Gordon McCloud wrote. “They argued that developments in neuroscience have rendered a bright line at age 18 arbitrary and that defendants age 21 and younger should receive the benefit of the same constitutional protections that this court and the United States Supreme Court have recognized for juveniles.”
Laws about how juveniles are sentenced have changed as science has evolved about how their brains develop.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders were unconstitutional since they did not take into account the offender’s “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change.”
In response the state Legislature said state courts should consider “mitigating factors that account for the diminished culpability of youth” — including age, life experience and chances for rehabilitation — before sentencing 16- and 17-year-olds to life without parole.
Later the state’s high court found life without parole for children constituted cruel punishment and was unconstitutional.
“We hold that the aggravated murder statute’s rigid cutoff at age 18 combined with its mandatory language creates an unacceptable risk that youthful defendants without fully developed brains will receive a cruel LWOP sentence. But we also recognize that every individual is different,” Gordon McCloud wrote in the Thursday ruling. “... the petitioners have neither argued nor shown that LWOP would be categorically unconstitutional as applied to older defendants.”
Justice Steven C. González wrote a concurrence. Justices Susan Owens, Charles Johnson, Barbara A. Madsen, and Debra Stephens dissented.
“... I struggle to identify at what precise age we will stop redrawing these lines based on this brain development evidence, be it 20, 22, 25, or even older,” Owens wrote. “I further caution that today’s decision may eventually compel us to revisit and invalidate a staggering number of LWOP and Sentencing Reform Act of 1981 sentences ... . This task would tremendously burden the State’s resources and the victims’ families.”
The lead opinion, Owens wrote, “circumvents the reality that no legislatures or courts in the other 49 states have ever recognized such a protection.”
The dissent goes on to say: “At the heart of this case is the important question of when a person should be held fully accountable as an adult. This is a question that requires a meticulous examination of a number of scientific, moral, ethical, and practical considerations. Our court is not a legislature, and it is insufficiently equipped to decide this issue on selectively presented evidence put forth by limited parties on a constrained schedule.”
Cases possibly affected
A spokesperson for the Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office said it has identified 14 cases, including those of Bartholomew and Monschke, that might be affected by the ruling. In addition to those 14, information from the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys suggests there may be 55 to 60 other cases affected statewide.
Pierce County Prosecutor Mary Robnett said in a statement: “In today’s ruling, the state Supreme Court says loud and clear that it won’t allow the legislature to define adulthood. The offenders committed horrific crimes at ages 19 and 20, and now argue that ‘they were essentially juveniles in all but name at the time of their crime.’ The Supreme Court narrowly agreed. The Pierce County offenders affected by this ruling were convicted by juries of the most serious crime we can charge in this state: aggravated, premeditated murder.”
Among the cases that might be affected is that of Tyler Savage, who was 18 when he killed Kimberly Daily, a 16-year-old Special Olympian in 2010. She was found raped an strangled in the South Hill area.
Another is the case of Jimmie Chea, one of five suspects convicted in the 1998 Trang Dai Cafe massacre that killed five people in Tacoma. Tuyen Vo, 21; Nhan Ai Nguyen, 26; Tuong Hung Do, 33 and brothers Hai Le, 27, and Duy Le, 25 were killed in the shooting. Prosecutors said Chea drove a getaway car. He was 18.
One of the other Pierce County cases that could be affected by the ruling is that of Dwayne Satterfield. He was 19 when he was part of an Orting convenience store robbery during which the clerk, 25-year-old Linda Miller, was shot and killed in 1991.
This story was originally published March 11, 2021 at 11:15 AM.
