WA Supreme Court vacates murder conviction for 2010 Craigslist killing in Pierce County
The state’s high court Thursday vacated a murder conviction for a high-profile Pierce County homicide that happened in 2010.
The divided opinion from the Washington State Supreme Court means Amanda Christine Knight will be resentenced for her role in the so-called “Craigslist killing” case, and no longer faces what was effectively a life sentence.
The court’s lead opinion said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support Knight’s murder conviction in the particular way it was presented to the jury.
She and three others went to the Edgewood home of 43-year-old Jim Sanders on the pretense of buying a diamond ring Sanders posted on Craigslist. Knight called Sanders and told him she wanted to buy the ring for her mother as a Mother’s Day present, according to The News Tribune article about her sentencing in 2011.
Prosecutors said the group terrorized the family, beat Sanders and his wife, and one of the four fatally shot Sanders when he fought with them.
“I’m sorry I brought the devil to your door,” Knight told the family at the 2011 sentencing hearing. “Your family didn’t deserve that.”
She has been serving a sentence of nearly 72 years.
“Amanda Knight was 22 years old with no criminal record when she foolishly got involved in this terrible crime,” Tim Ford, the attorney who represented Knight in her appeal, told The News Tribune via email. “She never held a gun, never assaulted anyone, and wasn’t even there when the struggle broke out in which James Sanders was shot. But she got more than 70 years in prison, more than most actual murderers.”
Ford said the now-35-year-old has already served 13 1/2 years.
“Her case shows how prosecutors can overreact to horrible crimes and how their charging power has produced the over-incarceration of people of color in our state,” Ford wrote. “The Supreme Court was right to correct this injustice.”
Pierce County Prosecutor Mary Robnett said in a statement: “We are heartbroken for the Sanders family and all of Jim’s loved ones. A dozen years after receiving a modicum of justice, this decision upsets that. The court in its ruling went down a hypertechnical legal thread before reaching a plurality decision, with four justices dissenting.”
Four justices signed the lead opinion, four dissented and one dissented in part and concurred in part.
“I’m sure none of that matters to Jim’s family. What matters is that this offender, who deserved the sentence she received for the harms that she caused, will see that sentence cut significantly,” Robnett wrote. “That is unfortunate and it is painful.”
When Knight is resentenced for her other convictions — two counts of first-degree robbery, two counts of second-degree assault and one count of first-degree burglary — she faces a shorter standard sentencing range. However, Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Adam Faber said that sentencing enhancements alone should add 21 years to whatever base sentence a judge gives her at resentencing.
Ford said he hadn’t researched the exact sentencing range yet.
The others who got long sentences for Sanders’ death are Kiyoshi Higashi (who pulled the trigger), Joshua Reese and Clabon Berniard.
High court’s divided opinion
It was the state’s victory in Knight’s prior appeal that led to its defeat this time, Justice Pro Tem Rebecca L. Pennell wrote in the lead opinion, which was signed by Justices Sheryl Gordon McCloud, Mary Yu and Raquel Montoya-Lewis.
Pennell explained that the court decided in 2020 in the prior appeal that Knight’s convictions for first-degree robbery and felony murder based on first-degree robbery did not amount to double jeopardy.
That meant Knight’s convictions were upheld in that prior appeal, and in the process the court specified that her murder conviction was based on the robbery of a safe in the garage of the home, not the robbery of the ring from Sanders’ finger.
“Although the prohibition of double jeopardy generally precludes the State from imposing separate convictions for felony murder and its predicate offense, the court’s prior case held this prohibition did not apply because Ms. Knight’s felony murder and robbery convictions were premised on different conduct,” Pennell wrote. “Specifically, the felony murder was based on robbery of a safe, whereas the first-degree robbery was based on robbery of a ring.”
Knight’s latest appeal argued that meant there wasn’t sufficient evidence for the murder conviction, because they didn’t actually manage to break into the safe, and left without it, which made that an attempted robbery, not a completed one.
Jury instructions have to specify if a murder is based on an attempted crime, Pennell explained.
“Here, the instructions referenced only a completed crime,” the lead opinion said. “The State did not object to the instructions at the time of trial; in fact, the State proposed the felony murder instruction that was ultimately adopted by the trial court.”
Justice Barbara Madsen wrote a full dissent, signed by Justices Charles Johnson, Susan Owens and Debra Stephens.
Madsen wrote that “the lead opinion’s rewrite of” the 2020 opinion “threatens the integrity of this court’s decision-making process.”
Madsen explained that: “The murder itself occurred during the attempted robbery of the safe — the end in the series of robberies and attempted robberies that stemmed from the first robbery, that of the wedding rings, which the Sanderses had advertised online and which were the intended objects of the home invasion.”
However, Madsen wrote, the justices in the prior appeal all agreed that “the predicate for Sanders’s murder,” was the robbery of the ring.
The dissent argued Knight’s petition should be dismissed.
“Because the safe robbery was not complete when the jury instructions required a completed offense, Knight claims insufficient evidence supports her murder conviction,” Madsen wrote. “This is an incorrect reading of our decision and does not point to any substantial change in the evidence warranting a second look at her original case.”
Chief Justice Steven González concurred in part and dissented in part.
If the prior case was decided properly, he wrote, Knight’s murder conviction should be dismissed.
However, the high court “may overrule a case that is both incorrect and harmful,” he wrote.
His preference would be to overrule the prior decision and vacate Knight’s robbery conviction, his opinion said.
“This would avoid the injustice that follows from our mistakes in our earlier opinion,” González wrote. “We would do better to admit we were wrong than to double down on our mistake.”
This story was originally published November 10, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
