Prosecutors called Shawn Kemp’s assault sentence illegal. Here’s what judge said
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Pierce County judge corrected ambiguous sentencing documents for Shawn Kemp.
- Kemp received 30 days home confinement and 240 hours of community service.
- Legal debate centered on home monitoring in violent crime sentencing rules.
The Pierce County judge whom prosecutors asked to reconsider former NBA SuperSonics star Shawn Kemp’s sentence of home confinement for second-degree assault said Friday that he did not intend to give Kemp any more jail time.
Superior Court Judge Michael Schwartz corrected what he repeatedly called “ambiguous” sentencing documents to clarify that Kemp was given one day in jail, which he had already served when he was first arrested in 2023, and while on community custody he is to stay within his residence for 30 days while on electronic home monitoring.
Kemp still has to serve 240 hours of community service primarily in Tacoma and Pierce County.
Schwartz said the issue seemed to be that the court left a blank space on the sentencing documents where it says “days of confinement,” and he didn’t check a box for discretionary conditions of community custody.
“It looks to me like the [judgement and sentence document] is ambiguous at best,” Schwartz said.
Kemp, 55, pleaded guilty in May for shooting at an occupied car on March 8, 2023, outside the Tacoma Mall. Inside the vehicle, a stolen Toyota 4Runner, were two men who had broken into Kemp’s truck the night before. Kemp tracked his stolen cell phone to the parking lot and fired on the 4Runner with a revolver at least three times in the middle of a busy afternoon at the mall. No one was injured.
At his sentencing hearing Aug. 22, Kemp was apologetic and said he should have used better discretion. Prosecutors had recommended a nine-month jail term, arguing that there was no evidence either of the men in the 4Runner shot at Kemp before he fired the gunshots.
Schwartz said Kemp’s claim that the men shot at him first, and he returned fire in self defense was evidence in itself, and circumstantial evidence supported him. Prosecutors also conceded that 33 seconds of the encounter was not captured on video, and the men Kemp shot at had significant histories of crimes of dishonesty that would have been admissible had the case gone to trial.
Schwartz declined to order any jail time at the sentencing hearing and instead imposed home confinement and community-service hours. Deputy prosecuting attorney Thomas Howe filed a motion Aug. 26 pointing out that the law does not allow a jail sentence to be substituted for partial confinement — which includes electronic home monitoring — when the offender has been convicted of a violent crime such as second-degree assault.
On Friday, in an eighth-floor courtroom of the County-City Building in downtown Tacoma, Kemp sat quietly with his defense attorneys while Howe explained what he believed was unlawful about the sentence Schwartz imposed.
Howe said it was his position that if Schwartz did not want to send Kemp to jail, Schwartz needed to say he was departing from a standard-range sentence to give him zero days in jail, which he said the judge had not done at the August sentencing hearing.
“[The defense attorneys] want to be able to say, you know, he served his sentence, it was all legal. It’s not,” Howe said.
Tim Leary, an attorney for Kemp, said he was struck by the final line of Howe’s written motion, which he said indicated the state was not saying Schwartz should put Kemp in jail.
“I think one of the proposals which Mr. Howe said today, you could sentence him from anywhere from zero to whatever you choose to do,” Leary said.
Schwartz concluded that to give Kemp a valid sentence, his sentencing documents simply needed to be amended or corrected.
This story was originally published September 19, 2025 at 12:10 PM.
