Extra-long sentences whose appeals ended before ruling to stand

Felons whose above-standard sentences survive final appeals aren’t covered by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last June that partially overturned Washington’s sentencing guideline law, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The ruling preserves extra-long sentences for perpetrators of some of northeast Washington’s most grisly crimes, including Stanley Leonard Pietrzak, who told dinner guests he was serving them stew made with human flesh after he murdered a Spokane woman and burned her remains in a furnace.

Sentencing guidelines called for a sentence of 22 to 30 years, but a judge gave 46-year-old Pietrzak 40 years in November 2000. He had exhausted his appeals by the time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that guideline sentencing laws in Washington and at least eight other states improperly allowed judges to decide facts for above-standard sentences.

The 5-4 sentencing-guideline decision involved a Grant County, Wash., judge’s finding that Howard Ralph Blakely Jr. deserved extra punishment because of “deliberate cruelty” in the way he kidnapped his estranged wife and drove her across three states in a box in the bed of his pickup. The court said defendants were entitled to have juries decide facts used to justify above-standard sentences.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court offered no guidance, Washington courts have been struggling for a year to decide whether above-standard sentences could still be imposed without help from the Legislature. In many cases, the answer was “no.”

Even after the Legislature amended the law, questions remained about whether the amendment is retroactive to cases that were pending when the amendment took effect on April 15. Attorneys anticipate the state Supreme Court will need several more months to resolve that question.

The state’s high court has ruled, however, that defendants whose above-standard sentences were on appeal at the time of the Blakely ruling must have their sentences reduced to the standard range for their crimes.

But the state Supreme Court said Thursday prison inmates who had already exhausted their appeals at the time of the ruling are stuck with their sentences. The court took its cue from a ruling their federal counterpart issued on the same day it ruled in Blakely’s case.

In the other ruling last June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld death sentences, following a principle of law that favors finality of judgments.

In addition to the Pietrzak case, Thursday’s decision affects the sentences of:

•Spokane Valley resident Brad Jackson, who got 56 years in November 2000 for murdering his 9-year-old daughter, Valiree, and hiding her body.

•Spokane County resident Willie R. Holland, who got 54 years in April 2002 for raping an 8-year-old girl over a nine-month period and giving her a venereal disease.

•Andrew D. “Drewcifer” Erickson of Stevens County, a self-described Satan worshipper who got 75 years in February 2002 for leading two teenage boys in riddling a 17-year-old Pend Oreille County boy with bullets, stabbing the victim in the throat and urinating on his body.

•Loon Lake, Wash., resident Curtis Buckner, who got almost 80 years for a 1988 crime in which he stabbed a young Spokane woman and repeatedly raped her while she lay dead or dying.