Yates readies appeal of death sentence

OLYMPIA – Four years after a Pierce County jury sentenced serial killer Robert Yates Jr. to die, Yates is asking the state’s highest court to give him the same sentence he got a year earlier in Spokane: life in prison, but no death penalty.

His sentence in Spokane – 408 years in prison – is not part of the appeal. But what happened in Spokane is a key part of Yates’ Pierce County appeal.

His central argument: In 2000 he was misled by Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker into believing that his Spokane plea agreement – which covered 13 killings and an attempted murder in three counties – also included the two Tacoma-area slayings.

It didn’t. Within hours of being faxed a copy of a proposed statewide plea deal by Tucker – a deal that spared Yates the death penalty – Pierce County officials rushed to charge him separately with the two local homicides. In 2002, a Tacoma jury sentenced Yates to die.

“The State wrung every bit of information it could from Mr. Yates and then waited until the last possible moment to pursue separate charges in Pierce County,” Yates’ attorneys at the Washington Appellate Project wrote to the state Supreme Court. Pierce County’s response: Yates volunteered the information.

Arguments in the case are slated for a rare all-day hearing Nov. 30.

The fact that Yates, 54, didn’t get the death penalty in Spokane is also a key part of the appeal. After getting life in prison in Spokane – despite admitting to so many killings – it would be unfair, his lawyers argue, for Pierce County to have him executed for just two murders.

“Mr. Yates’ (death) sentence is arbitrary, wanton … freakish and random in light of his Spokane County sentence,” his lawyers argue.

The appeal also touches on a third aspect of the Spokane case: Yates’ lawyers argue that he should serve the Pierce County sentence only after he completes the Spokane sentence. In other words, his execution should wait until after he’s served those 408 years.

The Pierce County cases involve Melinda Mercer and Connie Ellis, two heroin addicts who supported their habits with prostitution.

Mercer was killed in December 1997. Yates shot her three times in the head, then wrapped her head with four plastic bags. Police investigators discovered that Mercer apparently survived for several minutes, using her teeth to bite through two of the bags in an attempt to breathe. Her nude body was dumped in blackberry bushes in a vacant lot in Tacoma.

Yates killed Ellis the following year. Shot once in the head, wrapped in plastic bags and dumped down a trash-strewn embankment.

Tucker said he stands by the decision to seek a plea agreement in the Spokane cases, instead of trying for the death penalty. Among his reasons:

“Two-thirds of the victims’ families favored life in prison,

“He worried about Yates appealing a death sentence on the argument that the murders didn’t meet the legal requirement that they be part of a “common scheme or plan,”

“Executions are extremely rare in Washington,

“And that Yates had agreed to describe all the killings to police in detail, as well as reveal the location of a pistol used in many of the slayings. (He withdrew both offers once Pierce County charged him.)

“We gave him 408 years,” Tucker said. “It was a death sentence in time.”

Yates, a factory worker and Air National Guard helicopter pilot, was arrested in Spokane in April 2000 after years of unsolved deaths of local prostitutes. Yates typically would get them into his black Ford van, in which he’d installed a homemade wooden platform bed covered with carpet. There was no door handle on the inside of the van’s sliding door. When police seized the van, they found three bullet holes in it and blood stains on the carpet and padding.

Within six weeks of his arrest, Yates’ public defender was floating the idea of a plea bargain to Tucker. Through the lawyer, Yates started revealing information about his victims and his crimes.

Throughout this time, Tucker has repeatedly said, he thought he had then-Pierce County Prosecutor John Laderburg’s permission to include the two Pierce County cases in the plea deal. The subject came up, Tucker said, during a discussion with several prosecutors during a conference in Chelan in June 2000. The consensus, Tucker later testified, “was that the county with the most cases could handle all of them.”

Not so, according to Ladenburg. He set up a conference call with Tucker a few days later. Ladenburg said he told Tucker that a plea deal was “ill-considered and premature.” He said he told Tucker to leave the Pierce County cases out of any deal that didn’t include the death penalty.

Tucker said he has no recollection of Ladenburg saying anything of the sort in that phone call. He remained under the impression that all the cases were his to negotiate. On July 17, Tucker sent the proposed plea deal to Ladenburg, who immediately charged Yates himself.

“By filing the cases in Pierce County, Mr. Ladenburg took public jurisdiction and control over what was rightfully his,” the county’s current prosecutor wrote to the high court.

Yates’ lawyers say it was more like bait and switch. They objected to a Pierce County judge, to no avail. He “viewed this problem as a feud between two county prosecutors,” they wrote to the high court, “ignoring the much-more-important fact that this internal squabble had a very real and lasting impact on” Yates.

In court documents, Yates argues several other reasons for overturning his sentence:

“The death penalty is inherently unfair, with some murderers sentenced to death for two killings while Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway got life in prison despite confessing in 2003 to killing at least 48 people.

“Three jurors were wrongly excused after admitting to personal qualms with the death penalty.

“Prosecutors inflamed the jury with needlessly gruesome photos of victims.

“Many nations, including Canada’s highest court, have concluded that America’s death penalty is cruel and inhuman.

“The death penalty “is infrequently imposed and purposeless” as a deterrent.