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State Supreme Court restricts use of felony murder law The Associated Press
OLYMPIA (AP) -- Two men get into a fight at a bar. One knifes the other, who dies. Can the attacker be convicted of murder? For 26 years, the answer in Washington state was yes -- until Thursday, when the state Supreme Court limited the application of the law in a 5-4 decision. Prosecutors said the ruling throws in doubt the sentences for hundreds of murder convicts. The defense lawyer who argued the case says the impact will be much less. At issue is a law that makes death resulting from specified felonies, including robbery and arson, punishable as felony murder regardless of whether the perpetrator intended to kill. The decision took assault off the list of those "predicate offenses." It does not affect murder cases based on felonies other than assault. The high court ordered the resentencing of Shawn Andress, serving prison time for a fight in which Edwin Foster was stabbed to death outside a West Seattle bar in 1995 Andress was convicted of second-degree murder by a King County Superior Court jury that concluded he committed assault by using a knife in the fight. The Supreme Court directed that Andress be resentenced only for assault on Foster's friend, for which he also was convicted. Sentencing Andress for murder "makes no sense," Justice Barbara Madsen wrote for the majority, "since the conduct constituting the assault and the homicide are the same." Madsen and Justices Gerry Alexander, Charles Z. Smith, Charles Johnson and Richard Sanders concluded that in revising the felony murder law in 1976, the Legislature didn't intend that assault be considered an underlying felony to support a murder charge. King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng said he would ask the high court to reconsider and clarify the ruling. If it is fully applied retroactively, Maleng said, the ruling could "set aside the convictions in some of our most serious cases." For example, he cited the second-degree murder conviction of Jerrell Thomas for the death of Kristopher Kime, who was fatally knocked to the pavement during Mardi Gras riots last year in Pioneer Square in Seattle. "The felony-murder law has been used for decades to hold offenders fully accountable for the fatal consequences of their violence," Maleng said. Pierce County deputy prosecutor Barbara Corey-Boulet said the decision "would have the very real and dramatic effect of freeing hundreds of murderers." She said her office had identified more than 200 potential candidates from its files alone by Thursday afternoon. Defense lawyer Timothy Ford, who argued the Andress case before the high court, said he believed Washington was the only state that allowed someone to face murder charges based on the crime of assault. Most convicts affected by the ruling will likely face new trials on charges such as manslaughter or assault, rather than be set free, Ford said. "If there is a problem, it's a problem they have made by taking advantage of this loophole," he said. "This was a weird quirk in the law." |