I was a law clerk on a death penalty case. So LISTEN! (Hi @BearsWiin )
The background here is the state's proportionality statute, which mandates that the court review each capital case, compare it to prior cases and consider factors such as aggravating circumstances, and conclude, one way or the other, whether the state is disproportionately leveling the death penalty on some groups over others. These statutes exist entirely because of the south, where the death penalty really has been disproportionately leveled against blacks. The statistics are there, and the problem has been that in some parts of the country, a black guy doing what Mitchell Rupe did would get the chair and a white guy doing what Wesley Allen Dodd did would get life w/o parole. That's literally how that statute is applied: "what the white guy did was way worse than what the black guy did, and the black guy death and the white guy didn't."
A lot of people thought the Rupe case (remember the guy who said he was too fat to be hanged in violation of the 8th amendment) was the end of proportionality review in WA. 'All Rupe did' was shoot some bank tellers in @RaceBannon 's hometown. Compare/contrast with Dodd, who raped and tortured (including vivisection) Lee Isley over two days before hanging him in a closet. The idea behind Rupe being, if a white guy got death for a run-of-the-mill capital crime, there's no problem.
In Washington, there really has been no problem with disproportionality, at least insofar as the prosecutors decision to seek it is implicated. The jury thing is another matter I suppose.
Essentially we have a statute modeled after a Georgia statute forcing the WSC to do something here it hasn't really needed to do. In GA, they need to keep doing it.
I'll have to read the case to find out how they cooked that answer up here. It really was a no brainer in the souf. I remember seeing those statistics and comparisons of aggravating circumstances and penalty imposed, and it was pretty clear.
PS: it was this [/i]experience that kept me from wanting to prosecute. Combing through the details of the case and the prior cases haunted me for years. Especially the Dodd case. The details of what he did was excruciating to wade through.
