Washington pauses to reflect on death penalty

They talked about nail polish and new haircuts. They were funny women. Smart, even. They were women with hopes, dreams of nights when they wouldn’t have to duck inside the cars of men offering them money for sex.

That’s what Lynn Everson remembers of the women who were found half-naked and dead, flung into roadside ditches on the outer edges of Spokane, Wash.

“It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times,” Everson — who has run the Spokane County needle exchange program for the past 25 years — said of that time, during which a shelter called Hope House opened, shining a light into the darkness for desperate prostituted women.

Though capital punishment has always been a part of the United States’ history, its use was suspended from 1972 to 1976, when the Supreme Court found the death penalty was bordering on unconstitutional and qualified as cruel and unusual punishment.

By 1977 capital punishment was slowly being reintroduced by the majority of U.S. states — including Washington, which revised its statute in 1981 so only aggravated, first-degree murder convictions could qualify for the death penalty. Washington has executed five people since. 

Mark Larranaga, a Seattle private practice attorney and former director of Washington’s Death Penalty Assistance Center, said that’s reason enough to re-examine the state’s policy.

“The reality is, in 40 years we have executed five people, three voluntary — they waived their appeals,” he said. “Forty years is a pretty good chunk of history to do an assessment.”

Larranaga also served on the state’s Death Penalty Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Defense. In its 2006 report, it found that since 1981, there had been 254 death-eligible cases in Washington but just four resulted in executions. (One more person has been executed since the release of that report.)

“History has told us, in four decades of trying to administer Washington’s death penalty, it’s undeniable that we are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on a product that fails miserably,” he said. “The system — and what it’s trying to do — has failed.”

Even more, some prosecutors in Washington fear that a capital trial — which the committee found to carry an average cost of $470,000 — could bankrupt a county. And though the state has a fund for “extraordinary criminal justice costs,” counties that ask for reimbursement from it rarely see more than a small fraction of their request.

“The yearly allocation is discretionary, and the amount received is typically pennies on the dollar,” a February Seattle Times op-ed read. “That poses a complex question for lawmakers: If the legislature insists on a capital punishment, shouldn’t it pay the cost?”

Karil Klingbeil wanted to tell everyone she felt empty. After each trial, every appeal, every court appearance, she would find a crowd of TV reporters thrusting microphones in her face, asking if she felt closure now that the man that murdered her sister would be executed. What could possibly give her closure, give her brother-in-law his wife back, give the kids their mother?

Would killing Mitchell Rupe make the hurt go away?

When Inslee announced the death penalty moratorium, detractors instantly pointed at the families of victims — people like Klingbeil, whose sister Candy Hemmig was murdered in an Olympia bank by Rupe in 1981. They argue that executing the worst criminals among us gives victims’ families closure.

“That theory that having to have the death penalty somehow equates to justice for the victims — that’s not happening,” Larranaga said. “It’s actually kind of insulting to the cases [where] the death penalty is not being sought. I don’t think those victims of those individuals are any less worthy of seeing punishment.”

Through 20 years of hearings and appeals, Klingbeil advocated for Rupe’s execution. At each court appearance, she would relive the horror of her sister’s death. The bloody crime-scene photos. Her sister’s killer sitting just feet from her.

Dick Morgan, a retired superintendent of the Washington State Penitentiary and state director of prisons, oversaw three executions during his career. With the news of the moratorium, he wrote of his opposition to capital punishment too.

He was responsible for assembling the staff that carried out executions during his tenure and said his employees always had the right to refuse participation.

“Others had stipulations,” he recalled. “I had one say, ‘All right, I’ll help you out with this, but my wife can never find out or my church can never find out.’”

But even after getting willing participants, Morgan said he still had employees who would go to him after an execution, complaining of nightmares and other post-traumatic stress symptoms. Others asked to be dismissed from the team as executions approached. 

Lynn Everson will never forget the steely, dead-eyed glare Robert Yates gave her as she sat on the stand and testified about the vulnerabilities of women on the streets.

Even still, she said, when she received news of the moratorium on executions last month, she felt a sense of relief.

“I think he’s an incredibly sick and twisted individual who kills people, who kills women and then has sex with them after they’re dead or buries them under his bedroom window,” she said. “He killed some folks I really liked.”

But she said she doesn’t want him to be executed. She wants him to be forgotten.