If Ridgway got life, would anyone get death?

Sometime in the coming months, a King County jury will hear details about a heart-wrenching crime: a young mother, her sister and two little boys stabbed to death inside their Kirkland home while the children's father was off fighting in Iraq. The home was then torched, the bodies burned, in an apparent attempt to hide what happened.

King County prosecutors think the man accused of the crime, 25-year-old neighbor Conner Schierman, deserves to die and part of their case will try to get a jury to agree. But such a sentence is hardly guaranteed. A jury's feelings, a defendant's mental-health history, the punishment meted out to the state's worst serial killer and even a proposed new law could all impact whether Schierman is sentenced to death if convicted.

Schierman is accused of killing his neighbor Olga Milkin, 28; her sister Lyubov Botvina, 24; and Milkin's two sons, Justin, 5, and Andrew, 3, on July 17. King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng announced Tuesday he will seek the death penalty against Schierman.

It was the first time Maleng has asked for the death penalty since he sought it for Green River killer Gary L. Ridgway, whose case has become a litmus test of sorts with regard to the death penalty in Washington state.

Prosecutors eventually gave up on capital punishment in exchange for Ridgway's cooperation, during which he provided detectives details that helped solve dozens of open murder cases. Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder in 2003 and was sentenced to life in prison.

King County senior deputy prosecutor Scott O'Toole said Tuesday that Maleng did weigh the fact that he didn't seek the death penalty for Ridgway when making his recent decision. Maleng also spoke at length with the Kirkland murder victims' family.

"At the end of the day, he decided this is a decision that should be placed before a jury," O'Toole said.

Milkin's husband, Leonid Milkin, now a sergeant in the Army National Guard, said Schierman needs to be held accountable.

"I think the death penalty in this case would be appropriate," he said Tuesday.

In weighing his decision, Maleng considered a mitigation report submitted by Schierman's defense attorneys. The information in the report has not been made public, though some of it will come out during the trial and any subsequent sentencing phase.

Generally, mitigating factors can include troubles in the defendant's life, mental-health history and any substance-abuse problems.

Maleng declined to discuss his decision Tuesday, saying only that he did not find any mitigating factors sufficient to prevent a jury from considering the death penalty. The only other penalty for aggravated first-degree murder is life in prison without parole.

James Conroy, Schierman's defense attorney, declined to talk about Schierman's mental state and whether anything about that or his struggles with addiction would factor into his defense.

Schierman, a self-described recovering alcoholic and drug addict, had been a patient at a rehabilitation home until about 17 months before the killings. He had worked at a pet store, was a maintenance worker in Kirkland and had no criminal record.

Blackout alleged

According to court documents, Schierman told police that after a night of drinking vodka he awoke from an alcohol-induced blackout to a bloody scene in the victims' house. Detectives say he took a shower, changed into clothes he found in the home and drove to a nearby convenience store, where he purchased gasoline. He then returned to the house, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze.

Like other defense attorneys in recent years, Conroy argues that it's unfair for his client, accused of four murders, to face the death penalty when Ridgway, convicted of so many more, did not.

"It defies any rational analysis," he said. "I'm disappointed for my client, [but] I am more troubled by the system we have in place. Permitting any prosecutor to pick and choose is fundamentally flawed."

Ultimately, the defense argument about Ridgway may have no legal standing: Last year, a divided state Supreme Court found in a 5-4 ruling that Dayva Cross, who killed his wife and two of her daughters in Snoqualmie in 1999, should not be spared the death penalty because of the Ridgway case. In their majority decision, the justices said the Legislature was the appropriate body to sort through the moral question of fairness with respect to other cases. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear Cross' case.

On Tuesday, a judge signed Cross' death warrant, setting Feb. 21 as his execution date.

Though it failed on legal legs, some observers say the comparison to the Ridgway case could still have an impact on a jury deliberating the fate of Schierman.

"It's naive to think jurors won't consider this question of fairness. And isn't that what we want? Death-penalty cases are the only ones in which we ask the community, in the form of a jury, to impose the punishment," said Mark Larranaga, former director of the Washington Death Penalty Assistance Center, which works with defense attorneys. "Is it fair to continue to use the death penalty, morally and philosophically, when it's applied in some cases and not others?"

The last time Maleng sent a death-penalty case to a jury was in 2002 with the trial of Kevin Cruz, a schizophrenic who killed two men and wounded two others in a 1999 shooting at Seattle's Northlake Shipyard. Unable to agree on a death sentence, the jury spared his life.

Federation shootings

Maleng recently declined to pursue the death penalty in another high-profile King County case, that of Naveed Haq, the man accused of last year's shooting rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle that left one woman dead and five others wounded.

In that case, Maleng said Haq's history of mental illness helped rule out the death penalty.

Another factor that could influence the Schierman case is a bill recently proposed in Olympia by a handful of Democrats that seeks to create a bipartisan task force to review the death-penalty statute and determine, among other things, the uniformity of decision-making by prosecutors in aggravated-murder cases.

The bill, which will be debated in committee before a complete vote, seeks to stay all death sentences in Washington until July 2008.

While it may be too soon to tell how far the bill will go this session, sponsor Rep. Brendan Williams, D-Olympia, says the issue needs to be addressed.

"We can't punt on it," he said. "[Norm] Maleng has said that if you kill 48 people you get a life sentence, but if you kill four you get a death sentence. It hangs over everything."

Natalie Singer: 206-464-2704 or nsinger@seattletimes.com

Times staff reporter Jennifer Sullivan contributed to this report.