High court affirms death sentence for Spokane serial killer

OLYMPIA — The state Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of convicted serial killer Robert Yates Jr.

Yates had asked the high court to throw out his death sentence and take a fresh look at how capital punishment is applied in Washington.

In an 8-1 ruling, the high court ruled that his conviction and sentence should stand, rejecting his arguments that Pierce County should not have been able to seek the death penalty after a plea agreement was made with Spokane, and also rejecting his argument that the death penalty is applied in a disproportionate way.

A central question was how the so-called Green River killer, Gary Ridgway, could escape the death penalty after pleading guilty to killing 48 women, while less-prolific killers are sentenced to death.

Yates was sentenced to 408 years in prison in 2000 after confessing to 13 killings in a plea deal with Spokane County prosecutors that included information on the Pierce County deaths.

Pierce County moved separately to charge Yates. He was convicted of killing two women in that county and sentenced to death in 2002.

In seeking to overturn his Pierce County sentence, Yates' lawyers said he was misled by Spokane County prosecutor Steve Tucker into believing that the two Tacoma-area slayings were part of his Spokane plea agreement.

They weren't, Pierce County said.

A key part of his appeal is that Yates didn't get the death penalty in Spokane, despite a larger number of victims.

"Mr. Yates' [death] sentence is arbitrary, wanton ... freakish and random in light of his Spokane County sentence," his lawyers argued in court documents.

The court in April narrowly upheld the death sentence of a man who fatally stabbed his wife and two children. That case also pointed to the disparity with Ridgway's sentence.

In that 5-4 case, the court acknowledged the extraordinary circumstances of Ridgway's case but said no matter how unfair it may seem, his plea deal does not automatically invalidate the state's death penalty for everyone else.

Yates, an aluminum-smelter worker and Air National Guard helicopter pilot, was arrested in Spokane in April 2000 after years of unsolved deaths of local women, many of whom were prostitutes.

Within weeks of his arrest, Yates' public defender was trying for a plea agreement with Tucker. Through the lawyer, Yates started revealing information about his victims and his crimes.

Tucker has repeatedly said he thought he had then-Pierce County prosecutor John Ladenburg's permission to include the two Pierce County cases in the plea deal.

Ladenburg has said he told Tucker in a conference call that a plea deal was "ill-considered and premature" and 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 that.

Shortly after Tucker sent the proposed plea deal to Ladenburg, Yates was charged with the Pierce County homicides.