Few cases warrant death penalty, candidates say

In 2003, in a SeaTac motel room, Dan Satterberg, Norm Maleng, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert and a victims' advocate met with the families of 44 women slain by Gary L. Ridgway, the Green River killer.

Maleng, the King County prosecutor, had decided against seeking the death penalty, and wanted to explain it to the families. Under the plea deal, Ridgway would admit to 48 killings and lead authorities to the remains of four victims whose bodies had not been recovered.

"At the end of spending time with all of these families, I was convinced and remain convinced that this was the right thing to do in that case because it was about finding justice for the victims of those crimes," said Satterberg, who was Maleng's chief of staff at the time. "And justice was finally knowing the truth."

A prosecutor's weightiest decision is whether to seek the ultimate sanction in a murder case. Satterberg, who has consulted with Maleng on every death-penalty case in King County over the past 17 years, said he would pursue the sentence only "when there is a complete absence of mitigating circumstances."

He said death-penalty cases result in more than a year of pretrial motions and can lead to decades of appeals. The sentence holds out false promises to families of victims who "feel like they have to be for the death penalty because that somehow is a measure of the value of the life that was taken," he said.

"But we don't do it very well here in Washington," he said. "I want to be realistic about the practical ramifications of seeking the death penalty. I will be very conservative in how we apply it."

Satterberg's Democratic opponent, Deputy Prosecutor Bill Sherman, also believes Maleng made the right choice in the Ridgway case.

Sherman said there are "troubling examples where DNA evidence has exonerated people who have been sentenced to death, and we've seen cases where the death penalty is applied in disparate ways across racial groups, income levels and even geography."

He said he supports a gubernatorial moratorium on executions while those imbalances are studied. But as a prosecutor obliged to apply existing law, he said he would make death-penalty decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com