Snohomish County candidate leaves race after old felony surfaces

A candidate for Snohomish County Council abruptly withdrew from the race Thursday after learning that The Seattle Times was about to publish a story that included his 1983 felony conviction for indecent liberties.

Greg Stephens, 60, a Republican from Maltby, said he pleaded guilty to molesting a 9-year-old relative nearly 30 years ago rather than contest the allegation and drag his family through a trial. Under the terms of a deferred sentence, Stephens served five years of probation and completed counseling.

The criminal charges in King County Superior Court turned up during a routine background check on all four candidates in the race for the District 5 seat.

On Thursday, Stephens sent an e-mail to the editorial boards of several newspapers announcing his withdrawal and citing concerns about his health. He added that "muckraking and political potshots are still more important than public service or thoughtful policy goals."

Stephens first ran for County Council in 2005 as an independent. He finished a distant third, with just 2,852 votes out of 35,400 cast, but took credit as a spoiler because Democratic challenger Dave Somers defeated Republican incumbent Jeff Sax by only 2,109 votes.

Stephens said he has spent the past 30 years in service to the community. He was vice president of the Maltby Neighborhood Alliance, president of the Little Bear Creek Protective Association and served on the Highway 2 Safety Coalition. "I've tried to do everything I could to do good," he said.

In an interview with The Times, Stephens, a retired emergency-medical technician, said he pleaded guilty in 1983 and accepted a deferred sentence with the understanding that once he successfully completed it, the guilty plea would be withdrawn, the charges dismissed and the case stricken from the record.

Legal experts say a person could ask the court to dismiss criminal charges upon the successful completion of a deferred sentence and could then say he had never been convicted of the crime.

However, there is no such order dismissing the charges in Stephens' court file. The Department of Corrections supervised Stephens' probation from March 1983 through October 1988. But it also has no record of the original criminal charges being expunged, said Chad Lewis, spokesman for the department.

Katie Blinn, assistant elections director with the Secretary of State's Office and an attorney, said that under the terms of a deferred sentence, if a guilty plea was withdrawn and the charges dismissed by a court, a felon automatically regained his full rights, including the right to vote and to run for office.

Stephens said he believed his rights were automatically restored once he completed his sentence.

Lynn Thompson: 206-464-8305 or lthompson@seattletimes.com. Times researchers Dave Turim and Gene Balk contributed to this story.