In the Matter of the Personal Restraint of Mark Edwin Cook, Petitioner

Summary

The Washington Supreme Court denied Mark Edwin Cook's second personal restraint petition, which sought relief from his 1976 King County convictions for two counts of first degree assault and aiding a prisoner's escape on the ground that they duplicated his federal convictions for the same conduct in violation of RCW 10.43.040's statutory double jeopardy protection. The court held that RAP 16.4(d) does not bar a successive petition whose grounds were not previously 'heard and determined,' extending its grounds-based construction of that rule to nonconstitutional claims, and it abolished the automatic bar to raising nonconstitutional issues not previously raised at trial or on direct appeal, substituting the federal threshold that the claimed error constitute a fundamental defect which inherently results in a complete miscarriage of justice. Cook's claim cleared that threshold, but on the merits the court found that none of his state convictions was in fact identical to any of his federal convictions, because the state counts required specific intents the federal counts lacked and the federal conspiracy rested on five overt acts unrelated to the state crimes. No separate opinions accompanied the decision.