State v. Stenson

Summary

The Washington Supreme Court, sitting en banc, rejected Darold Stenson's guilt-phase challenges to his convictions for the first degree murders of his wife and his business associate: it upheld the particularity and scope of the initial and expanded search warrants and the voluntariness and breadth of his written consent to search, sustained the admission of marital-relationship evidence, the life-insurance and certificate evidence, and presumptive phenolphthalein blood testing, found no prosecutorial misconduct, and held the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying substitution of counsel, a continuance, and Stenson's equivocal request to proceed pro se. The court applied de novo review to the Fourth Amendment particularity questions and abuse-of-discretion review to the evidentiary, misconduct, and counsel-substitution rulings. The portion of the opinion supplied does not include the penalty-phase analysis or the court's final disposition.