State v. Yates

Summary

The Washington Supreme Court, en banc, affirmed Robert Lee Yates Jr.'s convictions for the aggravated first degree murders of Melinda Mercer and Connie Ellis and affirmed his death sentence, finding no reversible error in the guilt or penalty phases. The court held that neither equitable estoppel nor substantive due process bars Pierce County from seeking the death penalty based on preliminary cross-county plea negotiations, that the 'common scheme or plan' aggravator properly encompasses an overarching plan used to perpetrate separate but very similar crimes, and that the evidence sufficed to prove the common scheme or plan and robbery aggravators while failing only on the concealment aggravator. It rejected claims of juror-selection error, a defective charging document, denial of a lesser-included option, evidentiary abuse, prosecutorial misconduct, and SRA-mandated consecutive sentencing, and in mandatory review found sufficient evidence that mitigating circumstances did not merit leniency, no passion or prejudice, and no disproportionality.