A former Sequim resident now on death row is asking the state to reconsider his sentence, in part because the Green River Killer was spared the death penalty.
Lawyers for Darold Ray Stenson have filed a personal restraint petition in the state Supreme Court, and on Monday submitted specifics regarding last month’s life sentence of Gary Ridgway in King County for killing 48 women.
Others among the state’s 10 death row inmates are also appealing on similar grounds.
They question why Ridgway, the nation’s worst serial killer, got life imprisonment while they are facing a harsher sentence for their convictions on fewer murders.
“The prosecutor in the Ridgway case did exactly what a prosecutor is supposed to do, and we have absolutely no (qualms) with that,” said Sheryl Gordon McCloud, a Seattle attorney representing Stenson in his Supreme Court appeal.
“On the other hand, for us in our case, we have a right to have the Supreme Court examine proportionality, whether the punishment in our case is proportionate to the punishment in other cases,” she said.
Stenson, now 51, was convicted in Clallam County Superior Court in 1994 on two counts of aggravated first-degree murder for the March 25, 1993, shooting deaths of his wife, Denise Stenson, and his business partner, Frank Hoerner, at the Stensons’ exotic bird farm southwest of Sequim.
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The rest of the story appears in Thursday’s Peninsula Daily News Clallam County edition.
