No death penalty in retrial of '87 case of slain teen
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"Let him rot in jail," said Barbara Parker-Waaga, now of Port Hadlock, Jefferson County.
"This just about destroyed our family. We don't want to be his victims, too."
In paperwork filed last week, Kitsap County Prosecuting Attorney Russ Hauge said his office won't re-seek the death penalty against Brian Keith Lord when he is retried in September.
He was sentenced to death in 1987 after a jury found the itinerant carpenter had raped and beaten Tracy Parker to death.
But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the verdict three years ago, ordering that he be retried. The appellate court said Lord's attorneys made a mistake by failing to present at trial the testimony of three boys who told police they saw Parker alive the day after police say Lord killed her.
Prosecutors think the boys, who were intoxicated at the time, actually saw Parker's sister.
While they were interviewed by defense investigators, they did not testify in the trial because the lawyers decided the boys' stories were unreliable.
Prosecutors decided not to re-seek the death penalty because even if Lord were convicted and sentenced to death again, there is a high probability that conviction could be overturned on some other legal issue and the county would have to try him a third time, Hauge said.
"Death-penalty convictions get a higher level of scrutiny than non-death-penalty convictions," Hauge said.
He said prosecutors instead will seek life in prison with no possibility of parole for Lord, who earlier this year won the right to represent himself in the penalty phase if convicted again.
Hauge said "sometimes the best thing that the law can do is bring a case to an end. We want this trial to be the last time we see this defendant."
"If the death penalty were imposed there exists a substantial likelihood that we would find ourselves faced with yet another retrial many years in the future (when) witnesses would be even harder to find, their recollections would have faded even more."
Hauge said he consulted with Parker-Waaga before he made the decision. "Her support was a critical factor in our going this way," he said.
Parker-Waaga said she was disheartened that it's taken 16 years to bring justice to the man who killed her daughter, "and I don't have another 16 years to give to this."
In the original trial, Lord was convicted of killing Parker with a hammer. He was remodeling a Silverdale house where Parker was horseback riding when she disappeared Sept. 16, 1986. Her body was found two weeks later.
Lord's conviction was upheld by state courts, although U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in 1997 voided the death sentence when she determined prosecutors were inappropriately allowed to question Lord. She upheld the conviction, but it was reversed by the appellate court in July 1999, and a new trial was ordered. The U.S. Supreme Court later refused to reinstate the murder conviction.
The new trial is set to begin Sept. 23 in Kitsap County Superior Court, and Hauge said he expects it will take six weeks to three months. Hauge wouldn't say what evidence he plans to introduce at the trial, but he did say there is DNA technology available now that wasn't available in the first trial.
Lord, 41, is being held in the Kitsap County Jail. Before his conviction was overturned, he had been on death row at the Washington State Penitentiary near Walla Walla.
Susan Gilmore can be reached at 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com.