By Abby Spegman
The Olympian
Washington state’s Supreme Court has ruled that sentencing children to life without parole constitutes cruel punishment and is unconstitutional.
Thursday’s 5-4 ruling came in the case of a 39-year-old man who was a teenager when he was convicted of murdering his McCleary family.
Brian Bassett killed his mother Wendy, father Mike and 5-year-old brother Austin in 1995 when he was 16. He was convicted of three counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
A judge at the time called him “a walking advertisement” for the death penalty and sentenced him to three consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, which was the mandatory sentence at the time.
Bassett and his friend Nicholas J. McDonald were charged with the slayings. According to court testimony, McDonald hid the family’s bodies off a logging road and the two teens stole a family vehicle and fled to California.
Bassett’s parents had kicked him out of the family home roughly a week before.
In its Thursday ruling, the Supreme Court sent Bassett’s case back to the Grays Harbor County trial court to set a new minimum sentence and said he cannot be sentenced to a minimum term of life in prison, since that amounts to life without parole.
Grays Harbor Prosecutor Katie Svoboda told The Daily World, that the minimum sentence for a serious, violent crime is 25 years. She said the statute calls for his sentences on the three counts to run consecutively, which would mean at least 75 years. She said she expects Bassett’s lawyer to argue that the sentences should be concurrent.
“The ultimate goal,” Svoboda said, “is he should remain in prison the rest of his life. I don’t think’s he is safe to have on the streets.”
The decision follows a series of recent court rulings both statewide and nationally that address juvenile offenders, based on evolving science that shows the brains of children and young adults are not fully developed.
In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders were unconstitutional since they did not take into account the offender’s “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change.”
In response, the Washington Legislature said state courts should consider “mitigating factors that account for the diminished culpability of youth” — including age, life experience and chances for rehabilitation — before sentencing 16- and 17-year-olds to life without parole.
It also said those who had been sentenced to life without parole as juveniles should be re-sentenced.
Bassett sought relief under that ruling. At his re-sentencing hearing in Grays Harbor in 2015, a pediatric psychologist who treated him prior to the murders testified Bassett suffered from an adjustment disorder and struggled to cope with the stress from a strained relationship with his parents.
Bassett told the court as a teen he was unable to “comprehend the totality” of his actions, saying his first thought when he was arrested was “how much trouble (he) was going to be in when (his) parents learned that (he) was there in jail,” according to the Supreme Court decision.
The sentencing judge, David Edwards, was unmoved, and Bassett again received three consecutive life without parole sentences. Bassett appealed, with his attorneys arguing life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders were unconstitutional.
The state Court of Appeals agreed, and the case went to the Supreme Court.
Svoboda told The Daily World that McDonald, who was found guilty of second degree murder, could be eligible for release in the next six months or so. The state Supreme Court ruling this week did not affect him.
