Sentencing guidelines change, bring new pain for dead woman's family

By Christian Hill | The Olympian • Published October 12, 2008

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OLYMPIA – On July 5, 1996, Roxanne Jones was driving along a rural Lewis County road when an oncoming car veered across the center line toward her vehicle.

Ralph Howard Blakely case

In 2000, A Grant County judge sentenced Ralph Howard Blakely II to 90 months in prison for kidnapping his estranged wife. The maximum sentence under state guidelines was 53 months, but the judge ruled an exceptional sentence was in order because Blakely acted with "deliberate cruelty."

The state Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. Blakely appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nation's highest court heard the case March 2004 and released its decision three months later.

In a 5-4 decision, it held that the sentence violated the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right to trial by jury, because the facts that led to the longer sentence were not admitted by the defendant or found by a jury.

Jones remembers watching as her car's windshield exploded, sending shards of glass flying. The crash killed her mother, Evelyn Mitchell, 74, and left Jones severely injured.

Twelve years later, Jones has moved to Olympia and still suffers physical and psychological trauma from the crash. But she had taken some comfort in knowing that the driver who killed her mother, John K. McNeal, would spend most of his adult life in prison.

McNeal, who was on methamphetamine at the time of the crash, was convicted of vehicular homicide and other crimes.

So Jones was stunned early this year to learn that McNeal, now 46, was out of prison after serving just one-third of his sentence. He remains free pending possible resentencing. "I told my son I'm going to fight him tooth and nail," she said. "He doesn't deserve to get out of prison at all — period."

Her experience illustrates the effect of Blakely v. Washington, a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision stemming from another Washington case. The justices held that juries, not judges, must establish the facts leading to an exceptional sentence, a prison term that exceeds normal sentencing guidelines imposed to punish grievous crimes. McNeal had received an exceptional sentence because he had been convicted of several felonies before the crash. "I don't like the result, but Blakely has had that effect on many cases," said Andrew Toynbee, a Thurston County deputy prosecuting attorney who prosecuted McNeal in Lewis County years earlier.

Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jim Powers, who handles appeals for the Thurston County office in the aftermath of the Blakely ruling, estimated that exceptional sentences in 10 to 15 cases in the county have been reduced to standard sentences because an appeal was pending in the case before the Blakely decision or before subsequent legal fixes were enacted.

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