Confronting Violence: in the Act and in the Word

• Publication year: 1992
• Citation: Vol. 15 No. 03

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 15, No. 3SPRING 1992

Confronting Violence: In the Act and in the Word

David Boerner

I. The Act

The boy asked his mother if he could ride his bike to a friend's house. It was about 6:30 in the evening, Saturday, May 20, 1989. As the boy rode past a small woods in his South Tacoma neighborhood, a man, also riding a bicycle, asked the boy if he could ride with him on the trails through the woods.

At dusk, about 9:00 p.m., the Mansfield family, father and mother, daughter, and three nieces, entered the wooded area to bury their family cat. As they made their way along a path they saw the boy, in the distance, standing silently, naked, covered with mud and dried blood. Dick Mansfield swept the boy into his arms and carried him to their home and then to the hospital. At the emergency room, doctors found that the boy had been anally and orally raped, stabbed in the back, and strangled with a cord; they also found that his penis had been cut off.

Initially the boy was in shock, unable to speak, only mumbling incoherently. Later, he was able to give a description of a man with a badly pock-marked face and a large nose who was riding a green bicycle with front and back baskets. The description matched that of Earl Shriner, a man well known to the Tacoma police. Detectives went to Shriner's home, where they seized his shoes, stained with blood and mud. The soles of the shoes appeared to match treadmarks at the scene. They also seized his bicycle, which was green with front and rear baskets, and a cord from his jacket that carried blonde hairs similar to the boy's.

On Monday, Earl Shriner was charged with attempted murder in the first degree, rape in the first degree, and assault in the first degree.

The following is a narrative of my participation in the response to this act of sexual violence. This narrative begins with the public's reaction and then moves to the law's response to that reaction.

II. The Public's Response

A. Monday, May 22, 1989

The Tacoma Morning News Tribune leads its front page story with the headline:Past Sex Offender Suspect In Attack-Boy Too Traumatized to Cry by Mutilation.

The opening paragraph of the story reported:[a] Tacoma man with a 24-year history of killing, assault and kidnapping was arrested Sunday on suspicion of raping and sexually mutilating a 7-year-old Tacoma boy.

The story contained the following description of Shriner's history:

Police on Sunday said Shriner was released from prison in 1987 after serving a 21-year sentence for killing a young girl and has been arrested for crimes involving children since then.

But News Tribune files show Shriner was never convicted of killing the 15-year-old girl whose body he led police to in 1966. Shriner was not charged for that crime but instead was committed to the state Department of Institutions as a "defective delinquent." Psychiatrists at Eastern State Hospital then said he was too dangerous to be at large.

In that incident, after being detained for choking a 7-year-old East Side girl, Shriner, then 16, led authorities to the body of a 15-year-old retarded girl who had disappeared several months earlier. The girl, who was strangled, had been tied to a tree in a wooded area about a half-mile away from the scene of Saturday's assault.

Files also show a long list of Shriner's other victims.

Shriner, who has been described in court records as mildly retarded, in 1977 pleaded guilty to assault and kidnapping charges in connection with the abduction of two 16-year-old girls in Spanaway. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison after Eastern State Hospital officials determined he was not suited for the hospital's sexual psychopath program.

Shriner has twice been acquitted of charges in connection with attacks on young women.

Since his release from state prison in 1987, Shriner has served 66 days in the Pierce County Jail for second-degree assault. Part of that sentence was suspended. Jail and police officials Sunday said they did not know the circumstances of that crime or the victim's age.

Shriner was released from the county jail last December after serving 67 days for an unlawful imprisonment conviction stemming from an attack on a 10-year-old boy who escaped after being tied to a fence post and beaten. Shriner originally was charged with attempted statutory rape and unlawful imprisonment in connection with that attack. After Shriner pleaded guilty to the unlawful imprisonment count, prosecutors recommended that 30 days of his sentence be converted to community service.

Police on Sunday said another unlawful imprisonment charge is pending against Shriner.

Shriner appeared before the Pierce County Superior Court on Monday afternoon. The courtroom was jammed with spectators and reporters, while pickets outside demanded high bail. The judge set Shriner's bail at one million dollars.

B. Tuesday, May 23, 1989

Tuesday's papers carried considerably more detail about Shriner's past and began to explore the adequacy of the state's response to that past. Under the headline "System Just Couldn't Keep Suspect," the Tacoma Morning News Tribune reported that state officials had sought to have Shriner civilly committed in 1987 when he was released from prison after serving "the full 10 year sentence for assaulting and abducting two 16-year-old girls." The story revealed that Washington's Parole Board had denied all requests to release Shriner on parole. In addition, it reported that state officials had sought civil commitment when Shriner completed his prison term because he "had hatched elaborate plans to maim or kill youngsters while waiting out the final months of his prison sentence in early 1987. . . ." The chair of the state Indeterminate Sentence Review Board was quoted as saying that Shriner "had lists of apparatus he might need in that regard. ..." The story reported that after being held for seventy-two hours, Shriner was released because the judge found that he did not fit the statutory criteria for civil commitment.

The article revealed further details on Shriner's arrests since his release from prison in 1987. Four months after his release he was arrested for stabbing a sixteen-year-old boy in the arm with a knife. After an evaluation at a state mental hospital, Shriner was found competent to stand trial by a psychologist who reported "[b]ecause he seems to possess such tenuous behavioral controls over aggressive and sexual impulses, we believe he is a high risk for future violent acts, especially against children."

Initially, Shriner was charged with assault in the second degree for the attack on the sixteen year old. After plea bargaining, Shriner pled guilty to the misdemeanor of attempted simple assault and was sentenced to the statutory maximum sentence of ninety days in jail. The Tacoma Morning News Tribune reported that the judge who sentenced Shriner was a presiding criminal judge who would see up to one thousand cases per month and did not remember Shriner. When asked about the psychologist's report, the judge stated that "[y]ou can't give an exceptional sentence based simply on someone's thought that they might be dangerous in the future."

The Tacoma Morning News Tribune also reported that Shriner was arrested again in January, 1988 in connection with an attack on a ten-year-old boy who was tied to a fence post and beaten. Originally charged with attempted unlawful imprisonment, a gross misdemeanor, and attempted statutory rape, a felony, Shriner plead guilty to attempted unlawful imprisonment when the attempted statutory rape was dropped as part of a plea bargain. He was sentenced to sixty-seven days in jail and ordered to pay $78 in court costs and $70 to the crime victim's compensation fund. He was released from jail in December, 1988.

The Tacoma Morning News Tribune story also announced that donations towards the mutilated boy's medical bills could be sent to a Tacoma bank.

The story quickly spread throughout the state. Tuesday morning's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the newspaper with the widest circulation in the state, carried a front page story under the headline "Mutilation Suspect Denies All Charges-Spectators Cheer As Judge Sets High Bail." The story contained essentially all the information carried by the Tacoma Morning News Tribune. Tuesday afternoon's The Seattle Times, carried the story on page one under the headline "Outrage In Tacoma-Police Frustrated, Neighbors Angry That Suspect in Boy's Mutilation Was Free."

C. Wednesday, May 24, 1989

Wednesday's news focused on the fact that so many officials had known of Shriner's history and had predicted he would commit acts of violence. The Tacoma Morning News Tribune carried two front page stories, one under the headline "Outrage Over the Attack, Over the System," and the other under the headline "Lack of Options, Data, Time Restrict What Judges Can Do." It also editorialized about "[a]n offense that calls for outrage." The Seattle Times headlined its story, "System Couldn't Cope With Assault Suspect," and detailed Shriner's past contacts with Washington's criminal, juvenile, and civil commitment systems. Under the heading, "Put Mutilators Away," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorialized:

This case makes clear that a class of criminal exists that is...