SPOKANE – Convicted rapist Kevin Coe does not want to testify at a hearing later this month to determine if he is to remain in custody now that his prison term has ended.
Defense attorney Tim Trageser on Thursday filed a motion asking Spokane County Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor to grant Coe the right to remain silent during the Oct. 30 hearing.
The state is seeking to hold Coe indefinitely as a violent sexual predator, and it may call him as a witness to bolster its case.
“The state’s threat to call Mr. Coe at the probable cause hearing is really a means to coerce him into stipulating to probable cause or otherwise not contest the hearing,” Trageser said in his motion. “It is anticipated that the questions will encompass a period of decades of Mr. Coe’s life. … “
“The state will use the probable cause hearing as a ‘fishing expedition’ to ferret out every detail of Mr. Coe’s life, particularly his sexual history,” he added.
The probable cause hearing will determine whether the state has established a case to allow the possible civil commitment of Coe, a process similar to involuntary commitment of the mentally ill. If O’Connor agrees with the state, she would later preside over a jury trial seeking to indefinitely keep Coe in the state’s Special Commitment Center for sex offenders on McNeil Island in Pierce County.
Assistant Attorney General Todd Bowers said he had not seen Trageser’s motion.
“I can’t recall ever having seen that motion in any of these cases in 11 years of doing this,” Bowers said.
Bowers has not yet decided whether he will call Coe to testify. Under a criminal proceeding, Coe would have the legal right to refuse. But because this case is a civil proceeding, Coe “doesn’t have that blanket right,” Bowers said.
Trageser agreed to a point, but cited cases in King County where judges granted similar motions allowing defendants to avoid testifying at the probable cause hearings.
“If Mr. Coe is called as a witness, he frankly wouldn’t be prepared to testify. He is in no position to be called and be grilled by the state,” Trageser said.
Trageser and Coe continue to go through volumes of evidence that includes police reports of many of the 43 sexual attacks that Spokane police attributed to the South Hill rapist.
Coe was arrested in 1981 and charged with six of those rapes. He initially was convicted on four counts, but after two rounds of appeals just one rape conviction remained. For that case, Coe was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
He was scheduled to be released from prison Sept. 8, but will remain in custody in the Pierce County facility until the civil commitment process is decided. Trageser and Bowers confirmed that process could take as long as two years.
If O’Connor allows the case to proceed, prosecutors would have to convince a jury that Coe has a mental abnormality or personality disorder that makes him more likely than not to reoffend if he were to be released into the community, Bowers said.
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