A convicted rapist lost a bid for freedom Monday after the state Court of Appeals rejected his claim that Snohomish County prosecutors engineered an unfair trial in 2000.
Mitchell Gaff argued it was wrong for prosecutors to challenge state mental health experts who were then recommending Gaff be considered for more freedom.
Gaff has been locked up since 1984 for a series of sexual attacks in Everett. Since the mid-1990s he’s been confined in the state’s prisonlike treatment center for sexual predators, now located on McNeil Island.
Gaff argued that it was unfair for deputy prosecutor Paul Stern to use the trial to raise questions about the opinions offered by state experts without presenting an expert of his own.
"While the state’s decision not to call such an expert is unusual, it is not prohibited by any authority Gaff cites," the appellate court ruled. "Because he has cited no authority, we must presume he has found none."
Stern said the decision means Gaff will, at least for now, remain confined, and that is good news. Stern said his first phone calls after the ruling was announced were to some of the women Gaff raped. They were relieved to hear he’ll remain behind bars, Stern said.
At his 2000 trial, Gaff testified he raped eight women and girls during the late 1970s and early 1980s and sexually attacked scores more. At one point, he was accosting or attempting to attack 10 to 30 women a day, knocking some to the ground and putting his hands up their skirts, he admitted.
But Gaff also insisted he’d changed over the years, thanks to treatment.
Gaff has been behind bars since he slipped into an Everett home in 1984 and bound and gagged two sisters, one 14, the other 16. He spent more than two hours repeatedly raping, sodomizing and beating the pair.
The attack ended only when one of the girls was able to wriggle free and escape, naked, into the street. At the time, Gaff had been trying to strangle one of the girls with an electrical cord.
Gaff served 10 years in prison for the 1984 rapes. On the eve of his release, prosecutors filed papers seeking to have him detained under the state’s sexual predator law. A Snohomish County jury in 1995 determined Gaff belonged behind bars receiving treatment.
The state’s experts testified that even with treatment, there was a 64 percent chance that Gaff would reoffend within a decade if released.
Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.
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