It’s not a good time to be a cop killer seeking mercy or understanding in Washington state courts. But Darrin Hutchinson is at it again; he recently filed a motion in Island County Superior Court to have his conviction and sentence vacated. Needless to say, his chances are slim.
Hutchinson shot and killed Island County deputies William Heffernan and John Saxerud in the breathalyzer room of the Island County jail in Coupeville following a DUI arrest Nov. 14, 1987. He took a key from Saxerud’s pocket, stole a patrol car and abandoned it in a ravine. He was arrested at his parent’s house a short time later. Hutchinson, a South Whidbey resident, was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
It may seem like a cut-and-dried case, but Hutchinson has a long and complicated history in the appeals and supreme courts. At one point, an appeals court overturned his conviction, though the state Supreme Court later reversed that decision and upheld the conviction. Hutchinson exhausted appeals to the state appeals court, the state Supreme Court, the U.S Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. But that apparently doesn’t stop him from filing motions on his own, using a prison typewriter and a pen.
The motion Hutchinson filed in court Jan. 7 offers a sad glimpse into the mind of someone capable of gunning down two deputies in cold blood. In court papers, he claims that the conviction should be vacated because the judge in the original trial had raped his sister years before. He claims diplomatic immunity because President Wilson gave his great grandfather, the Russian Czar Nicholas II, safe haven under the secret Russian Royal Family Protection Clause. And he writes that there was a conspiracy against him and that the detectives destroyed the victims’ bodies.
Hutchinson also believed in aliens and shared a sketch he made of a man from outer space with a former South Whidbey Record reporter who interviewed him in prison. At his murder trial, Hutchinson claimed he acted in self defense against abusive cops and he put up a diminished capacity defense. I’m not sure that “diminished capacity” in the right term.