Harger: Somehow, three years is the full sentence for the Third and Pine shooting. Sentence served, says the state

Monday afternoon, the state sent out a notice that William Tolliver is out of prison. Sentence served. One person dead, seven others shot. He served a little more than three years for it.

Let me tell you about an evening in January of 2020. I was staying late at work, finishing up a project, when the newsroom scanner blared.

So I grabbed my reporting gear and drove downtown to Third and Pine.

I have covered a lot of scenes. That one I still see. Chaos. A dead woman had just been whisked away by paramedics. Seven other people were shot, including a nine-year-old boy who had spent the day at the Pacific Science Center with his family. I walked up to a man who lived on the street and asked him what he saw. He couldn’t hold his hands still. He tried to answer me, and all he could say was he saw that little boy get shot.

None of those people had anything to do with what started it. Prosecutors described this in court as a gang feud. Two crews, one grudge, and the corner they chose to settle it on was the busiest corner in Seattle at rush hour. Between the two shooters, they had 65 prior arrests and four felony convictions. One of them was acquitted. The other pleaded to manslaughter and got four years. He served a bit more than three.

So let me first explain how the acquittal happened, because that’s the part that should have been fixed six years ago.

Marquise Tolbert’s defense was self-defense. He argued he was in a gunfight and he feared for his life, and under Washington law, that argument was available to him. A jury found him not guilty. He pleaded guilty to having the gun.

A man goes to a downtown corner armed to settle a score with a rival crew. The shooting starts. Bullets go into a crowd of strangers. A woman dies. A child is hit. And the law lets him say he was the one who was afraid.

That law is a loophole, and it’s still open today

So how does a first-degree murder charge and six counts of assault turn into four years for Tolliver? He pleaded guilty to amended charges in June of 2023. Second-degree manslaughter, third-degree assault, unlawful possession of a firearm. That’s the deal that was on the table after a jury had already acquitted the other shooter on self-defense. Once that verdict came in, the case prosecutors were left holding was a different case than the one they filed.

And Tolliver didn’t exactly spend the wait quietly. In March of 2023, before trial, he was released to electronic home monitoring at his grandmother’s house. The conditions were simple. No guns, no contact with witnesses, and no contact with co-defendants. A couple of months later, he was back in custody, accused of threatening someone with a gun. That was while he was on release, in a murder case, for a shooting that killed a woman and put a bullet in a nine-year-old.

Washington already has a rule for this. If a jury decides you started the fight, self-defense is off the table. The catch is what the state has to prove. Prosecutors have to convince 12 people beyond a reasonable doubt that this particular defendant is the one who started it. In a shootout between two crews, where the witnesses are scattered and terrified, and nobody agrees on who fired first, that is close to impossible. The rule works fine when one person attacks another. It falls apart when two armed men shoot at each other in a crowd.

I brought this case up a few weeks ago when I talked about the shooting at the Bite of Seattle, where a teenager fired back at someone who shot first, and three people died. I said then that Third and Pine set the precedent everybody would reach for. I didn’t expect to be back on it this fast.

Readers keep bringing this up. They ask why anybody should believe the system works when the paperwork says sentence served and a woman is still dead. I don’t have a good answer for that. What I have is the fix.

Olympia can close this. One bill. Say plainly that a man who arms himself and goes to a public place to settle a beef with another crew doesn’t get to claim self-defense when strangers catch the bullets.

Drafting that is not simple. You have to write it so it doesn’t punish the person who was ambushed and had no choice, and the line between a fight you chose and a fight that found you is a genuinely hard one to put into statute.

But hard is not the same as impossible, and six years is a long time not to have tried.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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