Sentence reduced for Finley man involved in 2013 high-speed chase, crash with patrol cars

The prison sentence for a Finley man, convicted of leading police on a 100 mph chase in 2013 and plowing into two patrol cars, has been cut in half.

Shane K. DeWeber, 37, has been a free man since April 13, when a Benton County Superior Court judge granted his release because of a state Court of Appeals decision.

DeWeber returned to a Kennewick courtroom on Wednesday for Judge Cameron Mitchell to re-sentence him to three years and five months in prison.

He already had served 1,265 days of his original seven-year, two-month exceptional sentence. Credit for good behavior while locked up bumps that time served to 1,898 days, or more than five years and three months, explained Deputy Prosecutor Terry Bloor.

So, DeWeber doesn’t have to spend any more time in custody for sending two law enforcement officers scrambling as he crashed into two parked cars.

When DeWeber was sentenced in March 2015, he called the crime spree the biggest mistake of his life, apologized to the officers and thanked them for not killing him.

“I don’t ever want to be that man I was that night,” he said at the time. “I live in shame.”

DeWeber had asked officers responding to the disturbance at his estranged wife’s home on Oct. 8, 2013, to shoot him. He was armed with a sword, ignored commands to drop the weapon and wasn’t affected when a deputy tried to stun him with a Taser.

He then led them on a chase that topped 100 mph, with DeWeber often driving on the wrong side of the road, before hitting the patrol cars on Haney Road.

Benton County sheriff’s Sgt. Mathew Clarke and Kennewick police Officer Liz Grant were putting spike strips across Haney Road when they saw DeWeber point his Dodge Ram at their cars on the gravel shoulder. They ran away and were hit by flying debris as the truck catapulted over the patrol cars.

DeWeber claimed he took about 250 psycho-stimulant pills before the incident, and didn’t recall anything from the time he swallowed the medication to when he woke up in the hospital.

He crawled out of his crashed pickup and tried to attack the officers on foot. Another Taser again had no effect on him, but he was subdued by officers and taken to the hospital for treatment.

DeWeber was charged with two counts of first-degree assault, but the jury acquitted him on those and opted to go with the lesser crimes of second-degree assault. He also was convicted of attempting to elude police.

The assaults included the aggravating circumstance that the victims were law enforcement officers performing their duties.

Judge Mitchell, during the 2015 sentencing hearing, determined that the law enforcement factor supported a sentence above the standard range of two years and nine months to three years and seven months. He doubled the top of the range for the 86-month term.

DeWeber made it clear at the time that he would appeal based on two special verdict forms, which noted that the victims were law enforcement performing their official duties, but left off the part that DeWeber knew they were officers.

Mitchell had ruled then that the jury instructions were proper in covering the special verdicts.

Judge Kevin M. Korsmo of the Court of Appeals agreed with Mitchell’s ruling, writing a dissenting opinion saying DeWeber’s original sentence should stand.

“Nothing in our case law requires that the special verdict form set forth the underlying elements of the special verdict,” Korsmo wrote. “As long as the jury was properly instructed on the elements — as was done in this case — the verdict form need only assure that the jury is returning a verdict on the question presented to them.”

But Judge Laurel Siddoway and Acting Chief Judge Robert Lawrence-Berrey were in the majority on the three-judge panel.

Siddoway and Lawrence-Berrey said Judge Mitchell committed an error by ordering an exceptional sentence that was not supported by “a sufficient jury finding” since special verdict forms only mentioned two of the three required elements.

This story was originally published August 3, 2017 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Sentence reduced for Finley man involved in 2013 high-speed chase, crash with patrol cars."