David Lewis Rice
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Lewis Rice (born 1958) is a follower of the Christian Identity movement who, on Christmas Eve in 1985, forced his way into the Seattle home of civil rights attorney Charles Goldmark with a toy pistol and stabbed Goldmark, his wife, and two children to death. Rice erroneously believed the family was Jewish and Communist, and saw the crime as part of a broader religious war between American Christianity and Soviet atheism. Goldmark and his family had been active in progressive politics in Washington for years, and his parents had won a highly publicized libel suit in 1964 as part of an effort to refute accusations of past membership in the Communist Party. When confessing to the crimes, Rice called Goldmark the "top Jew" and "top Communist" in the state.
Rice was convicted in 1986 of aggravated murder for the four deaths and was sentenced to death, but the conviction was later overturned on the grounds of an ineffective defense. A sticking point of Rice's case throughout the trial process was the psychotic symptoms that he sometimes displayed, and his attorney's lack of emphasis on them. In 1998, he finally pled guilty to the crimes in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. He remains alive in prison serving out a life sentence. The Goldmark Murders remain one of the most notorious anti-Semitic hate crimes in recent memory in the United States, even though the victims were not actually Jewish. It also remains a cause celebre of capital punishment proponents, since Rice avoided death based only on the ineptness of his attorney's work at trial.
