On October 11, Federal District Judge Jack Tanner ordered that David Rice be given a new trial. Rice, 38, was originally sentenced to die for the 1985 Christmas Eve slayings of Charles and Annie Goldmark and their two sons, Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, at their Seattle home. Charles Goldmark was a celebrated civil-liberties attorney, as was his father, John; Rice had confused Charles with John and incorrectly thought that John Goldmark was a Communist and Jewish. Tanner ruled that Rice's first lawyer, Bill Lanning, had inadequately defended him. Rice's current lawyers argued that Lanning, who was in his seventies during the trial and has since died, was physically unable to keep up with a capital-punishment case. They said that Lanning allowed police to extract a confession from his client without an attorney present, and he didn't object to the confession being admitted into evidence during trial. They said that these actions were devastating to Rice's case. Rice's attorneys also contended that Lanning incompetently prepared for the penalty phase of the trial. Thorough preparation, they said, would have unearthed a psychiatrist's evaluation that Rice suffers from paranoid delusional disorder, supporting the contention that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. "That evidence about mental illness would have made a difference, and the jury never heard it," Peter Offenbecher, one of Rice's attorneys, said. http://www.scn.org/activism/wcadp/winter98.html