More than three decades after a brutal killing shocked Sumner, Randy Philip Capps was back in a Pierce County courtroom Friday, asking a judge to give him something he did not get the first time around: a fixed prison term and a chance at release.
Capps, a Gig Harbor man serving life without parole for his role in the 1994 killing of Marietta Dela Cruz, appeared for resentencing on Friday, April 10, 2026, in Pierce County Superior Court. He was 20 years old when Dela Cruz was killed on March 15, 1994. The hearing was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. at the Pierce County courthouse in Tacoma.
According to court records, Capps first asked the court in 2019 to vacate his life-without-parole sentence, then followed up with a personal-restraint petition that was addressed in 2022, per the Washington Court of Appeals. The case stems from the March 15, 1994, killing of Dela Cruz; Capps pleaded guilty to aggravated first-degree murder in 1995, according to reporting by The Seattle Times.
As reported by KING5, Capps' attorney urged the court in a sentencing memorandum to replace the life term with a new sentence of 400 months. A defense report filed with the court states that Capps has expressed remorse, obtained his GED, and completed prison programs during his time in custody. The same filing also acknowledges serious infractions earlier in his prison record, and both prosecution and defense submitted evaluations ahead of the hearing. The state agreed to move forward with resentencing after appellate litigation over mandatory life-without-parole sentences for young adults.
Legal background
The push to resentence Capps traces back to a 2021 Washington Supreme Court decision in the case In re Pers. Restraint of Monschke, which held that mandatory life without parole is unconstitutional for people who were 18 to 20 years old at the time of their crimes and instructed judges to weigh the mitigating features of youth. That ruling opened the door for judges to swap automatic life terms for term-of-years sentences, according to the Washington Supreme Court. The Monschke decision is the reason Pierce County prosecutors and defense lawyers have been reopening long-closed files for fresh sentencing hearings.
Co-defendants and local context
Pierce County has already begun resentencing others connected to the 1994 case. One co-defendant, Jason Allison, was resentenced in December 2024 to 400 months, and prosecutors say Pierce County has more similar "Monschke" resentencing cases than any other county in Washington, according to reporting by The News Tribune. Some co-defendants, including the victim's daughter and another defendant who turned 21 just days before the killing, are not eligible for resentencing under the youth-sentencing rulings, according to court records and prior reporting.
If the judge agrees to vacate Capps' life-without-parole sentence, the court can replace it with a specific term, which might or might not match the 400-month recommendation and could itself be appealed. For now, the case has become an early test of how Pierce County judges will apply the post-Monschke framework to one of the county's oldest life-without-parole files.
