Life without parole in Rafay family killings

05:04 PM PDT on Friday, October 22, 2004

From KING Staff Reports and Wire Reports

SEATTLE - Glen Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay, both convicted of killing Rafay's parents and sister in Bellevue, Wash. 10 years ago have been given life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Both attested to thier innocence during their chance to speak in court before the sentencing. Burns told the court that his attorneys had been ineffective and that jurors had not been able to properly understand the his state of mind when he and Rafay told undercover Canadian police that they had committed the killings.

Much of the prosecution's case rested on the confessions.

But King County Judge Charles Mertel wasn't having any of it.

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Sebastian Burns spoke for over an hour at his sentencing in King County Superior Court Friday, Oct. 22, 2004.

"Mr. Burns, you're not immoral - you're amoral. You have no moral rudder," Mertel told Burns during the back-to-back sentencing hearings. "You are an arrogant, convicted killer."

Clearly annoyed and disturbed by Burns, Mertel sentenced him to three life sentences -- to be served one after the other - without the possibility of parole. Burns is also prohibited from profiting in any way from the crime through book, movies or other artistic works.

Rafay was given the same sentence just minutes later. Hechoked back tears addressing the court on Friday, saying the loss of his parents and sister has caused him great anguish.

"Unlike your colleague, I find you genuinely remorseful," Mertel said.

Like Burns, however, Rafay said that he had lied when he made his confession to undercover police.

Burns and Rafay had both been expected to receive mandatory life sentences for the death of Rafay’s parents and sister at their Bellevue home in 1994.

Teens at the time, Burns and Rafay fled to Vancouver, British Columbia, shortly after reporting they had found Tariq and Sultana Rafay and their 20-year-old autistic daughter, Basma, beaten to death with baseball bats in the Rafay's Bellevue home on July 12, 1994.

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An emotional Atif Rafay cried as he addressed the courtroom. The judge later sentenced him to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

The two were charged with aggravated first-degree murder, punishable in Washington by either death or life in prison without parole.

For years, Canadian authorities refused to send them back to Washington because of the chance of their execution. The two finally returned to face trial in 2001, after King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng agreed not to seek the death penalty.

Prosecutors alleged Burns, now 29, wielded the aluminum bat used in the killings, and that he and Rafay, 28, planned the murders for money.

The two were arrested in Vancouver in August 1995, the same month that the family estate, valued at about $300,000, was turned over to Rafay, who had just completed his first year at Cornell University.

Defense lawyers insisted throughout the trial that the two merely found the bodies when they returned from seeing a movie, and that police had focused too much on Burns and Rafay and not enough on other suspects.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police planted bugs in the defendants' home and car - tactics that were legal in Canada but wouldn't have been allowed in the United States - and agents posed as gangsters to obtain taped confessions from the two before arresting them.

Burns' lawyer, Song Richardson, sought to bar the videotaped confession from trial, but Mertel allowed it, saying if the methods were legal in Canada they were admissible under international treaty.

The case took bizarre twists, with Burns being assigned to Richardson after jail guards reported seeing him having sex with his previous lawyer, Theresa Olson, in a jail interview room. She has denied the charge, characterizing the encounter as "a hug gone bad."

Olson lost her job as a public defender, and a disciplinary hearing examiner has recommended she be suspended from practicing law for two years.