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Andrew Bergh
Andrew Bergh

April 27, 2000

When is a golf pencil a deadly weapon?

By ANDREW BERGH
Special to the Journal

What do writing paper, dental floss and golf pencils have in common?

Absolutely nothing.

But put all three items in the hands of a dangerous criminal, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a homemade spear on your hands.

State v. Skenandore proves my point.

In July 1996, Neil Skenandore was an inmate at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center on the Olympic peninsula. Like most prisoners at the facility, Skenandore had plenty of idle time on his hands.

So the convicted felon got creative.

The first thing Skenandore did was to procure some writing paper. Next, he somehow scored dental floss and a golf pencil. (In case you don’t tee it up, golfers use a particular type of pencil to keep score during a round of golf. About half as long as a regular pencil, golf pencils contain hard lead and are usually sharpened to a fine point.)

With these basic ingredients at hand, Skenandore secretly went about his work.

As his first order of business, the jailbird rolled up sheets of writing paper into tight, semi-rigid sections. Skenandore then bound three or four sections together with the dental floss, which he also used to secure the golf pencil to one of the ends of the “shaft.” Just like that, Skenandore had ingeniously fashioned a three-foot-long homemade spear.

On July 21, 1996, the second phase of Skenandore’s scheme kicked in.

That morning, Jason Jones, one of the correction officers at the prison, was handing out sack breakfasts to the inmates. When he got to Skenandore’s cell, Jones looked through the viewing window on the left side of the cell door and bent over to pass the meal through a small, locking portal.

I don’t know whether Skenandore was privately feuding with the guard, protesting the quality of prison food, or just in a foul mood. Whatever the reason, before Jones could pass the sack breakfast through the opening, Skenandore jabbed him three times with the homemade spear – twice in the chest, and once on the left arm.

But if you want blood and guts, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

At the time of the assault, Jones was wearing a short-sleeve shirt over a T-shirt. The spear didn’t cause any damage – just three pencil marks on his outer shirt. And when Jones was examined at the center’s medical clinic, the nurse found no broken skin – just two red marks on his chest that faded away within two hours, and a two-inch long mark on his left arm.

But that doesn’t mean Skenandore got off Scot-free. On the contrary, he was charged with second degree assault in January 1997, while a second (and less serious) charge for custodial assault was added almost three months later.

Under Washington law, a person is guilty of second-degree assault if he assaults another with a deadly weapon. A weapon is “deadly” if, under the circumstances in which it is used, it is “readily capable” of causing “substantial bodily harm.” So when Skenandore’s case went to trial in November 1997, the prosecutor argued that the homemade spear was a deadly weapon because Skenandore had tried to put out Jones’ eye with the sharpened pencil.

Siding with the prosecutor, a Clallam County jury convicted Skenandore of both assault charges.

But in a post-trial motion, the spearmaker said his second-degree assault conviction should be dismissed because there was insufficient evidence that his homemade spear was a deadly weapon.

Unswayed, the trial judge denied the motion and sentenced Skenandore to six years in prison. Adding insult to injury, the judge also said the sentence should run consecutively to his previous sentence for first degree murder.

Skenandore appealed. (Hey, why not, when you’ve got no other commitments and free, court-appointed counsel?) And after waiting over two years, Skenandore’s perseverance paid off last month.

That’s when an appeals court unanimously agreed that his conviction for second degree assault should be reversed.

It’s true, said the court, that the homemade spear could potentially cause substantial bodily harm. The fact remained, however, that the victim had barely suffered a scratch.

The court also noted that given the circumstances of the assault, the homemade spear was incapable of poking out Jones’ eye. This was so, said the court, because the guard was looking through the cell’s window at the time of the assault, and also because Skenandore had little room to maneuver the spear through the small, waist-high opening in the door.

Does this mean Skenandore will skate? Not hardly, since he still faces sentencing on the custodial assault charge and has to complete his sentence on the murder conviction.

And on top of that, his dental floss privileges are undoubtedly long gone.


Seattle lawyer Andrew Bergh, a former prosecutor and insurance defense attorney, now limits his practice to plaintiff's personal injury cases. He fields questions via email at andy@berghlaw.com.


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