A man’s new trial in a 1989 Tacoma murder was cut short Thursday through a guilty plea. A judge had allowed James Ronald Howland to again appear in front of a jury after an attorney for the Washington Innocence Project argued that newly-discovered DNA evidence supported his innocence.
A Pierce County judge vacated Howland’s conviction for aggravated first-degree murder in 2024. An attorney for Howland, 69, had contended that testing of bloodied items taken from the crime scene and Howland’s property excluded him and pointed to someone else being responsible for the killing.
Howland’s new trial was underway when he pleaded guilty Thursday to premeditated first-degree murder. He has been incarcerated since his pretrial arrest in 1989 and was sentenced to life without parole when a jury first convicted him in 1990…