Results 1 to 5 of 5

Thread: Richard Lee Whitley - Virginia Execution - July 6, 1987

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217

    Richard Lee Whitley - Virginia Execution - July 6, 1987




    Facts of Crime: On July 25, 1980, in Fairfax County, Richard Whitley slit the throat of 63-year-old next-door neighbor, Phoebe Parsons.

    Victim: Phoebe Parsons

    Time of Death: 11:07 p.m

    Manner of Death: Electric chair

    Last Meal: None recorded

    Final statement: Made no final statement.

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    July 7, 1987

    Richard Whitley dies in Va. electric chair

    RICHMOND, JULY 6 -- Richard Lee Whitley, a part-time house painter and handyman, was executed tonight for the brutal sex murder of his 63-year-old next-door neighbor, Phoebe Parsons, seven years ago in the Pimmit Hills area of Fairfax County.

    Whitley, 41, was believed to be the first Fairfax County resident to die in Virginia's electric chair.

    He was pronounced dead at 11:07 p.m., five minutes after the electricity was turned on, according to Dwight Perry, state Corrections Department operations officer. Perry said Whitley, who was attended by a prison chaplain until his execution, made no final statement.

    Whitley's appeals ran out at 7:10 p.m. when the Supreme Court refused to block the execution, but Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, who rejected a clemency bid Friday, remained in his office at the Statehouse and kept a telephone line open to the penitentiary in the event of unexpected developments. Whitley was the second person executed in Virginia since Baliles became governor a year and a half ago.

    The only dissenters to the Supreme Court decision, according to a court spokesman, were Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall.

    Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Whitley's appeals for a stay.

    Whitley attorney Timothy Kaine based his appeals on arguments that his client, who had an IQ of 75, was "insane" or "feebleminded" and should have been commited to a state hospital.

    Tonight, Kaine told reporters before the execution: "Murder is wrong in the gulag, in Afghanistan, in Soweto, in the mountains of Guatemala, in Fairfax County . . . and even the Spring Street Peniten- tiary" here.

    Whitley was convicted May 13, 1981, of what Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. described as the "unbelievably brutal" slaying of the Pimmit Hills widow.

    At the trial, a signed statement was introduced in which Whitley admitted to strangling Parsons, cutting her throat and sexually assaulting her with two umbrellas.

    Although expert witnesses testified on appeal that Whitley had "organic brain dysfunction," Circuit Court F. Bruce Bach, who presided at the trial, ruled that there were no legal grounds for finding Whitley to be feebleminded.

    Whitley offered no reason for the attack other than that he went on a two-week drug and alcohol binge after his wife left him.

    Pimmit Hills is off Rte. 7 just inside the Capital Beltway. Many residents interviewed there today said they were unaware of the murder, which occurred July 25, 1980.

    But one longtime resident, Margaret Brazas, recalled Parsons as "really a good woman, a church woman and a mother. This was a very brutal murder. She didn't deserve this."

    In a telephone interview with a Richmond television station, Whitley said he was "ready to die. I know they're going to kill me."

    He said he would have liked to have had the execution televised and to be put to death without a hood over his head to "let the people see exactly what facial expressions you have when they put the juice to you."

    Whitley was the sixth person executed in Virginia, and the 81st in the nation, since the Supreme Court lifted the death penalty ban in 1978.

    As in past executions here, rival crowds of protesters showed up outside the brick-walled prison. On one side were about 100 antideath-penalty demonstrators who held a candlelight vigil. On the other was a like number from the surrounding blue-collar neighborhood who jeered at the death penalty opponents.Staff writer Liz Lazarus contributed to this report.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031602052.html

  3. #3
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    On Death Penalty Cases, Tim Kaine Revealed Inner Conflict

    By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and THOMAS KAPLAN
    The New York Times

    Kevin Green’s lawyers were pleading with the governor for mercy.

    It was spring 2008, and Mr. Green, a 31-year-old who had shot and killed a grocery owner, was on Virginia’s death row. His woes, his lawyers said, dated to childhood; he was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, repeated three years of elementary school, could not even tie his shoes.

    His was precisely the kind of execution a young Tim Kaine, a Harvard-educated lawyer with a deeply felt revulsion for capital punishment, would have worked himself to the bone to stop.

    “Murder is wrong in the gulag, in Afghanistan, in Soweto, in the mountains of Guatemala, in Fairfax County,” he once declared, as one of his clients was about to be put to death. “And even the Spring Street Penitentiary.”

    But on the night of May 27, Mr. Green was led into the execution chamber at the Greensville Correctional Center, strapped to a gurney and hooked up to intravenous lines.

    Shortly after 10 p.m., he became the fifth person put to death while Mr. Kaine was the governor of Virginia.

    For Mr. Kaine, now a senator and Hillary Clinton’s newly named running mate, no issue has been as fraught politically or personally as the death penalty. His handling of capital punishment reveals a central truth about Mr. Kaine: He is both a man of conviction and very much a politician, a man of unshakable faith who nonetheless recognizes — and expediently bends to, his critics suggest — the reality of the Democratic Party and the state he represents.

    He opposes both abortion and the death penalty, he has said, because “my faith teaches life is sacred.” Yet he strongly supports a woman’s right to choose and has a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood. And Mr. Kaine presided over 11 executions as governor, delaying some but granting clemency only once.

    He cast his decisions in simple terms: As Virginia’s governor, he was sworn to uphold the law — a message that helped him get elected governor. Calm, never letting his passion overtake reason and open to compromise, Mr. Kaine, 58, is well liked even by many Republicans he has worked with. His centrist appeal is one reason Mrs. Clinton added him to her ticket.

    But some death penalty opponents cast his decisions as political survival and ambition.

    “Tim is a politician,” said Jack Payden-Travers, who served as the executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty when Mr. Kaine was the governor. “Even though they say they’re not running for the next office, there’s always something coming up.”

    Deep inside, Mr. Kaine’s allies say, his role in seeing prisoners put to death tore at him. On days when an execution was scheduled, said Wayne Turnage, his former chief of staff, the normally outgoing governor would be “less communicative, and quietly pensive,” and when the moment was near, he would retreat to his corner office and remain there alone.

    When it was over, an aide would enter quietly, to report the dead man’s last words.

    “I can’t say that I saw him praying,” Mr. Kaine’s former chief legal counsel, Larry Roberts, recalled. “I’m sure that he was.”

    Wherever Mr. Kaine could hold to his ideals, his supporters say, he did. Though he commuted only one sentence, to life in prison, Mr. Roberts said the governor’s team had used an expansive legal theory to have that inmate declared mentally unfit for execution, interpreting Supreme Court case law in a way Mr. Kaine’s predecessors probably had not.

    When the Supreme Court took up the constitutionality of lethal injection in 2008, Mr. Kaine suspended executions until the court ruled to allow the procedure.

    And when Republicans in the General Assembly tried to expand use of the death penalty to cover more crimes, the governor blocked them.

    “If there was any death penalty bill that came up, it would go into the incinerator, I will tell you that,” Mr. Turnage said. “There was no sentiment for expanding the death penalty. That wasn’t going to happen.”

    Mr. Kaine declined to be interviewed. But in a 2009 interview with The Virginian-Pilot toward the end of his term, he said each clemency decision had been “very painful,” though his experience as a lawyer had prepared him.

    “I’ve eaten the last meal, and I’ve held the guy’s hand, and I’ve been to the Supreme Court, and I’ve been to the protests, and I know this very, very well,” he said. “And because of that, it was kind of demystified.”

    Mr. Kaine was a new associate at a Richmond law firm, specializing in civil litigation but eager to carve out a portfolio in civil rights, in the mid-1980s when he took the first of two pro-bono capital punishment cases he would handle. His client was Richard Whitley, convicted of murder for strangling and slitting the throat of an elderly female neighbor, and then sexually assaulting her corpse, after an alcohol and drug binge.

    It was “not a sympathetic case,” but Mr. Kaine, driven by his faith, “was extremely passionate about it,” said his co-counsel, Tom Wolf, who later became Mr. Kaine’s law partner and close friend. “He said there were a lot of people on death row who hadn’t had a fair trial, and there were not nearly enough lawyers willing to take those cases.”

    Virginia’s Supreme Court declined to block the execution, so Mr. Kaine turned to the federal courts. He argued that Mr. Whitley had not received a fair trial, because his court-appointed lawyer had failed to investigate or introduce evidence of the psychological damage Mr. Whitley had suffered as a child.

    The judges, Mr. Wolf said, “didn’t buy it.”

    Neither did the Supreme Court, which rejected Mr. Kaine’s request for a stay after Virginia’s governor, Gerald L. Baliles, refused a petition for clemency. On July 6, 1987, Mr. Whitley was executed in the electric chair. Mr. Kaine did not witness it — Mr. Whitley did not want him to, a Kaine aide said — but was intent on being with him in the hours before his death. Along with a priest, they shared Mass and the condemned man’s last meal.

    “I’m certain that Tim felt very close to him,” Mr. Wolf said. “It was important to him to let Richard know that he was there for him, no matter what, and that he wasn’t just filing papers for him, but that he regarded Richard as a valuable human being.”

    In 2005, when he was the lieutenant governor and running for governor against Jerry Kilgore, a former state attorney general, he was fighting the perception that he was too liberal to lead the state. Issue No. 1 was the death penalty; Virginia was second only to Texas in prisoners put to death since 1976.

    “People thought it was almost disqualifying to be against the death penalty in Virginia,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime political analyst in the state. Candidates who held the stance were routinely dismissed, he said, as being “soft on crime.”

    So Mr. Kaine’s team prepared, developing a message that cast the issue in terms of his faith, pointing out his work as a Jesuit missionary in Honduras. Then, in October, Mr. Kilgore ran an advertisement featuring the father of a murder victim whose killer had been represented by Mr. Kaine. “Tim Kaine says that Adolf Hitler doesn’t qualify for the death penalty,” the grieving father said.

    The Hitler reference drew condemnation, and the Kaine team responded with its own ad, featuring a serious Mr. Kaine staring straight into the camera and telling voters that he wanted to “set the record straight,” and explaining that despite his religious objections, “as governor I’ll carry out death sentences handed down by Virginia juries because that’s the law.”

    The ads and religious-themed messaging proved a turning point, said David Eichenbaum, Mr. Kaine’s media strategist. “Once many of these voters learned he was a man of deep faith and actually was a missionary,” Mr. Eichenbaum said, “all of a sudden he wasn’t so liberal anymore.”

    The first big test of Mr. Kaine’s promise came in April 2006, three months after he took office.

    Dexter Lee Vinson, 43, was set to be executed for abducting and killing his former girlfriend, whose mutilated body was found in a vacant house. A Vatican representative and Roman Catholic bishops in Arlington, Va., and Richmond asked Mr. Kaine to spare him.

    One of Mr. Vinson’s sisters, Jewel Bailey, expressed hope that Mr. Kaine’s religious convictions would win out.

    “My thing is, ‘Why did you take the position that you have when you don’t believe yourself in the death penalty?’” she said at the time. “The Bible says, ‘Thou shall not kill,’ and that’s what I’m going to stand by. Thou shall not kill.”

    Inside the governor’s office, Mr. Kaine and his lawyers were following a careful protocol devised by an aide to a previous Democratic governor of Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder.

    The governor would have no direct contact with family members or inmates’ lawyers. Instead, the governor’s staff lawyers would prepare him detailed memos — one making the most aggressive case for clemency, the other making the most aggressive case for execution.

    Mr. Kaine would pepper the lawyers with questions about whether a client might be innocent, or mentally incompetent to face execution. But he almost always deferred to the findings of courts; in the one case in which he granted clemency, he concluded that the inmate’s mental status had changed since he had been convicted, said Mr. Roberts, his former chief counsel.

    Mr. Kaine took comfort, Mr. Roberts said, in the fact that as the governor, he did not have to actually sign death warrants. It was simply up to him to decide whether to intervene.

    “I think he viewed himself as the final decision maker, with a caveat,” Mr. Roberts said, “that it was death unless we stepped in, so he was never deciding whether to impose the penalty.”

    Mr. Vinson’s was the first execution of Mr. Kaine’s term as governor. Ten more would be put to death, including one of the “D.C. snipers,” John Allen Muhammad, and Mr. Green, whose clemency petition to Mr. Kaine said he was a “mentally retarded man by every reliable scientific measure.”

    “This was a case that he could have intervened on, and it wouldn’t have taken much to say, ‘I’m concerned enough to not let the execution go forward,’” said Robert Lee, who worked on Mr. Green’s clemency petition, which asked Mr. Kaine to “err on the side of mercy and life.”

    In a statement explaining his decision, Mr. Kaine noted that Mr. Green’s sentence had been upheld by several courts, and that the Supreme Court had declined to hear it.

    “Having carefully reviewed the Petition for Clemency and judicial opinions regarding this case, I find no compelling reason to set aside the sentence that was recommended by the jury, and then imposed and affirmed by the courts,” he wrote.

    “Accordingly, I decline to intervene.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/us...T.nav=top-news

  4. #4
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    GOP Ad Attacks Tim Kaine for Refusing to Execute Man Who Thought He Was Jesus

    THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE on Monday released an attack ad targeting Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine for serving as a defense attorney for men convicted of murder, agreeing to let a German citizen convicted of murder go to a German prison, and commuting the sentence of a man on death row.

    The first half of the ad focuses on Lem Tuggle and Richard Lee Whitley, both of whom were convicted for murder. Kaine’s legal representation of the two men did not change the fact that both were executed. It also criticizes Kaine for agreeing to repatriate German citizen Jens Söring who was convicted of murder (the repatriation was blocked by his successors).

    The ad’s description of Tim Kaine’s commutation of Percy Walton, who was convicted of murdering an elderly couple as well as a neighbor, simply says that “Kaine commuted his sentence, citing concerns disproved by the courts.”

    But when Kaine commuted Walton’s death sentence to life without parole in June of 2008, he wrote that “one cannot reasonably conclude that Walton is fully aware of the punishment he is about to suffer and why he is to suffer it.”

    Kaine was referring to Walton’s mental competence, or lack thereof. When Kaine originally chose to postpone the inmate’s execution in 2006, it was because Walton had been judged by many to be in deteriorating mental health. Walton had told his attorneys that his execution would reanimate his victims, and that he’d return to life and ride to Burger King on a motorcycle. A few years earlier, he scored a 66 on an IQ test and a state-issued evaluation said that he “doesn’t shower, talks to himself … and … bangs on walls.”

    Amnesty International campaigned for his sentence to be commuted, citing psychological evaluations concluding he was schizophrenic and his claim to relatives that he was actually Jesus.

    “If right now he is insane and he doesn’t know right from wrong and he doesn’t know diddly squat, what purpose would it serve? I’d get no satisfaction out of watching him die,” the daughter of the couple Walton was convicted of murdering told the Washington Post in 2006.

    The irony behind the ad is that Kaine is not a death penalty abolitionist. While he has expressed personal opposition to executions, he presided over 11 executions as governor; his running mate Hillary Clinton is a proponent of capital punishment.

    https://theintercept.com/2016/10/03/...-he-was-jesus/

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    If you go to the link in the story you can listen to the tape of this execution yourself.

    NPR uncovered secret execution tapes from Virginia. More remain hidden

    By Chiara Eisner
    NPR

    On a summer's day in 2006, inside an apartment not far from Virginia's old death chamber, an 82-year-old man handed over a briefcase to an archivist. The bag held four execution recordings so rare, similar tapes from another state had been released just once before in history.

    When executions take place, only a few people are permitted to attend as witnesses. Since prisons forbid even those journalists, lawyers and family members from recording audio or images, virtually no physical evidence from their vantage point exists from any state. But they're not the only ones watching. Prison employees also see what happens in the death chamber – and they sometimes tape it.

    The cassettes in the briefcase were recorded by staff, and the donor, R. M. Oliver, had worked in Virginia prisons for years. But how that government audio ended up in his bag – and why he privately donated it to the Library of Virginia – is a mystery. Oliver left his last position with the Department of Corrections in Richmond before any of the executions were taped. His family said he took the story to his grave when he died.

    The four tapes were marked as "restricted" in the archives of the Library of Virginia in Richmond.

    "Dad kept it a secret from us," said his son, Stephen Oliver. "I don't even remember seeing that briefcase."

    The tapes from Oliver's bag remained unavailable for 16 years. The library initially restricted them and planned to keep them off limits for decades more. But NPR argued for their public release and obtained the audio in 2022.

    An NPR investigation can now reveal the tapes show the prison neglected to record key evidence during what was considered one of Virginia's worst executions, and staff appeared unprepared for some of the jobs they were tasked to do in the death chamber.

    Before Virginia abolished capital punishment in 2021, the state executed more people than any other in America. This is the first time audio recorded during any of those executions has ever been published.

    Behind the scenes: "We didn't know for sure"

    Minutes before he was scheduled to die by the electric chair, Alton Waye used his last words to forgive the workers who would soon have to help kill him.

    "I'd like to express that what is about to occur here is a murder," he starts by saying on the tape.

    An employee whispers the rest of Waye's statement into the recorder: "And that he forgives the people involved in this murder. And that I don't hate nobody and that I love them."

    That worker then checked in with another colleague to see if he had heard the statement correctly. He hadn't.

    "I'm trying to get it," the second man responds. "I would like to express that what is about to take place here is a murder. Did anyone else catch the rest of that?"

    Oliver's briefcase also contained other official execution documents from the prison, like this photo of Alton Waye that was taken before he was executed in 1989.

    The prison eventually got Waye's words down right. But the other tapes show uncertainty was common in the death chamber. At the beginning of the narration of Richard Whitley's execution in 1987, the staff seemed confused about how they were supposed to record the event.

    "We're not using a blank tape?" one worker asks, before a second wonders out loud if the recorder was turned on.

    The prison staff seemed still more unprepared during the electrocution of Richard Boggs. For more than two minutes, staff can be heard on the tape appearing to struggle to connect a call from one of the only people with the power to cancel an execution at the last moment.

    "We need to get 306 clear, the governor's office is calling," a worker says.

    The situation was urgent.

    "Debbie, they are strapping him in the chair!" a second woman exclaims. "Hold on a minute."

    If the governor wanted to save Boggs' life, he would need to be connected with someone in the death chamber quickly. Minutes passed, however, and the issue appeared unresolved. A third employee predicted they would have to cut Debbie off in order to connect the governor.

    "Let me call Switchboard and see what's going on," one of the workers interjects, before a line appears to go dead.

    Boggs was eventually executed. The governor, L. Douglas Wilder, had not called to spare him. But if Wilder had felt differently – and had the staff not been able to connect him in time – Virginia could have come close to carrying out the execution of a pardoned man.

    "We didn't know for sure whether you had contact down there with the governor's office," one of the workers reiterates on the tape.

    The fourth and final recording revealed a more serious oversight.

    Local reporters who watched the execution of Wilbert Lee Evans in 1990 said they witnessed one of the worst in Virginia's history. Three journalists wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that, following the administration of the first jolt of electricity from the chair, Evans started to bleed from his eyes, mouth and nose.

    "Blood flowed from under the leather death mask," observed a journalist from the Virginian-Pilot.

    A reporter from a third newspaper, the Alexandria Journal, said something similar.

    "He started bubbling blood," Geoff Brown observed, "and it ran down his belly and his shirt."

    But the tape the prison created during Evans' execution recorded none of those details.

    "It is 11:04, the first surge of electricity has been administered," an employee states.

    It was right after that first jolt that reporters said the blood started streaming down Evans' chin and soaking his shirt. The voice of the narrator can be heard breaking on tape. But if she was affected by the scene, she didn't clarify the reason. She never mentioned any evidence of blood.

    "It is 11, 11:05," she stutters. "The second surge of electricity has been administered."

    Then, minutes later, just: "The inmate has expired."

    "What is the state trying to cover up?"

    None of the 27 states that currently allow the death penalty use the chair as their primary method of execution anymore. Most have switched to lethal injection. But mistakes in the death chamber are still common.

    In 2022, more than a third of the 20 executions that were attempted across the country were botched. The governor of Tennessee called off an execution after he learned staff had failed to test the chemicals they were planning on using for contamination. Workers in Texas struggled for more than half an hour to place an IV into a disabled man's neck.

    Official cover ups after the executions go wrong are also not unusual. Behind closed doors, on July 28, 2022, execution workers in Alabama took more than three hours to set an IV line into Joe James, Jr.'s body. The state said nothing out of the ordinary happened during that time. But a nonprofit, Reprieve, obtained permission from his family to conduct an autopsy afterwards. It revealed multiple puncture wounds, bruises, and evidence that the state may have cut into his skin to find a vein, said Blaire Andres, who leads death penalty projects for Reprieve.

    The Alabama Department of Corrections provided this undated photo of Joe Nathan James, Jr. to the press.

    "All of that was hidden from view from the journalists that were supposed to witness the execution," said Andres. "If the state is doing everything correctly, they shouldn't have anything to hide. So it does raise the question, what is the state trying to cover up?"

    The Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to NPR's request for comment. The same question now remains open in Virginia, too. Though the library eventually released the tapes Oliver donated, NPR discovered the Department of Corrections has more audio that it's still choosing to keep hidden from the public.

    After NPR requested all remaining execution audio from the agency under the Freedom of Information Act, Corrections confirmed it has at least six additional audio files with 70 minutes of tape recorded on them. But it refused to share the tapes. It also declined an interview request.

    In an email, a representative from the agency defended the decision to keep the audio concealed. Because the tapes are private prison records, private health records and contain confidential personnel information, the agency does not have to share them, the representative wrote.

    An attorney who teaches at the University of Virginia's law school, Ian Kalish, reviewed the email. He said Corrections seemed to be acting in a manner contrary to the intention of the state's public records law, which was designed to grant people access to government files."These types of records are really key to facilitating public oversight and holding public bodies and government actors accountable," Kalish said. "It's very concerning to me that this type of information is being withheld."

    As long as Corrections refuses to reveal the rest of the execution audio, Oliver's tapes could be the only existing content from inside Virginia's death chamber that people can hear. Together with the 19 execution tapes from Georgia that an attorney subpoenaed during a court case, the two sets are the only pieces of publicly available audio evidence from the more than 1,500 executions that have taken place across the U.S. during the past 50 years.

    Whether Oliver knew how significant the four tapes would be when he gave them away is unclear. But Roger Christman, the archivist who collected the briefcase from Oliver's apartment back in 2006, thinks he may have had an idea.

    "He was really happy that he could find a home for these records," Christman remembered. "He thought they were very important."

    https://www.npr.org/2023/01/19/11495...tapes-virginia
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •