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Thread: Kevin Green - Virginia Execution - May 27, 2008

  1. #1
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    Kevin Green - Virginia Execution - May 27, 2008


    Lawrence Vaughan, with his dog Gizmo, outside his former country store.
    Vaughan ran the store with his wife, Patricia, until she was killed by
    Kevin Green in a 1998 robbery. Vaughan was shot but recovered.




    Facts of the Crime:
    Convicted and sentenced to death in the August 21, 1998 robbery-murder of Patricia L. Vaughan in Brunswick County.

    Green entered a convenience store in Dolphin shortly before two p.m. with his 16-year-old nephew, David Green. Green shot the owners, Patricia L. Vaughan, 53, and her husband Lawrence Vaughan, 68. and then stood watch while a bank bag with $9,000 in cash and a handgun was taken. Green shot Patricia Vaughan again before he ran out of ammunition and left. The two fled to Washington. They returned several days later, were arrested and admitted to the crime. Patricia L. Vaughan was shot four times and Lawrence Vaughan was shot twice. Lawrence survived and testified against Green. He still has a bullet in his neck and one in his elbow. Ballistics experts matched bullets and casings found on Green's property with those taken from Patricia Vaughn. David Green was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

    Victim: Patricia L. Vaughan

    Time of Death: 10:05 pm

    Manner of Execution: Lethal Injection

    Last Meal: Not made public

    Final Words: "No, I don't got nothing to say."

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    May 27, 2008

    Va. Executes Man, Ending De Facto Moratorium

    Convicted killer Kevin Green was put to death by lethal injection last night, becoming the first inmate executed in Virginia's normally busy death chamber since 2006.

    Green, who killed a southeastern Virginia convenience store owner in 1998, was strapped to a gurney, administered a succession of three drugs and pronounced dead at 10:05 p.m., said Larry Traylor, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections. The execution came after an unusual hour-long delay as Green's attorneys tried to persuade a federal judge in Richmond to issue a last-minute reprieve, even though the U.S. Supreme Court and Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) had declined to intervene.

    U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer refused, clearing the way for Green to die at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.

    The execution signaled the resumption of capital punishment in the state after it was effectively put on hold in the fall because the Supreme Court was debating the constitutionality of lethal injection. Kaine also twice delayed the execution of another inmate in 2006.

    Virginia has executed 99 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, second only to Texas, which has executed 405. The last inmate executed in Virginia was John Yancey Schmitt, who died by injection in November 2006.

    "Tonight justice has been served," Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R) said after Green's death.

    But Timothy M. Richardson, an attorney for Green, said that even though Green's victim "suffered a horrible loss as a result of Mr. Green's crime . . . we just executed a man with the IQ of an 11-year-old child."

    Green's attorneys had argued to Kaine that their client could not be constitutionally put to death because, with an IQ of 65, he is mentally retarded. The Supreme Court outlawed the execution of mentally disabled people in 2002 but left it up to states to define mental retardation.

    Kaine denied the clemency petition, saying he had carefully reviewed the case but found "no compelling reason to set aside the sentence that was recommended by the jury." And the Supreme Court rejected a stay of execution, though Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said they would have granted the stay.

    Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection last month, a federal appeals court in Richmond is weighing a challenge to the three-drug method of lethal injection. Attorneys for convicted killer Christopher S. Emmett are arguing that Virginia's protocol is unconstitutional, saying that prisoners are not fully anesthetized before being administered drugs that can cause excruciating pain.

    State attorneys say Virginia's lethal injection protocol is "virtually identical" to the procedures in Kentucky that the Supreme Court upheld.

    Green was convicted in the killing of Patricia L. Vaughan, who owned a small grocery store with her husband in Brunswick County. A jury convicted Green and sentenced him to death in 2000. The Virginia Supreme Court ordered a new trial in 2001. Green was again convicted and sentenced to death later that year.

    Green requested a last meal yesterday but did not want it disclosed, officials said. He did not offer any last words.

    Three executions are scheduled in Virginia over the next two months, including that of Percy L. Walton, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to killing an elderly Danville couple and his neighbor. Kaine twice delayed Walton's execution in 2006 so his condition and competence could be evaluated.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

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    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

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