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Thread: Earl Clanton, Jr. - Virginia Execution - August 14, 1988

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Earl Clanton, Jr. - Virginia Execution - August 14, 1988




    Facts of Crime: Strangled a school librarian, Wilhelmina Smith

    Time of Death: 11:07 p.m.

    Manner of execution: Electric Chair

    Last Meal:

    Final Statement:

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    April 15, 1988

    Slayer Is Electrocuted in Virginia After Supreme Court Rejects Stay

    RICHMOND, Va., April 14 — Earl Clanton Jr. was executed in the electric chair tonight for strangling a neighbor in a 1980 robbery.

    Mr. Clanton, 33 years old, was pronounced dead at 11:07 P.M., seven minutes after the first of three one-minute jolts of 2,300 to 2,500 volts each was administered, a spokesman for the State Department of Corrections said.

    Earlier in the day, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit set the stage for the seventh execution in Virginia since 1982 when it unanimously overturned a stay granted Tuesday by a Federal judge in Richmond.

    Tonight, the United States Supreme Court, in a 7-to-2 vote, denied a stay, and Gov. Gerald L. Baliles refused clemency an hour before the execution, the 98th in the nation since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed states to resume use of the death penalty.

    Mr. Clanton was convicted by a Petersburg jury in 1981 of murdering Wilhemina Smith, a 38-year-old school librarian who lived in his apartment building.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/15/us...ects-stay.html

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    Member Member giallohunter's Avatar
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    Six inmates facing the Virginia electric chair made a daring escape from the facility on May 31, 1984. The inmates who escaped, two of the notorious Briley Brothers (James and Linwood), Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson, and Willie Jones, had observed how correctional officers were complacent in following procedures. While returning to the building from evening recreation time, the hulking Clanton hid in a CO station restroom, then charged out on cue from another inmate when the CO station door was open.

    Clanton overpowered the CO and released all of the locks in the housing unit. Inmates took over the unit and stole the uniforms of COs who subsequently entered on rounds. They bluffed their way out of the unit by putting on riot helmets to conceal their faces as they carried a purported bomb, which was in actuality a cellhouse TV covered with a blanket. They carried the TV out of the unit on a stretcher spraying it with fire extinguishers and put it into a waiting van, which they then drove out of the prison.

    Once the six men were free of the prison, they escaped across the nearby North Carolina border. The men soon split up, unsure of what to do now they were back in free society.

    Earl Clanton and Derick Peterson were caught the following day when a patrol car driving past a laundromat spotted two men inside, one of them wearing what appeared to be a CO's jacket with the badges torn off. The two had stopped to eat some cheese and drink cheap convenience store wine.

    Tuggle, Jones and the Briley Brothers stole a pickup truck with the vanity tag 'PEI-1' from the driveway of its owner. The Brileys were dropped off in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where they went to work as mechanics for a friend of a local uncle. Tuggle and Jones got as far north as Vermont, where Tuggle was apprehended at gunpoint by Vermont state troopers after robbing a souvenir shop for $80.

    Jones gave himself up the following day, just five miles south of the Canadian border. He was cold, hungry, and bitten by flies, so he called his mother who persuaded him to turn himself in. The Brileys were caught after the FBI traced a phone call they made to a contact in New York to the garage where they were working. All six men were returned to Virginia under heavy security. Upon their arrival, they were held on $10 million dollar bond each.
    Much of what has been revealed about the escape came from fellow inmate, Dennis Stockton. Dennis Stockton was also on death row for murder and originally planned to escape with them; but backed out because he anticipated his case would be overturned on appeal. During the escape, he wrote down everything that happened minute by minute in his diaries, which were later published in a Norfolk, Virginia newspaper, the Virginian Pilot.

    Crime & Capital Punishment case files on the seven inmates:
    Linwood Briley - Virginia - October 12, 1984
    James Briley - Virginia - April 18, 1985
    Earl Clanton Jr. - Virginia - August 14, 1988
    Derick Lynn Peterson - Virginia - August 22, 1991
    Willie Leroy Jones - Virginia - September 11, 1992
    Lem Tuggle - Virginia - December 12, 1996
    Dennis Stockton - Virginia - September 27, 1995

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Inmates at Virginia's Mecklenburg Maximum Security Center took over the second floor of building number 5 along with seven hostages on Aug. 4, 1984.


    Derrick Lynn Peterson, second from left, and Earl Clanton Jr., far right, are escorted from the Warren County jail to a waiting van in Warrenton, N.C. after they were recaptured following their prison break.


    Mecklenburg Six: How death row inmates busted out of prison that was considered 'escape-proof'

    By Mara Bovsun
    THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

    With their audacious escape from Dannemora’s maximum security prison, convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt joined a peculiar fellowship — inmates who manage to slip out, leaving people wondering, “How did they get away with it?”

    Many prison breaks seem impossible, the stuff of fiction, like Stephen King’s “Shawshank Redemption,” which was mentioned over and over by reporters covering Dannemora.

    Depression-era Public Enemy No. 1 John Dillinger busted out using a make-believe gun fashioned from a block of wood and shoe polish. Other prisoners have clung to the bottoms of police wagons, squeezed through food slots, convinced accomplices to whisk them away in helicopters, and tunneled out of Alcatraz with a metal spoon and a vacuum cleaner transformed into a drill.

    Few, though, can rival the Mecklenburg Six, a group of Virginia condemned killers who managed to playact their way through the prison’s doors.

    It took them less than two hours to bust out of the brand-new lock-up, which was considered “escape-proof.” The $20 million Mecklenburg Correctional Center, near Boydton, opened in 1976, complete with the latest in jailhouse high tech. Nevertheless, on May 31, 1984, with little more than a stretcher, a blanket, and a portable TV, they pulled off the largest escape of Death Row inmates in U.S. history.

    Brothers James and Linwood Briley were the ringleaders. Four others, Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson and Willie Lloyd Turner, would join in the dash for freedom.

    A seventh, Dennis Stockton, who landed on Death Row for a 1978 contract killing, helped but didn’t join them. Many details about the bust would come from Stockton’s diary, which later was the basis for a book, “Dead Run,” by Joe Jackson and William F. Burke, Jr.

    The plan started with careful, months-long scrutiny of the guards, their shifts and habits, and even their clothing sizes. On the afternoon of May 31, the six inmates got haircuts and close shaves, to make them appear like a bunch of college grads on their first job interviews to blend in on the outside.

    They made their move around 8 p.m., overpowering the guards and opening all the cells in one block.

    Outfitted with uniforms and riot gear that they found in a storeroom, the men put the portable TV on a stretcher and covered it with a blanket. Pretending to be guards, they radioed an emergency call and said that they needed a van to remove a bomb from Death Row.

    For an extra touch of drama, they used fire extinguishers to douse the “bomb” as they scurried from the building and into the waiting getaway police van.

    It took half an hour for prison officials to realize that they had been tricked and that six extremely dangerous men were at large.

    The news spread sheer terror through the community; people were afraid to go out of their houses. All six were cold-blooded killers, but the Brileys were in a class by themselves — they seemed to kill for fun. The eldest, Linwood, started his murder career in 1971, at 16, with the shooting of a recently widowed neighbor as she hung laundry in her backyard. When police pinned the crime on him, he nonchalantly said, “She would have died soon, anyway.”

    In 1979, Linwood, his brothers James and Anthony, and a teenage accomplice, Duncan Eric Meekins, went on a killing spree that snuffed out at least 11 lives and some believe there may have been as many as 20 victims.

    The crimes were particularly brutal and senseless. They shot a beloved country and western DJ, Johnny Gallaher, and dumped his body in a river, stealing $6 and a distinctive turquoise ring. It was on Linwood’s finger when he was brought in for questioning in connection with another crime. A detective who happened to be a friend of Gallaher’s recognized it, connecting Gallaher’s death to the brothers.

    One victim was stabbed with knives, scissors and a fork and then the body was set on fire. In their last attacks, on Oct. 19, 1979, they raped a pregnant woman, shot her four times in the head, and then shot her husband and 5-year-old son. All that, just to steal a television.

    Police already had their eyes on the killer quartet and arrested the brothers and their teen accomplice after these murders.

    Meekins told all and testified against the Brileys at their trial. The younger brother, Anthony, was sent to prison for life. James and Linwood were sentenced to death.

    They were trouble from the moment they set foot in the jail, up to the last day of May 1984, when they busted out.

    Police nabbed Clanton and Peterson a day after the break. A few days later Tuggle tried to rob a jewelry store, which led to his recapture, as well as Turner’s. They had made it as far as Vermont.

    It took nearly three weeks for the law — hundreds of officers and

    FBI agents — to catch up with the Brileys. They were in Philadelphia, barbecuing chicken when police closed in. Both brothers, as well as the other escapees, kept their dates with the electric chair.

    An investigation determined that sloppiness among the prison staff had made the escape possible. The prison reviewed its practices and tightened up security.

    Virginia’s governor ordered the facility closed in 2012.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crim...icle-1.2256866

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