Supreme Court Grants Stay of Virginia Execution

Washington Post ^ | 7/11/05 | Donna St. George

[Crackingham]

Just 4 1/2 hours before his scheduled execution, Robin Lovitt was given a legal reprieve today by the U.S. Supreme Court, which stayed his death sentence until the fall, when it will consider whether his case deserves a full hearing on its merits. The decision was relayed to lawyers about 4:30 p.m. after a tense day of waiting among many in the case -- and after Lovitt's family members had bid him goodbye, not knowing whether he would be put to death.

When the word came, his sister Tangala Carter said she was gathered in a room with other relatives. "I jumped up and said 'He got the stay! He got the stay!' " she recalled, "And everybody started screaming."

It was a day of high-stakes decisions in a case that has captured widespread attention and created a test of capital punishment as rarely before. In an era in which DNA so definitively determines guilt and innocence, lawyers and religious leaders are separately asking whether a death sentence should be carried out after a state mistakenlydestroys DNA evidence that had the potential to clear a man.

SNIP

In its brief, one-paragraph stay, the Supreme Court did not decide the DNA issue or any others. But Peter Neufeld, cofounder of the Innocence Project, has said that he knew of no other case nationally in which DNA evidence had been destroyed within two year's of an inmate's conviction.

In Virginia, a coalition of religious, civil rights and civil liberties groups had called on Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) to commute Lovitt's sentence to life in prison with no parole. The groups included the ACLU, the conservative Rutherford Institute, a number of church groups, and the NAACP.

[republican2005]

another good reason to appoint a good conservative judge ASAP.