Virginia's governor made the courageous choice to commute an inmate's death sentence to life in prison. Now he faces an even more difficult decision.
A Times Editorial
Published December 2, 2005
Virginia, whose 94 executions are second only to Texas since 1976, escaped the dubious distinction of the nation's 1,000th when Gov. Mark Warner commuted Robin Lovitt's death sentence Nov. 30 to life in prison.
Warner recognized that Lovitt's execution would be fundamentally unfair because of a court clerk's arguably inadvertent but inescapably illegal destruction of key evidence, a pair of scissors that Lovitt contended could establish his evidence through modern DNA testing, while he was still appealing his conviction.
The governor's decision was responsible and courageous. Although he is leaving office under Virginia's one-term limit, there was an element of risk to his potential presidential candidacy. It helped, no doubt, that Kenneth W. Starr, the former independent counsel, was one of Lovitt's advocates. That made the point that fairness in something so fateful as the death penalty is neither a liberal cause nor a conservative one but a universal human value.
The Lovitt case was an easy call, however, compared to another decision that Warner needs to make before his term ends next month. It concerns DNA testing for Roger Keith Coleman, who met his death in Virginia's electric chair 13 years ago still insisting on his innocence of the rape and murder for which he was condemned.
DNA testing has helped to exonerate 163 prisoners, including at least six on death row and another who died of cancer before he was cleared. But it was not available at the time of Coleman's 1982 trial, where blood and hair samples and the testimony of a jailhouse informant that he had confessed the crime were used against him. Jailhouse snitches are notorious for lying, however, and blood and hair evidence is primitive compared to modern DNA analysis such as that sought for the sperm sample saved from the Coleman trial. Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey organization that helps prisoners claiming to be innocent, asked Warner two years ago to authorize the test. He has hinted recently that he will agree but has yet to confirm this.
It would be easy, but wrong, for the governor to dismiss the issue as moot. If Coleman was telling the truth, it meant not only that an innocent man was sacrificed on the altar of death penalty politics, but that a guilty man remained free. One prospect is as intolerable as the other.
There may be people who would prefer that a killer escape to being confronted with proof that an innocent man died in his place. But that is not the point of view of most Americans, and it surely cannot be shared by anyone who would deserve to be their president.
