A convicted killer due to become the 1 000th prisoner to be executed in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 was reprieved on Tuesday night when the governor of Virginia commuted his sentence to life in prison.
Robin Lovitt (42), found guilty of fatally stabbing a pool-hall worker with scissors during a botched robbery, had been due to die by lethal injection at the Greenville correctional centre in Virginia on Wednesday.
But Governor Mark Warner, who is being touted as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, agreed to grant clemency after calls from Lovitt’s lawyers and anti-death-penalty campaigners.
The 1 000th person to be executed is now likely to be either Kenneth Boyd, who is scheduled to die on Friday in North Carolina, or Shawn Humphries, whose execution has been scheduled on the same day in South Carolina. Boyd, who was convicted of killing his estranged wife and her father in 1988, was taken to a small cell block across the hall from the death chamber on Tuesday afternoon.
Candlelit vigils had been planned across the country to coincide with Lovitt’s execution, and churches in several states planned to toll their bells. But the planned protests were not purely symbolic. Lovitt has always maintained his innocence and defence lawyers argued that his life should be spared because a clerk prematurely destroyed the bloody scissors and other evidence to make room in a store cupboard, precluding DNA testing.
”Mr Lovitt’s case is an example of everything that is wrong with the death penalty,” said Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, a spokesperson for Amnesty International. ”It is a system that is fundamentally flawed because it is carried out and administered by human beings who make mistakes.”
Capital punishment appears to be falling out of favour in the US. A spokesperson for the Death Penalty Information Centre, Richard Dieter, said: ”Death sentences are down 60%; executions are 40% less than five years ago; and public support is down from 80% in 1994 to 64% this year, according to the latest Gallup poll.”
Doubts about guilt are the main reason, with mistakes exposed through DNA testing leading juries to hesitate before sending prisoners to death row. — Guardian Unlimited Â