THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 13, 1994 TAG: 9409130531
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: B11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Virginia News
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
State Corrections Department officials say they foiled a planned escape by death row inmate Joseph P. Payne Sr.
Authorities said Monday that ``a couple of small pieces of hacksaw'' blade and a piece of Plexiglas fashioned into a handle were found in Payne's cell on death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center.
``There was never any danger to the public. He had not gotten free from his cell, and even if he had he would still have been in the compound,'' said Jim Jones, a Corrections Department spokesman.
Payne was sentenced to death for setting an inmate ablaze in retaliation for the victim's disclosure of an earlier escape attempt.
Jones said officers searching Payne's cell Aug. 30 found that part of a metal screen on his cell's window had been partly cut. Had the entire screen been removed, security glass still blocked the opening.
Jones said that Payne has been placed under special guard, pending an investigation. Jones said authorities are trying to determine how Payne got the hacksaw blade.
The Mecklenburg prison has had problems with contraband.
In May, death row inmate Joseph Savino overdosed on heroin in his cell less than a year after death row inmate Wayne Kenneth Delong hanged himself after injecting cocaine and drinking prison hooch.
In April, authorities recovered a two-shot derringer hidden in the rectum of another Mecklenburg inmate. Another inmate at Mecklenburg killed himself with a heroin overdose in 1992.
Payne was convicted in 1982 of fatally shooting an elderly woman during the robbery of her country store.
He was serving a sentence of life plus one year at the Powhatan Correctional Center when inmate David Wayne Dunford was murdered in 1985.
Dunford was doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Payne had placed a lock on the cell door preventing it from being opened. Dunford was burned over 70 percent of his body and died nine days later.
At his 1986 trial, Payne said Dunford was a ``snitch'' who disclosed Payne's escape plans.
Payne also tried a previous escape from death row.
On Oct. 2, 1987, officers making a routine security check found that he and another death row inmate, Lem Tuggle Jr., had sawed through the security screens on their windows. A hacksaw blade also was used in that attempt.
Tuggle was one of six inmates who escaped from the Mecklenburg in May 1984 in the largest death row escape in U.S. history. Last month, a federal judge ordered that he be given a new sentencing hearing. The five inmates who escaped with Tuggle have since been executed.
KEYWORDS: ATTEMPTED ESCAPE MECKLENBURG PRISON by CNB