
DATE: Wednesday, October 8, 1997            TAG: 9710080500

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

DATELINE: PHOENIX                           LENGTH:  101 lines

DEATH KNELL TOLLS FOR SOME MIDNIGHT EXECUTIONS EARLIER TIMES LESSENS STRAIN ON FAMILIES, REDUCES OVERTIME.

The days of cellblock lightbulbs flickering at midnight, candlelight vigils and literal 11th-hour appeals may be coming to an end.

Virginia, Arizona and Texas are abandoning midnight as the hour of death, opting to hold executions in the afternoon or evening to reduce lost sleep for judges, overtime for guards and added strain on victims.

``Dispensing justice at that hour of the morning is difficult, to say the least, and we have an obligation . . . to give our best efforts in every one of these instances,'' said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, complaining about an execution in Arizona last June that prompted the state to do away with putting inmates to death at midnight.

It was 3 a.m. in Washington before the high court rejected a flurry of last-minute appeals for killer William Woratzeck and cleared the way for his death by injection minutes later.

Now, Arizona prosecutors plan to ask the state Supreme Court to schedule future executions between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Texas, which has executed 30 people so far this year, changed its execution time two years ago to 6 p.m. instead of between midnight and dawn.

Virginia, which ranks second behind Texas with six executions this year, recently changed its time from 11 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Virginia's first execution after the 20-year national moratorium on the death penalty took place on Aug. 10, 1982. The condemned was Frank Coppola, a former Portsmouth police officer who was sentenced to death for murdering a Newport News woman.

Since all of the officials who had presided over executions in the 1950s and early 1960s were retired or dead, it fell to James Mitchell, then the warden of the state prison in Richmond, to figure out how and when to execute Coppola.

All previous Virginia electrocutions had taken place at 7 a.m., but Mitchell decided that 11 p.m. was a more seemly and tasteful time of day for such an act.

``To do it in the morning, it made it look like you couldn't wait to get the guy executed,'' Mitchell told a reporter.

In January of 1995, the time changed again.

It was then that state corrections boss Ron Angelone set up Virginia's lethal injection protocol. Taste and seemliness, Angelone made clear, were no longer primary considerations. Convenience was.

``The reason for moving it up two hours was to be more accommodating to victim family witnesses who may have been in attendance and to be more accommodating to the Department of Corrections staff,'' said Angelone's spokesman, David Botkins.

``Nine o'clock is a very manageable time for all involved. There is no movement afoot to change that time to make it any earlier.''

The state's last five executions were:

Coleman Gray: Feb. 26.

Roy Bruce Smith: July 17.

Joseph O'Dell: July 23.

Carlton Pope: Aug. 19.

Mario Murphy: Sept. 17.

Where the midnight tradition got its start is unclear. Some prison officials said the idea was simply to carry out the execution as soon as possible on the execution date set by the court. Others said the reason was to reduce the risk of inmate disturbances and large protests.

Midnight executions gave rise to the Hollywood image of the lights flickering in cellblocks, striking fear in other prisoners, when someone dies in the electric chair.

Whatever the reason, more and more midnight executions began to take their toll.

``It was just a strain on everyone to be up to all hours in the morning trying to make clear-headed decisions,'' said Texas prison spokesman David Nunnelee.

Before the time change, Nunnelee said, he would be awake as late as 6 a.m. and still have to be at work at 8 a.m.

Some states have no plans to switch to daytime executions. In Nevada, holding executions by injection just after midnight frees more employees to help with the process, said prison spokesman Glen Whorton.

``You can use staff to do the execution rather than control the inmates,'' Whorton said. ``You're going to have overtime, regardless. It takes a lot of people to do this, and if you do it during those evening hours you have a larger pool of people to choose from for those activities.''

Changing the time of execution will not stop last-minute appeals, however, said Aaron Caplan, one of Woratzeck's lawyers.

``Now that we have fax machines and e-mail, it allows us to scramble around and do things at the last minute. It doesn't matter if the last minute is at 5 p.m. or at midnight,'' Caplan said. ``About the only difference with 5 p.m. is, once the flurry is over, the restaurants are still open.'' MEMO: This story was compiled from reports by The Associated Press and

staff writer Laura LaFay. ILLUSTRATION: IN VIRGINIA

Execution time: 9 p.m.

An earlier time: Virginia recently moved the time up two hours to be

more accommodating to victim family witnesses.

A set time: ``Nine o'clock is a very manageable time for all

involved. There is no movement about to change that time to make it

any earlier.''

- DAVID BOTKINS, STATE CORRECTIONS SPOKESMAN KEYWORDS: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT EXECUTION