Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 24, 1992 TAG: 9201240214
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
WILDER SAVES CONVICT FROM THE ELECTRIC CHAIR
Gov. Douglas Wilder on Thursday spared the life of convicted murderer HerbertR. Bassette, who had been scheduled to die in the electric chair at 11 p.m.Wilder commuted Bassette's death sentence to life in prison without possibility of parole.
"I cannot in good conscience erase the presence of a reasonable doubt and fail to employ the powers vested in me as governor to intervene," Wilder said in the document that commuted the sentence.
In a brief interview Thursday night, Wilder said he was particularly bothered by one point made by Bassette's lawyers:
"It's a question of having, for the very first time ever in Virginia, someone sent to death based on accomplices' testimony alone," Wilder said.
Bassette, who received the news in his death row cell at the Greensville Correctional Center, declined to comment to reporters. One of his lawyers said Bassette was grateful the governor would listen where state and federal courts would not.
"As a first step, I should say we're very pleased with the news. It's a great sense of relief," said lawyer Douglas W. Davis.
Davis said the lawyers plan to appeal to Wilder again with claims that Bassette is innocent of the 1979 murder of a 16-year-old Richmond gas station attendant.
"We're hoping we will be able to present further evidence to the governor and convince him Herbert Bassette ought to be eligible for parole or even to release him," Davis said.
Attorney General Mary Sue Terry, whose office fought Bassette's appeals at every step, reacted with a brief statement:
"The ultimate decision on an execution rests exclusively with the governor," she said. "Obviously, I do not intend to second-guess his decision. Mr. Bassette is a lucky man."
Those words were far different from the angry insistence of guilt Terry issued the only other time Wilder halted an execution -- last February, in the case of convicted killer Joseph M. Giarratano.
Hard feelings were sharper among the relatives of victim Albert Burwell Jr., who was shot six times after a gas station holdup and bled to death in a Henrico County ditch.
"I don't know how I feel right now, but I'm not too pleased about it," said Albert Burwell Sr., 53, the victim's father. "I don't think he's getting everything he deserved, that's all."
Henrico County's commonwealth's attorney, James S. Gilmore, was outraged by Wilder's decision.
In a statement, he said that court records show that sheriff's deputies overheard Bassette admit to his wife after the trial that he had killed the station attendant.
"In 10 years of appeals, no witness to this cold-blooded murder ever changed their story until the eve of the carrying out of the sentence," Gilmore said. "Justice has been cheated and my sympathy goes out to the family of the victim and to the people of the commonwealth who have seen justice denied."
In Roanoke, plans for a candlelight vigil sponsored by local members of Amnesty International, Southwest Virginians Against the Death Penalty, Plowshare Peace Center and several religious groups were called off Thursday afternoon.
Similar vigils, held near Lee Plaza in downtown Roanoke, have become a ritual over the past three years on the eve of any state execution.
Faye O'Dell-Nova, one of its original organizers for Amnesty International, was happy with the show of clemency.
"While Governor Wilder does believe in the death penalty," she said, "at least when it comes to a question of innocence, he shows some leniency."
The first jury that heard the case against Bassette in 1980 couldn't reach a verdict. The only evidence linking him to the crime was the word of three other people involved in it.
The jury that finally convicted Bassette gave him the death penalty because a 1966 robbery and shooting made him seem like a continuing threat to society.
But Bassette's lawyers came up with new evidence that he might not have committed either the 1966 shooting or Burwell's murder. In recent days, federal and state courts refused to hear that evidence on the grounds that it should have been introduced sooner.
The new evidence includes:
Transcripts of an interview with a friend of Bassette's named George Johnson who all but admitted the 1966 shooting, and who said he was afraid to come forward.
The transcript of an interview with a woman who heard another man, Tyrone Jackson, confess to killing Burwell. In the original trial, the woman said she didn't believe Jackson. But the recently unearthed transcript shows the woman had insisted to police that Jackson was the killer. She claims today that prosecutors told her not to say so in the trial.
Davis talked to Bassette on Wednesday night, and again Thursday morning when it looked like the execution would proceed. "There was actually a lot of banter back and forth, kidding each other, laughing," Davis said.
"Not because we were not serious or he thought clemency was in the bag at all. It was simply that in the face of that kind of adversity he was still able to deal with us in a seemingly very normal manner. He's a very strong person."
When a lawyer later broke the news to Bassette that his life was spared, "he was silent at first," Davis said. "I think he was just so overcome with the events that, untypically for him, he was not very communicative at that point.
"I think you can imagine . . . somebody 12 hours away from being in the electric chair, that's got to be a very traumatic experience."
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.