Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 20, 1993 TAG: 9301200262
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: JARRATT LENGTH: Medium
DISABLED INMATE EXECUTED
Charles Stamper, a disabled death-row inmate, was executed in Virginia's electric chair Tuesday night for the 1978 slayings of three co-workers at the restaurant where he was a short-order cook.Stamper, 39, was pronounced dead at 11:15 at Greensville Correctional Center, said Wayne Brown, the facility's operations officer.
Brown said prison guards, at Stamper's request, held him by the shoulders and helped him walk the last few steps to the electric chair.
As the execution approached, four family members of one of Stamper's victims waited outside the prison gate.
"I think it's a shame it took 14 years to do it," said Clyde Vie, a brother of slaying victim Agnes Hicks.
Four death-penalty opponents also waited outside the prison.
"I'm personally sorry this man is going to be executed, and this is my prayer for him," said Suzie Hudenburg of Richmond.
Stamper had spent the day visiting with relatives.
Requests by Stamper's attorneys to halt the execution on grounds there was insufficient evidence to prove Stamper was the trigger man in the slayings were rejected Tuesday by U.S. District Judge James R. Spencer and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Barry Weinstein, Stamper's lawyer, appealed to the Supreme Court, which denied the request without comment at 9:25 p.m.
Two men were convicted in the slayings, Stamper receiving the death sentence and his accomplice a prison term.
Weinstein said Stamper should not have received the death penalty "because he wasn't the actual perpetrator of the homicide."
A three-judge panel of the appeals court said, however, that Stamper showed no constitutional error in the trial and that he did not show why he failed to Stamper assert his claim earlier.
Stamper had been on death row longer than any other Virginia inmate. He had been in a wheelchair since his spinal cord was injured in a 1988 fight with other inmates.
Leigh Dingerson, director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said no one in a wheelchair has been executed since the Supreme Court allowed the resumption of capital punishment in 1976.
Stamper's execution originally was set for last Oct. 28. Gov. Douglas Wilder postponed the execution while a medical team evaluated Stamper's condition.