Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 21, 1995 TAG: 9501230060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: JARRATT LENGTH: Long
There is a shadow in the cell at the Greensville Correctional Center where Dana Ray Edmonds has lived for two weeks. It reaches for him from the floor when he sits down on the bed. He feels it walking with him when he paces back and forth.
It's not a cold shadow or a scary shadow, says Edmonds. ``It's a weird shadow. It's like somebody crawling all around. ... I don't know if ghosts exist, but maybe it's the ghosts of the Greensville death house. I think about it as all the inmates who have been here and died here, who only left here in a body bag.''
Since 1991, when the Department of Corrections moved the state's death chamber from the state penitentiary in Richmond to the gray and white concrete bunker that is Greensville, 12 men have walked to their deaths from this cell. Edmonds is next in line.
Unlike the others, though, he will not die blindfolded and tied to a chair with a cloud of smoke floating above his head. Instead, on Tuesday night at 9 he will lie strapped to a gurney while a lethal mix of sodium pentothal, Pavulon and potassium chloride is injected into his veins. If all goes smoothly for the state, his heart will stop in 20 minutes.
Virginia's execution rate - the third highest in the country - stalled last spring after the legislature enacted a lethal-injection law. Under the new law, which became effective Jan. 1, Edmonds was allowed to choose his method of execution. He picked injection over electrocution, he says, as a kind of public service to the 55 men he left behind him on death row.
``They already have the means to know about the electric chair,'' he reasons. ``If this happen, then they'll have the means to know about lethal injection. So they'll know about both when they go to choose.''
Edmonds was sentenced to die for the 1983 murder and robbery of John Elliot, a 62-year-old Danville grocer. Elliot, who owned a store in Edmonds' neighborhood, died of a stab wound to the throat and a head injury inflicted by a brick. He was found behind the counter of his store by an egg deliveryman. A rag had been tied around his mouth.
Edmonds, who was 21 at the time of the killing, calls Elliot's death an ``accident.'' He is sorry now, he says. He thinks about Elliot every day, and about all the pain he has brought to the Elliot family. He has thought about writing to them, he says, but he ``did not think it would be accepted. And I did not want to bother them.''
According to his petition for clemency, filed with Gov. George Allen on Jan. 9, Edmonds was in Elliot's store trying to buy a carton of chocolate milk when the grocer put a gun to his head and accused him of stealing watches.
In an effort to defend himself, says the petition, Edmonds grabbed a brick from the floor and threw it at Elliot. The brick knocked Elliot down, but he got up again, still holding the gun. At that point, his lawyers maintain, Edmonds grabbed the grocer's wrist with one hand and snatched a knife off a store counter with the other. The two struggled, and Elliot was cut in the neck.
The petition cites a polygraph test administered this past October in which Edmonds was found to be telling the truth about the incident. It also includes several affidavits from Elliot's customers in which they describe the grocer as a volatile man, given to drinking, who used the gun he kept in his store to threaten his largely black clientele.
Edmonds' lawyers argue that he should never have been charged with capital murder in the first place, because such a charge requires that the killing occur during the commission of another felony, such as robbery. And there is no evidence, they say, that Edmonds went into Elliot's store intending to rob him.
In addition, the lawyers cite a serious conflict-of-interest problem with Edmonds' trial. The conflict: that Edmonds' court-appointed attorney, J. Patterson Rogers III, at the same time represented a woman in another case, a woman who testified against Edmonds.
Edmonds' lawyers have filed a motion for a stay of execution. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for 11 a.m. today in U.S. District Court in Roanoke.
Elliot's relatives are tired of these kinds of delays.
``He's had lots of appeals,'' says Elliot's sister, Virginia Stowe, who lives in Dry Fork.
``I don't know why he's waited until the last minute to bring up all this about racism and the lawyer's incompetent and all that stuff. When somebody's been on death row for 11 years, I think that's enough.
``He's guilty, and I think you should be punished for what you do,'' says Stowe. ``When someone does a crime bad enough to have the death penalty and they are found guilty, then I think they should have the death penalty. It just goes back to the old saying in the Bible: `You reap what you sow.'''
The fifth of nine children, Edmonds was born in Danville in 1962. His parents, according to a psychiatric report submitted with his clemency petition, have always lived in ``abject poverty'' and are both "intellectually'' and ``emotionally'' limited.
His father, Arnold ``Rufus'' Edmonds, ``seemed intellectually impaired'' and ``able to follow a conversation only with difficulty'' when he was evaluated at the University of Virginia Hospital in 1984. Since then, he has been almost completely disabled by a stroke.
His mother, Mary Graves Edmonds, is described as ``a pitifully withdrawn person'' with a ``total inability to make eye contact.'' When a doctor interviewed her last year, ``she sat in a semi-darkened room and spoke with her hand up over her eyes and face.''
The two still live in the five-room house where they raised their children. The house, as described in the report, ``is in an extreme state of disrepair'' and ``appears to have never been cleaned in all the years that this family has occupied it.'' Visitors are immediately ``hit'' by a strong stench of urine, probably caused by Dana's older brother, Michael. Now 34, Michael Edmonds is described as profoundly mentally retarded. As children, he and Dana shared a bed, ``requiring Dana to sleep on the floor unless he lay in his brother's urine.''
``The poverty in his rearing environment appears to have impacted Dana more than some of his other siblings because he has a natural intelligence that exceeded some of his family members,'' the report says. ``Dana, probably more than some of his siblings, had the capacity to appreciate his circumstances, but without the ability to overcome them.''
Sitting with his lawyer in the small concrete visiting room in the Greensville death house, Edmonds still is having the same trouble with his circumstances. He may be in the death house. His thoughts may lack focus, and his words may need a lot of untangling. But he is joyous, he says into a telephone receiver behind a Plexiglas window. Nothing bothers him. He is not afraid. God is with him.
``No matter what happen, God will take care of me,'' he says.
``My best friend is God. My second-best friend is Jesus.''
His eyes beaming and his smile beatific, Edmonds talks and talks about God. God came to him just before lunch one day in 1991, when he was reading the Bible in his cell at Mecklenburg. God loves him because he is honest. Because he always tries to be himself. God knows his struggle.
``From the person in '83 and the person in '95, it's no comparison at all,'' he says. ``The person in '83 was confused. Very frightened and disoriented. Person in '95 is much more understanding, warm, considerate, loving and peace-minded. Everything he do. Everything he say.''
The head cook has been by three times, asking Edmonds what he wants for a last meal. But Edmonds tells him he isn't thinking about last meals. Food is not important. If the cook wants to do something for him, he says, then the cook should make a meal for all the officers assigned to guard him at the death house.
He doesn't want a funeral, either.
``If a funeral happen, I would rather have them have a party,'' he says. ``Just to enjoy themselves. And be thankful to know that I have come to be happy.''
Edmonds believes in heaven. It is a place, he says, with ``many beautiful castles. Crystal. Pure gold. Air is the cleanest, and the people with the same hearts. Hearts pure as true gold. Not like the gold in the world.''
But for now there is the concrete cell and the Plexiglas window. The chaplains and lawyers during the day, and the shadow of the ghosts in his cell with him at night.
by CNB