Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 24, 1995 TAG: 9501240120
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Edmond's lawyers immediately appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But late Monday afternoon, a three-judge panel turned down a motion for the stay of execution, said deputy clerk Beth Catogni. Edmonds' attorneys now will make a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision likely means Edmonds tonight will become the first Virginia prisoner to be executed by lethal injection.
Turk concluded that Edmonds' rights had been violated because his trial attorney - J. Patterson Rogers III of Danville - also represented Laverne Coles, a prosecution witness against Edmonds.
Barry Weinstein, Edmonds' current lawyer, contended in a hearing Saturday that Rogers' situation prevented him from aggressively cross-examining Coles, since he would be defending her in court later on an unrelated charge.
Weinstein argued that the conflict of interest was a sufficiently serious violation of Edmonds' rights to require a new trial.
Turk found otherwise.
"Even if Edmonds had been appointed a new counsel and refrained from waiving his right to a jury trial, the court is confident that he still would have been found guilty," Turk wrote in Monday's decision. "Similarly, the court believes the conflict did not affect the trial judge's eventual decision to impose the death penalty." Both factors were critical in determining whether Edmonds met the legal tests to be granted a new trial.
Edmonds was convicted of murdering Danville grocer John Elliott during a July 1983 robbery. In the decade after the trial, various courts have upheld the conviction and the determination that the slaying was particularly ``vile,'' qualifying Edmonds for the death penalty.
Elliott was struck on the head with a brick, gagged, and stabbed in the throat. He was left to bleed to death on the floor of his store.
Edmonds was informed of Turk's decision by his lawyers and spent much of Monday in the company of prison chaplains. Prison officials refused his request to be baptized.
Turk said he was bound by law to deny Edmonds' appeal, but he emphasized in his written order that he was troubled by the decision.
"[T]he court would like to make it clear," he wrote in his conclusion, "that it believes Dana Ray Edmonds did not receive effective assistance of counsel. ... There cannot be a more blatant conflict of interest than the one that existed in the present case." He wrote that Rogers never should have accepted the appointment to represent Coles and that he was ``at a loss to understand why neither he nor the prosecutor presented the issue to the trial court.
``Even more troubling to [this] court, Dana Ray Edmonds will suffer the Commonwealth's most severe penalty ... despite the fact that the trial in which his death sentence was imposed was, unquestionably, marred by a clear violation of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
``... [O]ur judicial system should operate in such a manner that defendants are assured of receiving their constitutional protections before the state exacts punishment for the violation of its laws. It is the opinion of the court that the system failed to provide Mr. Edmonds these protections. As a result, this court was left to perform an arguably speculative examination of what would have happened if Edmonds had received his constitutional right to conflict-free representation."
Edmonds' execution is scheduled for 9 p.m.
by CNB