Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 14, 1995 TAG: 9508140102
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL BURKE LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On that day, four counties to the east, the man affected by the signing sat in a stuffy prison cell, putting words on paper himself.
The words he was writing will appear on the pages of this newspaper.
Stockton is the dean of Virginia's death row and, at 54, one of the oldest death-row inmates in America. He is scheduled to die at 9 p.m. on Sept. 27 in the death chamber at the Greensville Correctional Center.
As Stockton marks the days on the calendar, readers will know what he sees, what he hears, what he thinks. He is writing an account of what likely will be the final weeks of his life in a journal to be published here. The newspaper will follow the story through to its conclusion, whatever it may be: an execution, a pardon, clemency.
The first installment runs today.
Stockton himself suggested writing this account, and, after much discussion, editors and reporters at The Roanoke Times its sister paper, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, agreed to publish it. For each story Stockton is being paid at a regular correspondent's rate. The Virginian-Pilot helped pay for the Panasonic KX-R335 electronic typewriter Stockton is using to write his stories.
Stockton, of Shelby, N.C., was convicted in 1983 of the 1978 murder-for-hire of Kenneth Wayne Arnder, 18, in Patrick County. It was a brutal killing: Arnder was shot in the head and his hands were hacked off at the wrists. A jury sentenced Stockton to death.
Much has been written about Stockton's claims of innocence and about charges by him and his lawyers that his conviction and sentence were obtained under questionable circumstances.
In fact, the chief prosecution witness in the case in April recanted, in an interview with a Virginian-Pilot reporter, the story he had told at the trial: That he had heard Stockton accept a deal for a murder for hire. Without that testimony, prosecutors probably could not have obtained a death sentence. The witness later, under oath, denied making the recantation.
And a federal judge, while noting that the witness had a credibility problem, pointed out that the jury was aware of this when they sentenced Stockton and gave him the death penalty anyway. The judge then upheld that sentence.
But the account Stockton is writing is not about his guilt or innocence. It is not about whether he got a fair trial. Stockton is not being given a forum to make a plea for clemency or mercy.
This instead will be a chronicle of one person facing the ultimate punishment for a criminal act and how he copes with his mortality, knowing the day and the hour of his death. And knowing that he has no power to stop it.
The effect of the crime on the victim and his family will be included in this account. A reporter traveled to North Carolina to talk at length with the mother of Kenneth Arnder. The story of Wilma Arnder, about the impact of the crime on the Arnder family, about waiting 17 years to see justice come full circle, will be told next week.
Dennis Stockton has unusual credentials as a writer. He has kept a diary of life on death row since June 20, 1983, five days after arriving at Mecklenburg. This newspaper published lengthy excerpts from that diary in 1984, in which Stockton described the only mass escape from death row in U.S. history. Stockton was not among those who escaped.
Stockton has written several as-yet unpublished books and was the author of a monthly prison newsletter that was sometimes bitter and angry, sometimes quirky and whimsical.
Now he is writing what could be the final chapter of the diary he began 12 summers ago on Virginia's death row.
by CNB