Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 22, 1995 TAG: 9509220097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Tuggle - infamous for raping and killing his second victim while on parole and for breaking out of prison with five other death-row inmates - was scheduled for lethal injection at 9 p.m. Thursday at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.
Tuggle's lawyers filed an appeal Monday with the Supreme Court. The justices granted a temporary stay until they rule on whether to review it. The justices reconvene Oct. 2.
Tuggle's attorney, Timothy Kaine, said the stay of execution means there is a significant possibility the appeal will be granted.
Whether Tuggle's constitutional rights were violated is the focus of his appeal. Kaine said it includes four main claims:
nThat Tuggle was denied the aid of a state-paid psychiatrist.
nThat the state did not sufficiently prove Tuggle raped his last victim, a charge that must be proven to justify the death penalty.
nThat the jury was not impartial.
nThat the judge improperly instructed the jury during the sentencing phase.
If Tuggle's appeal is denied, the stay will end automatically, according to the one-paragraph order the Supreme Court issued.
At least five of the nine justices had to concur for a stay to be issued. The order did not indicate which justices did so, but a spokeswoman at the court's public information office said there were no dissenting opinions.
Kaine said his client had resigned himself to being executed, but was happy to hear about the stay.
Tuggle's legacy is the ruthlessness of two murders committed 12 years apart. Each time, he lured a woman away from an American Legion dance near Marion in Southwestern Virginia and killed her.
In 1971 he strangled Shirley Mullins, a 17-year-old from Smyth County. He admitted taking her to a deserted house. But once there, he said, he blacked out. When he awakened he discovered Mullins dead on a bed.
Tuggle was convicted and sentenced to 20 years. At his sentencing hearing, a clinical psychiatrist testified that he appeared to have two personalities, one passive and the other violent. There was a "high probability" Tuggle would kill again, according to the psychiatrist.
Despite that warning, the state granted Tuggle parole in 1983. After less than four months of freedom, he returned to the site of his first murder, befriending a 52-year-old grandmother at an American Legion dance. This time he remembered the murder, leading police to the body of Jessie Geneva Havens four days after he killed her.
She had been raped and shot once in the chest with a .25-caliber pistol. Police found the murder weapon in Tuggle's truck. He was convicted in 1984 of capital murder and sentenced to die.
Once on death row, Tuggle remained in the spotlight. In 1984, he was one of six killers who broke out of Mecklenburg Correctional Center. The inmates seized a dozen guards at knifepoint and drove away from the prison, pretending to have a bomb. It was the largest escape by death-row inmates in U.S. history.
Vermont State Police recaptured Tuggle nine days later. He is the last surviving participant in the prison break.
He attempted two more escapes, but was unsuccessful.
Tuggle, who has been on death row for a decade, will return to Mecklenburg Correctional Center and become one of nearly 60 prisoners awaiting execution.
Eight more men are scheduled for execution by the end of the year, an unprecedented number since Virginia reinstated its death penalty in 1977.
Death penalty experts say a new law shortening the appeals process, and the end of lengthy litigation for a handful of the death-row prisoners, has contributed to the number of execution dates set in 1995.
by CNB