ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, May 21, 1996 TAG: 9605210112
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
High court OKs stay of execution
RICHMOND - Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Monday denied Virginia's request to allow the June 6 execution of Lem Tuggle to proceed, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office said.
Don Harrison said Rehnquist denied, without comment, a request to vacate a stay of execution issued last week by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court granted the stay to give Tuggle time to ask the Supreme Court to hear an appeal. Tuggle's lawyer, Timothy Kaine, has until July 29 to file his petition.
Tuggle is the sole survivor of a six-prisoner gang that pulled off the largest death-row escape in U.S. history in 1984. The inmates escaped from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center after posing as guards. All six were recaptured within a month, and the other five have been executed.
Tuggle was convicted of capital murder for the 1983 rape and killing of Jessie Geneva Havens, 52, in Smyth County. Havens and Tuggle had met at a dance. She was shot in the chest and thrown down an embankment.
The crime occurred four months after Tuggle was paroled from a sentence he was serving for the 1971 murder of a 17-year-old girl.
- Associated Press
Spitting vandal pleads guilty
FAIRFAX - A man accused of public spitting in a lingering feud with a jeweler has pleaded guilty, dropping his claim of malicious prosecution after learning he was secretly videotaped in the act.
Thomas M. Jenkins, 62, pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of spitting in public and one count of defacing private property. General District Judge Barbara Kimble fined him $300 and sentenced him to a year of unsupervised probation.
The judge also ordered Jenkins, an aircraft broker, to stay away from Great Falls jeweler Mergeredich ``Mike'' Tashjian, whose shop and car had been the target of Jenkins.
The dispute apparently began over a watch that Tashjian was repairing for Jenkins.
- Associated Press
Judge sentences headmaster
WARRENTON - A former private school headmaster will spend close to a year in jail for fondling a student after a judge rejected a plea arrangement as too lenient.
Craig Channell admitted in March that he sexually abused and propositioned a 17-year-old student while headmaster of the prestigious Wakefield School. The girl, now 18, took the stand clad in her school uniform at Channell's sentencing on May 15.
As about two dozen of her schoolmates looked on, the girl pointed to a somber Channell and told a judge Channell assaulted her in his home last July.
A plea agreement worked out in March with Fauquier County prosecutors would have spared Channell any jail time.
``I think that something beyond the plea agreement was indicated,'' Circuit Judge Carleton Penn said in imposing a one-year sentence.
Channell mouthed the words ``I'm sorry'' to the victim as she passed him in the courtroom, and apologized again in a statement to the judge.
``Ten months ago I committed a crime against a person who had never done me harm, and who trusted me and looked to me for help,'' Channell said. ``I'm deeply sorry and ashamed about what I did.''
Under state sentencing rules, Channell probably will serve about nine months of the sentence, Fauquier Sheriff Joe Higgs said Monday.
- Associated Press
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