ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 10, 1996 TAG: 9612100113
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: STAUNTON
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY STAFF WRITER
Virginia will execute Larry Allen Stout tonight for the 1987 murder of the proprietor of a Staunton dry cleaners.
Jacqueline Kooshian died from a single stab wound to the throat inflicted by Stout on Feb. 19, 1987, during a robbery of her business. Kooshian, 40, had two children. An autopsy report indicated that her jugular vein was severed.
"I'm not sure I'm for the death penalty, but if that's what it takes, I don't know," Kooshian's mother, Charlotte Trimble, said this week.
"I'll just be glad when it's all over."
Stout, now 33, pleaded guilty to capital murder in 1987. During his sentencing, however, he testified that Kooshian's death was an accident.
He had committed a number of successful robberies in which he had brandished a knife and told his victims to lie on the floor, Stout testified. But Kooshian "throwed her hands up grabbed my arm and I pushed her, shoved. The next thing I know she was cut."
Stout's lawyers have argued in appeals that Stout got ineffective assistance from his lawyer, Staunton Public Defender William Bobbitt.
Bobbitt, court records indicate, advised that Stout plead guilty even though an autopsy report did not contradict his version of events and premeditation is a necessary element of capital murder in Virginia.
Bobbitt also decided not to present any evidence about Stout's childhood to the judge.
Born sick because of his mother's alcoholism, Stout barely survived. He was also half black, unlike anyone else in his migrant-worker family. His mother, Sylvia Sankey, was deserted by her husband soon after Larry's birth. Her next husband, an ex-convict named Cal Stout, referred to the child as "Nigger Larry."
By the time Larry Stout was 10, Cal Stout had pulled the children out of school and put them to work in the fields. Cal Stout also brutalized Sylvia's children. Both Cal and Sylvia Stout drank and by the time he was 18, Larry Stout was drinking a 12-pack to a case of beer daily, injecting cocaine and heroin and blacking out frequently. He couldn't read and he couldn't write. He picked fruit but during the off-season, when he needed money for drugs, he broke into houses and robbed stores.
The court-ordered psychological evaluation done at Western State Hospital documented the rapes, beatings and alcoholism that dominated Stout's youth. It also concurred with Stout's claim that he had not planned to kill Kooshian.
But Bobbit decided not to enter the report into evidence. "That report would have given the judge a reason not to impose the death penalty," said the condemned man's attorney, Roanoke lawyer Arthur Strickland.
In 1994, U.S. District Court Judge James Turk agreed Bobbitt was ineffective and ordered a new sentencing for Stout. But Turk's order was thrown out by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September. Bobbitt's decision to put on no evidence was " conscious" and "strategic," the panel ruled.
Stout's execution falls on both his mother's birthday and International Human Rights Day. For those reasons, death penalty opponents plan a protest on the state capital grounds in Richmond today.
"We are protesting the fact that, while the rest of the world is celebrating International Human Rights Day, Virginia is celebrating by executing a human being," said Henry Heller, director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
"We also want to call attention to the wave of executions we have been experiencing in this state. Six in 27 days during the holiday season. I mean, how cold can the government be?"
Stout's will be the third execution in Virginia since Nov. 21. Another - that of Lem Davis Tuggle III - is scheduled for Thursday. Two more are set to take place before Christmas.
Stout is scheduled to die at 9 p.m.
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