
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 14, 1994                    TAG: 9406140338 
SECTION: LOCAL                     PAGE: B1    EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA  
SOURCE: BY BETTY MITCHELL GRAY, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: 940614                                 LENGTH: Medium

DEATH PENALTY OPPONENT WILL APPEAR ON TALK SHOW

{LEAD} State Sen. Frank Ballance will mount an unfamiliar platform this week when the Warren County Democrat appears on national television in an interview with talk-show host Phil Donahue.

The 52-year-old lawyer from Warrenton will appear in a discussion of the death penalty during the broadcast that will feature the life and death sentence of a convicted North Carolina killer. The program is scheduled to air today in eastern North Carolina, according to a spokesman for Donahue.

{REST} Ballance, an opponent of the death penalty, sponsored a bill during the legislature's special session on crime earlier this year that would have brought back public executions. Ballance said he proposed the measure, in part, to spur debate about executions.

``I view the death penalty as barbaric. . . and to have it in private is indefensible,'' he said in an interview Monday from his Warren County law office. ``If it's too horrible to show, it's too horrible to do.''

Ballance said he agreed to appear on the Donahue show after he talked with its producers about the circumstances in which he would appear.

Such talk shows can ``get to be a spectacle,'' he said. ``But I had no objections to going on and talking about this particular bill.''

Ballance taped his segment of the program in a 20-minute interview with Donahue, also a death penalty opponent, in New York.

Ballance's appearance is part of a program on the life David Lawson, scheduled to die early Wednesday morning in North Carolina's gas chamber.

In 1980, Lawson, then 25, shot and killed 35-year-old Wayne Shinn after breaking into Shinn's North Carolina home.

He also shot Shinn's 78-year-old father, Buren, in the back of the head. The elder Shinn survived to identify Lawson, who was convicted of murder in June 1981 and sentenced to die.

Lawson's case made headlines earlier this year when Donahue asked the state for permission to televise Lawson's execution.

The request was rejected by the state Supreme Court and last week a federal judge also dismissed a request by Donahue to let Lawson's execution be videotaped.

{KEYWORDS} MURDER DEATH PENALTY CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

by CNB