THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 28, 1995 TAG: 9504280496
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LaFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
During his 15 years on Virginia's death row, Willie Lloyd Turner has been scheduled for execution at least six times.
Three times, he was transferred to the death house to await his fate in a cell adjacent to the electric chair. Once, he came within four hours of being strapped into it.
In between, he lived with the mentally ill, violent and disease-stricken inmates warehoused in M Building at Powhatan Correctional Center. He dodged the excrement they threw and picked it out of his food. He choked on the black smoke from the mattress fires they set. He listened to them scream as they lay chained to their beds.
Turner, 49, who murdered a Franklin jewelry store owner during a bungled 1978 robbery, has been on death row longer than anyone else in the history of Virginia's modern-day death penalty - nearly one-third of his life. He is scheduled to be executed May 25.
But petitions filed simultaneously in U.S. District Court and the Virginia Supreme Court Thursday argue that the past 15 years have punished Turner enough.
``Execution after such a long and inhumane incarceration would violate the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishment,'' Turner's lawyers argue in the petitions.
Two U.S. Supreme Court justices believe they have a point.
Refusing in March to hear the case of a Texas man who claimed that his 17 years on death row constituted cruel and unusual punishment, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer conceded that the argument is important.
The principal purposes of the death penalty - retribution and deterrence - may be negated by extended periods of time on death row, wrote Stevens, with Breyer concurring. Quoting from an earlier opinion by Justice Byron White, Stevens noted that:
``When the death penalty ceases realistically to further these purposes, . life without only marginal contributions to any discernable social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the state would be patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment.''
Although the Supreme Court regards the issue as important and worthy of review, Stevens wrote, the lower courts should consider it first.
Turner's case ``is exactly what Stevens had in mind,'' according to Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. ``Stevens is saying you have a Catch-22 with the death penalty.''
``If you want to make certain that someone has had a fair trial, you must dot every `i' and cross every `t'. And by definition, that takes a long time. However, if someone spends 10 or 15 years on death row, many people would argue that they've paid their debt and been punished enough.
``And when the conditions are horrible, as they are at M Building, it makes the argument against carrying out the death penalty even better.''
Turner's petition, and affidavits attached to it, describe M Building as ``a hell on Earth'' where inmates throw so many feces from their cells that correctional officers wear face masks ``to escape the flying dung'' and ``the Styrofoam containers in which Mr. Turner's food was served were frequently covered with feces.''
The petition describes prisoners chained to their beds and lying in their own waste, and a single shower for 26 people which is ``filthy, covered with human waste, frequently stopped up and shared by those with communicable diseases.''
Attached affidavits from Turner, two chaplains, a teacher and a former correctional officer speak of rat- and roach-infestation in the facility; poor ventilation that causes freezing conditions in winter; stifling conditions in summer and a gagging ``stench'' at all times; unsanitary flooding from stopped-up toilets, and the constant ``deafening roar'' of prisoners yelling and banging on the bars.
Turner's three trips to the death house - where condemned inmates are incarcerated and watched around the clock for 15 days before they are executed - also constituted cruel and unusual punishment, his petition argues. One of the trips, Turner wrote, occurred on April 19, 1985, the day after the execution of James Briley, a man he had known for six years on death row.
``When they brought me in, I could see - and smell - a box holding the burned, bloody clothes J.B. had worn in the chair, wet with urine and crusty with feces. Big green flies buzzed around the box. The chemical they had used still had not eliminated the odor of J.B.'s burned flesh from the air.''
More than once, Turner wrote, he has been in the death house with someone else and watched ``as his visitors, usually lawyers, became more frequent and more tense.''
``I could hear him on the phone with his friends and family trying to prop up their spirits while he kept a grip on his own. The day before the other man's execution, the guards would take me to another section of the prison, and I would say goodbye to a man I had known for years. By the next morning, they would bring me back, and the sickening odor of burnt flesh and disinfectant would be in the air again.''
Under a change in state law that went into effect last year, Turner, who was transferred to the Greensville Correctional Center last year, has a choice between electrocution and lethal injection.
A spokesman for Attorney General James Gilmore said Thursday that Gilmore could not comment on Turner's petition because he had not yet seen it. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
KEYWORDS: DEATH ROW CAPITAL PUNISHMENT VIRGINIA MURDER
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