THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 22, 1995 TAG: 9509220537
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
Lem Davis Tuggle, the last surviving member of a six-inmate gang that pulled off the largest death-row escape in U.S. history, won a stay of execution Thursday from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The twice-convicted killer was to have died by lethal injection Thursday night at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.
The Supreme Court said it needs to consider whether to hear the formal appeal Tuggle's lawyers filed with the court Monday. The court does not begin its 1995-96 term until Oct. 2.
Mark Miner, a spokesman for state Attorney General James S. Gilmore III, said that if the court decides not to hear the appeal, the stay would be lifted automatically. Under state law, the execution would be reset for a date no more than 70 days after the lifting of the stay.
Tuggle's lawyer, Timothy Kaine, said he was pleased to get the stay, but the real test will be whether the court agrees to accept the petition.
``Certainly the grant of the stay indicates that at least the justices feel there are some issues to resolve,'' Kaine said.
Eight more executions have been scheduled at Greensville over the next three months, beginning with Dennis W. Stockton on Sept. 27. However, court intervention for further appeals is likely in some of those cases.
Tuggle was convicted in Smyth County of the 1983 rape and murder of Jessie Geneva Havens. Havens, 52, and Tuggle had met at a dance. She was shot in the chest and thrown down an embankment.
Tuggle and five other death-row inmates escaped from Mecklenburg Correctional Center on May 31, 1984. They were recaptured within three weeks after a nationwide search. The other five have been executed.
Authorities said the six men used homemade knives and stolen guard uniforms to trick their way out of the rural prison in a state-owned van.
Tuggle was arrested in Vermont about a week after the escape.
Much of Tuggle's adult life has been spent in prison. Four months before Havens' murder, Tuggle was released on parole after serving 11 years of a 20-year prison term in the slaying of 17-year-old Shirley Mullins.
He came close to winning a reversal of his death sentence in 1985.
The Supreme Court ordered review of the sentence based on a ruling in an Oklahoma case. The case required independent psychiatric examinations for indigent defendants whose sanity is a major element in their defense.
The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the sentence a few months later, saying Tuggle failed to show at his trial that his sanity was in doubt. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Tuggle
KEYWORDS: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT by CNB