THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 22, 1997 TAG: 9702220343
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: 34 lines
A federal appeals court Friday denied a stay of execution for Coleman Wayne Gray, scheduled to die Wednesday for the murder of a Suffolk convenience store manager.
A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made its unanimous ruling without comment.
Gray was convicted for the May 1985 killing of Richard McClelland, 49, who was forced off the road shortly after he left work at a Murphy's Mart.
He was taken back to the store where his two abductors robbed the business. He then was driven to the Suffolk campus of Tidewater Community College and shot six times in the head.
Gray's lawyers have presented affidavits from some witnesses who said they lied about hearing Gray admit to killing McClelland. They also said in the affidavits that they lied about hearing Gray confess to two unrelated killings.
No one has ever been charged in the unrelated slayings, those of a Chesapeake woman and her daughter in 1984. But prosecutors compared evidence from those killings to McClelland's murder in seeking the death penalty during Gray's sentencing.
One of the trial witnesses against Gray was his co-defendant, Melvin Tucker. Tucker, who remains in prison, avoided the death penalty by testifying that it was Gray who shot McClelland.
Tucker is sticking by that story but said his testimony about Gray's admission that he killed the two women was false.
KEYWORDS: DEATH ROW CAPITAL PUNISHMENT