DATE: Saturday, March 22, 1997              TAG: 9703220609

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B4   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: From The Associated Press

                                            LENGTH:   63 lines

VIRGINIA

CENTRAL

State will move

death row to new

prison in Sussex

RICHMOND - The state will move death row inmates to a new prison equipped with interior gun ports, fencing with sensitive detection devices and a computerized security control system.

The Sussex I prison in rural Sussex County will begin receiving general population inmates in December, with death row prisoners moving in next year, Warden John Taylor said Friday.

Corrections Department spokesman David B. Botkins said the Sussex prison is more secure than the Mecklenburg Correctional Center, scene of the largest death row breakout in the nation's history.

On May 31, 1984, six inmates used homemade knives and stolen guard uniforms to trick their way out of Mecklenburg's death row in a prison van. Authorities recaptured them within a month, and all have been executed. The last of the six, Lem Tuggle, died by injection in December.

The $71 million Sussex prison will be the most secure prison in the state until Red Onion and Wallens Ridge prisons in southwest Virginia open.

Allen says he will veto bill

delaying school revisions

RICHMOND - Gov. George Allen said Friday that he will veto a bill delaying by nearly a year the effective date of revised public school accreditation standards.

The new standards are scheduled to take effect July 27. The bill by Del. Kenneth Plum, D-Reston, would have pushed the effective date to July 1, 1998. Plum said schools needed more time to prepare for the new standards.

But David Johnson, the executive director of the Virginia Education Association, said the changes given preliminary approval Feb. 25 by the State Board of Education were not as drastic as many people had expected.

$40 million site will honor

lives of Civil War soldiers

PETERSBURG - Curators at the site of one of the final Civil War battles said Friday they will build a $40 million museum to explore the common soldier's life.

The first phase of the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier is set to open in Dinwiddie County near Petersburg on Memorial Day in 1999, said A. Wilson Green, executive director of the Pamplin Park Civil War Site.

``The museum will be about the experience of the common soldier - who he was, what motivated him, what training he received, what kept him fighting amid the horrors of war and how the war affected him afterwards,'' Greene said at a news conference Friday.

COMING UP

Today

Richmond - Gov. George Allen signs into law a bill requiring girls to inform their parents before they have abortions, 11:45 a.m., south portico steps of the Capitol.

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