DATE: Thursday, October 16, 1997            TAG: 9710160562

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B13  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: FROM WIRE REPORTS

                                            LENGTH:   79 lines

VIRGINIA

CENTRAL

Company tests safer

cigarette, products

to help smokers quit

PETERSBURG - A tiny Virginia tobacco company has obtained federal approval for clinical tests of products that could make it easier for smokers to quit and may also produce a safer cigarette for those who don't.

The tests by Star Tobacco & Pharmaceutical Inc. of Petersburg use a new method to remove some cancer-causing compounds in cigarettes, the company said Tuesday.

The targeted compounds - nitrosamines - are considered a leading cause of lung cancer, which killed 158,000 Americans last year.

The experiments have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Health experts had mixed reactions to the testing.

Dr. Ronald Davis, director of the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, said tobacco smoke has at least 43 cancer-causing chemicals. ``So removal of some of them certainly doesn't solve the problem,'' he said.

But Dr. John Slade, a smoking researcher at St. Peter's Medical Center in New Brunswick, N.J., was optimistic.

``Here is a tobacco company really innovating and asking the right questions to modify tobacco,'' said Slade.

FDA officials declined to comment.

Star, which recently added ``Pharmaceutical'' to its name, is a maker of specialty cigarettes such as the brands Buz and Gunsmoke.

Samuel Sears, chairman of Star, said the company has been working on the nitrosamine removal process for more than two years.

Conviction overturned

in 1990 student slaying

RICHMOND - A man's conviction of the 1990 slaying of a college student in Harrisonburg was overturned Wednesday by a federal judge who said the prosecutor withheld key information from the defense.

The information cast doubt on the memory of a key prosecution witness, U.S. District Judge Robert Merhige Jr. said.

``Whether from good faith or bad, the effect is that these undisclosed materials were suppressed by the prosecution and never disclosed'' to Tommy David Strickler's trial attorney, Merhige said in overturning the conviction.

Prosecutors are required to turn over materials that might impeach the testimony of their witnesses.

Strickler was convicted in September 1990 by an Augusta County Circuit Court jury of the murder, abduction and robbery of Leanne Whitlock.

Whitlock, a student at James Madison University, was taken from the parking lot of a Harrisonburg shopping mall by two men and a woman on Jan. 5, 1990. Her nude body was discovered about a week later, her head crushed by a 69-pound rock.

The state produced a witness who identified Strickler as one of the men who forced their way into Whitlock's car.

But earlier this year, Strickler's lawyers subpoenaed newly discovered notes from a detective who interviewed the witness and letters from the witness to the detective.

According to the notes and letters, the witness at first could not remember being at the mall at the time of the abduction, and if she was there could not identify the woman in the car, the two men who entered the car, or remember any details of the event.

The notes and letters showed that some of what the witness remembered was based on what her 14-year-old daughter recalled. The daughter accompanied her mother to the mall, but did not see the parking lot altercation.

At the trial, the witness testified that she was ``100 percent'' certain of her identification of Strickler and his male companion. But according to the detective's notes, the woman was unable initially to identify either when shown a photo lineup.

``(Her) memory of the events to which she testified appears muddled at best. . . This information, at a minimum, would likely have been extremely valuable in attacking her credibility with the jury, if counsel were not successful in actually barring her testimony altogether,'' Merhige said.

Don Harrison, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office, said the ruling would be appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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