No dallying on executions

John Allen Muhammad can expect to be executed in about three years if he gets the death penalty following his conviction in the first Washington sniper trial.

Virginia inmates, on average, have the shortest stay on death row, when compared with condemned prisoners in the federal prison system or any other state that allows execution, according to a report released this month by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The average waiting time of three years in Virginia is one-third the national average of 9.1 years before execution, the report shows.

“Virginia, we believe, has the strongest and best capital-punishment law in the nation,” says Tim Murtaugh, spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore. “Our statute is very specific, and it’s been tested and retested all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s very sound.”

Federal death-row inmates wait an average of 4.1 years before being executed.

Death-row inmates in Washington state and Delaware had the third-shortest average waiting time to die, 5.1 years. Inmates in Tennessee and Utah wait the longest time on average, at 11.3 years.

By the end of 2002, Virginia had sent 137 convicts to death row and conducted 87 executions since 1976, when it reinstated the death penalty after a moratorium ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Those numbers put Virginia second only to Texas, which executed 289 prisoners over the same period. Death-row inmates in Texas spend an average of 7.4 years awaiting execution.

Fewer inmates in Virginia have had their convictions overturned or their sentences commuted than in any other state that has executed at least one inmate. A total of 22 of 137 inmates sentenced to death have been removed from death row since 1975, or 16 percent, compared with the national average of 36 percent.

All inmates currently on Virginia’s death row were sentenced after 1997.

A major reason for the swiftness between sentencing and execution is that Virginia’s legislature and the U.S. Supreme Court have streamlined the process for hearing appeals.

If Muhammad is sentenced to death, the state has a statutory obligation to grant him an automatic appeal at the Virginia Supreme Court.

“There’s going to be some rich grounds for appeal,” says James Oleson, a legal analyst and sociology professor at Old Dominion University.

The review would include a range of issues, such as the nature of instructions to the jury and whether the death sentence was handed down fairly, Mr. Oleson says. The court also would review issues specific to the Muhammad case, such as the first application of the state’s antiterrorism law and interpretation of the triggerman statute.

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