Riffs From The Row

By William Van Poyck - August  7, 2005

In my last column I wrote about a friend, Rob Lovitt, who was at the time scheduled to be executed by the commonwealth of Virginia on July 11, 2005. At the time Rob’s death seemed almost a foregone conclusion inasmuch as his last legal resort was the United States Supreme Court, and statistically speaking anybody’s chances of obtaining relief from the U.S. Supreme Court are very, very slim. Following my column I watched as the guards handcuffed & shackled Rob’s hands and feet and escorted him to the death house at Greensville, where all condemned prisoners go just 4 days prior to execution. In my almost six years here I’ve watched many men make that trip to Greensville and very few ever made the trip back. So it’s difficult not to be weighted down with resignation when you see someone, especially a friend, shuffle out of the cellblock for that 15–minute ride down the road. And, it seldom matters how strong or persuasive the merits of your legal claims are, or whether there exists substantial questions of your guilt or innocence. Rather, the dispositive issue is simply procedural, whether the proper procedures were followed. It is that focus on “procedures”, rather then the truth, justice, guilt or innocence which led the U.S. Supreme Court, some years ago, to famously hold that it is not unconstitutional to execute an innocent man as long as all of the procedures were followed. As the court often stated, the constitution does not guarantee a perfect trial, only a fair one, and as long as it was “fair” (defined as a trial where procedure was followed correctly) then it was, by definition, constitutional. Squinting through such a myopic lens allows the court to deem innocence constitutionally irrelevant. In this country, which prides itself as “a nation of laws”, the law has become all about the law and nothing about justice.

Be that as it may, on July 11, just four hours before his scheduled execution, a brief news flash flickered across my little TV as a local newscaster, sounding disappointed, declared that the U.S. Supreme Court had in fact issued a last-minute stay of execution for Rob; the court declined to give any particular reason for the stay (although it could only have been over Rob’s sole issue regarding the state’s destruction of all the evidence in his case, combined with the fact that the Virginia Crime Lab is currently under investigation over false and fabricated test results which have resulted in the convictions of innocent defendants) and stated that the stay will remain in effect until the Court, currently in summer recess, reconvenes in October. It certainly helped, in my opinion, that Rob’s attorney, who appealed to the Court, was Kenneth Star, who used to be the U.S. Solicitor general, used to be a federal judge, used to be the Special Prosecutor who brought impeachment charges against the President Clinton, and who is personal friends with all of the conservative Justices sitting on the Supreme Court. I think they threw a bone to their friend, Kenneth Starr and/or Starr called in a personal favor. Whatever it was, Rob is alive. Later that evening I watched Rob shuffle back up the long sidewalk leading to our cellblock, the same sidewalk he’d shuffled down just four days earlier. This time, though, Rob was smiling – a man who had just won the emotional lottery – silhouetted starkly against the pink-and-purple pastel sunset as he struggled to wave his shackled arms. I smiled too, knowing that on this night, at least, the monster – the machinery of death – would not be fed. Rob is now numbered among the very, very few who have ever made the return trip from Greensville.

Later that night I again watched the news on TV, hoping to hear more about the precise legal basis for the Court’s granting of Rob’s stay of execution. But the too-tanned TV announcer with his perfect white teeth and perfectly styled hair offered no information along that line – no mention of the destroyed evidence, no mention of the crime laboratory under investigation. Instead, he inexplicably offered, in a reedy voice equally tinged with disbelief and disappointment, that “this [July 11^th] is the latest in the year that Virginia has ever gone without executing anyone.” He seemed genuinely upset that Virginia had failed to kill anyone yet in 2005, as though this was a personal affront, a betrayal threatening to undermine his confidence in the machinery of death that Virginia holds so dear. I turned my TV off and laid on my bunk, and reflected on that newscaster’s words and expression. Where , I wondered, does this insatiable thirst for blood come from? It seemingly lays deep in the psyche of many of our citizens, like moray eels lurking in the coral reef’s shadow. I fell asleep knowing only that we as a nation know everything about violence and revenge and nothing about suffering and forgiveness.

William Van Poyck was sentenced to death in Florida but was transferred to Virginia’s death row by the governor of Florida after Florida State Prison guards murdered Van Poyck’s codefendant, Frank Vales, in his death row cell in 1999.

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