Warner Orders DNA Testing In Case of Man Executed in '92

After repeated appeals from Centurion, Warner reversed the state's longstanding opposition and ordered tests early last month. Although it is possible that the results will be inconclusive, Blake said he thinks more advanced testing is likely to produce a more definitive result.

Jim McCloskey, Centurion's executive director, yesterday praised Warner's decision. He recalled a meeting with Coleman in the hours before the execution when he promised he'd continue working to prove Coleman's claims of innocence.

"It's my expectation that the DNA tests will prove, once and for all, that Roger Coleman is a completely innocent man," McCloskey said. "If I'm wrong then I'm wrong. But with the tests we can find the truth."

Virginia -- the first state to create a DNA databank to solve crimes -- has become the first to engage in widespread genetic testing in old cases in an effort to see whether new technology will uncover any wrongful convictions.

After a recent review of 31 old criminal cases resulted in the exoneration of two men who spent years in prison for rapes they did not commit, Warner last month ordered the review of thousands of other old cases from the 1970s and '80s, before the advent of DNA testing. In all, five men who served 91 years in prison have been exonerated in the state over the past several years.

The testing in Coleman's case marks only the second time nationwide that DNA tests have been performed after the death of an inmate facing execution. In 2000, tests ordered by a Georgia judge on evidence in the case of Ellis W. Felker, who was executed in 1996, were inconclusive. Genetic tests exonerated Florida inmate Frank L. Smith in 2000, several months after he died of natural causes while awaiting execution.

During Coleman's trial, authorities said there was compelling evidence of guilt, including hair on McCoy's body that was similar to Coleman's and the account of a jailhouse informant. Officials also noted that he had been convicted of attempted rape in 1977.

But Coleman maintained his innocence in a series of television and newspaper interviews that generated attention around the world. Coleman said he had an alibi and would not have had time to commit the killing. Defense attorneys also have gathered affidavits from people who said another man boasted of killing McCoy. Time magazine featured his case in a cover story titled "Must This Man Die?"

The morning of his execution, as L. Douglas Wilder, the governor at the time, debated his fate, Coleman was secretly taken to a police building for a lie-detector test. He failed.

After he was strapped into the electric chair on May 20, 1992, Coleman, then 33, read this statement: "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight. When my innocence is proven, I hope Americans will realize the injustice of the death penalty as all other civilized countries have."