DNA Tests May Signal Shift in Death Penalty Debate

Capital Punishment Supporters Say Stance Is Boosted by Results Proving Guilt of Executed Va. Killer

As Jim McCloskey drove last week from Virginia back to the New Jersey charity he founded two decades ago to help free wrongfully convicted inmates, his mind was on the murderer and rapist who fooled him with false claims of innocence.

On May 20, 1992, in the hours before Roger K. Coleman was executed, McCloskey shared a pizza with Coleman outside Virginia's death chamber and vowed he would keep fighting to exonerate him. Coleman told him to turn to look at a television, where the phrase "miscarriage of justice" flashed across the screen as prison guards watched "Jeopardy."

McCloskey, convinced for years that he had witnessed a fatal mistake in the criminal justice system, last week learned that DNA tests proved that Coleman was a rapist and killer. Now he will try to figure out how he was misled.

"He pulled the wool over my eyes," said McCloskey, 63. "I'm going back and reflecting. Why was I blinded by this or that? We will learn from this."

For McCloskey, Coleman's guilt is a "bitter pill to swallow." But in the overall debate about the death penalty, Coleman's DNA results may be a watershed moment.

Coleman's case is rare. It had elements that very few other cases of executed inmates have: preserved DNA evidence, advocates willing to do legal work for free and, ultimately, a governor in Mark R. Warner who was willing to order the tests.

Now, death penalty foes will have to look for a new case on which to make their argument.

Michael Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School who has represented death row inmates, said an exoneration of Coleman would have cemented what he says is declining support for the death penalty nationwide -- a shift he attributes to concern over wrongful convictions and to states adding the option of sentencing felons to life without the chance of parole.

Last year, as the United States recorded the 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 60 inmates were executed, compared with a record-high 98 in 1999. The number of people sentenced to death has also been dwindling, with 125 felons entering death row in 2004, compared to about 300 annually in the mid-1990s. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has banned executions of minors and mentally retarded offenders.

But for advocates of capital punishment, Coleman's test results are proof that the system works, and some think it switches momentum to their argument.

"The Coleman case proves exactly what we've been saying: that the safeguards are there," said Stanley Rosenbluth, president of Virginians United Against Crime, a support group for victims that supports the death penalty.

Coleman, a coal miner from the town of Grundy in southwestern Virginia, was convicted and sentenced to death in the 1981 rape and stabbing of his sister-in-law, 19-year-old Wanda McCoy. He maintained his innocence in television and newspaper interviews that generated attention around the world. After he was strapped into Virginia's electric chair, he declared, "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight."