![]() ![]() Arthur Mathews of Washington, D.C.’s Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering came in in 1984, joined later by partner Thomas Connell and others, including associate Mark Cahn.īut the lawyers found little sympathy in the courts for a man with a history of violent crime who had killed an Alexandria sheriffs deputy with his own gun in a desperate 1981 bid to escape custody. Solo practitioner Jonathan Shapiro of Alexandria, Virginia, had fought to save him since 1982. It doomed a man whose appeals included strong evidence that the state had introduced false conviction records at his original sentencing in 1981, then concealed this from the courts for two years while changing the law so as to get another shot at electrocuting him.Įvans’s appeals were pursued with special dedication by a team of first-rate lawyers. In Evans’s case the momentum was powerful enough to doom a prisoner credited by several guards with saving their lives during a prison escape. It also shows what a relentless momentum builds up once machinery is put in place to feed the public lust for vengeance, and what faint protection the courts provide when this momentum takes an illegal turn. Officials say the killing machine worked fine, that Evans just had a nosebleed, and that the only sound was from the motor.Īside from its grisly denouement, the history of the state’s nine-year drive to kill Wilbert Evans shows how our society seems to have given up on the possibility of rehabilitation. Some later said they saw blood coming from his ears and heard air rushing from his lips with a sizzling sound, then a kind of moan.Įvans’s lawyers accuse the state of torturing him to death in a malfunctioning electric chair. Blood streamed from under his leather death mask, spilling onto his chin and chest, soaking his shirt, followed by bloody foam from his lower lip. ![]() The big man jerked backward as the first 55-second jolt of 2,400 volts surged through a dampened sponge into his brain. He needed help spelling "bury." He stuffed the opinion in his pocket before walking into the death chamber. "Please bury this with me," he wrote in a childlike scrawl on his copy ofthe dissent. Justice Thurgood Marshall’s scathing, solitary dissent, calling the imminent execution "dead wrong," gave Evans some comfort. Rewarding good deeds and showing mercy isn’t the business of the courts. In the eyes of the law, the Court seemed to be saying, a condemned man who heroically protected hostages during a prison break is no better off than if he had killed them. ![]() He has a burning ambition for national office and reason to worry that he’d be Willie Hortonized if he spared a cop killer like Evans.Įarlier that evening the United States Supreme Court had sent a similar message when it denied a stay and turned aside Evans’s last appeal without comment. They killed Wilbert Lee Evans almost on schedule that night, six minutes after Governor Wilder gave the go-ahead by spurning Evans’s clemency petition. If you treat your guards with exceptional respect and courtesy, if you work hard and strive to reform, if you put yourself at risk to shield hostages threatened with death by prisoners wielding knives and to prevent the brutal rape of a nurse-if you do all this, we will kill you anyway. Douglas Wilder of Virginia sent a message to prisoners on death row, one that says something about what we have come to as a society: ![]() ON OCTOBER 17, AT 10:58 P.M., GOV-ernor L. ![]()
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