Friday May 11 -

Death Row Cases Come With Twists

By CALVIN WOODWARD,  WASHINGTON  - Throughout history and especially now, death-row cases have come with wrenching twists in the last weeks, days, hours, minutes. Even last meals don't mean it's over.The postponement Friday of Timothy McVeigh (news - web sites)'s execution date was extraordinary in that it was motivated not by the condemned man, who seems detached about his fate, but by the government on the basis of a blunder.Yet 11th-hour detours from the death chamber are practically commonplace in the annals of American capital punishment, for the infamous and the unknown.``Spies Get 1 More Day,'' screamed the headline in a tabloid clutched by the bewildered children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953, before their parents were put to death for giving atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviets.In a modern-day case that contributed to the moratorium on Illinois executions, Anthony Porter had ordered his last meal and been fitted for burial clothes before winning a temporary reprieve in 1998.Then another man confessed to the murder, clearing him.``The death penalty is a roller coaster in terms of dates,'' said Richard C. Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center.``Typically people have two or three or four execution dates before it's carried out - if it's carried out.''The Rosenbergs' trial was a sensation; many protested its fairness and Albert Einstein and the pope asked that the couple be spared.The couple lived an extra day when the case was referred to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear appeals. The children, then 6 and 10, were photographed looking at the paper that chronicled their parents' last hope.McVeigh, convicted of killing 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was scheduled to be put to death Wednesday in the first federal execution since 1963. The government ordered a 30-day stay after the FBI (news - web sites) said it found documents it had failed to turned over to McVeigh's defense.Officials said the documents do not contain anything that clouds the jury's verdict or McVeigh's admission of responsibility.Still, Bush, overseeing his first execution stay as president, said the postponement ``is an example of the system being fair.''Last year, Bush authorized the only 30-day stay he granted as Texas governor, in the case of Ricky Nolen McGinn.McGinn was only 18 minutes from death and had eaten what was supposed to have been his last meal when Bush put off the execution so new DNA evidence could be considered. McGinn, a convicted child killer, was executed in September after the evidence failed to exonerate him.In normal circumstances, Dieter noted, most condemned prisoners never are put to death. Only about 10 percent of the 7,000 death penalty sentences ordered since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 have been carried out.Those executed in 1999 spent an average of 11 years and 11 months on death row, a government study has found.McVeigh decided earlier to drop all appeals, but as his lawyers pored over the withheld documents, they indicated he could decide to pursue avenues available to him.Public demands to save the lives of the condemned have animated other famous cases, including that of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists executed in 1927 for robbery and murder six years after a trial considered unfair by many then and now.No such movement has sprung up for McVeigh.The last prisoner executed by the federal government tried until the end to save himself.President Kennedy was pulled from the White House swimming pool to take a call asking him to look into the case of Victor Feguer, convicted of killing an Iowa doctor after driving him across state lines.Kennedy ultimately denied clemency; Feguer was hanged after a last meal consisting of a single olive with the pit still in it.Last year, President Clinton (news - web sites) twice delayed the federal execution of Juan Raul Garza, each time within a week of the scheduled date. The Texan is scheduled to be executed June 19.Such down-to-the-wire attention came too late for Leon Jerome Moser in Pennsylvania, convicted killer of his ex-wife and two daughters, in 1995.Nine minutes after lethal drugs began coursing into Moser, a judge placed a final call hoping to get him on the phone to gauge his competency.