Governor Mark Warner of Virginia has taken yet another action in the fight to pursue justice wherever it may take us. In the first move of its kind, the Governor has ordered post-mortem DNA testing to be done to determine if a man executed for murder in 1982 was in fact innocent.

Roger Keith Coleman may or may not be innocent, but we will soon know to a certainty. What we do know now is that the coal miner who appeared on a cover of Time Magazine, and whose execution the Pope tried to block, maintained his innocence up to the day he died, claiming he didn’t rape and kill his sister-in-law.

“An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight,” the 33-year-old said moments before he was electrocuted. “When my innocence is proven, I hope America will realize the injustice of the death penalty as all other civilized countries have.”

The extraordinary thing about this story is that it didn’t come about as a result of pressure from some anti-capital punishment group or Barry Sheck’s Innocence Project. It was the act of a politician trying to clean things up on his way out of office (the Governor’s term ends this month).

As for Mr. Coleman, we’ll know soon enough if he was just another guilty person claiming he was innocent, or if he is in fact someone put to death for a murder he did not commit. If it’s the latter, perhaps the DNA tests will lead police to whoever it is who actually raped and killed the first victim to die in this case.

Read the story here.

RP

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2006 at 3:59 pm and is filed under News, DNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.