DNA Evidence Deals Defeat…

…To the fawning crowd of anti-death penalty groups. Take THAT Mike Farrell!

From WDBJ here: http://tinyurl.com/84asy

New DNA tests ordered by Governor Mark Warner have confirmed the guilt of Roger Keith Coleman, who was executed in 1992. Coleman went to the electric chair for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law in 1981 maintaining his innocence.A news release from the governor’s office said, “The report from the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto concluded Coleman cannot be excluded as the source of the major DNA profile on the biological evidence.”

“According to the report, ‘The probability that a randomly selected individual unrelated to Roger Coleman would coincidentally share the observed DNA profile is estimated to be 1 in 19 million.'”

We have sought the truth using DNA technology not available at the time the Commonwealth carried out the ultimate criminal sanction, said Governor Warner in a news release. The confirmation that Roger Colemans DNA was present reaffirms the verdict and the sanction. Again, my prayers are with the family of Wanda McCoy at this time, the governor said.

Of course, Mark Warner was really hoping that the evidence would exonerate him so he could use Coleman as a plank in an anti-death penalty platform to make a run for the presidency in 2008.

But Capital punishment opponents and much of the leftist media were convinced of Coleman’s innocence, since, after all, he had an alibi and was declaring his innocence even to the point that he was strapped into Virginia’s electric chair.

Check out an excerpt of WashingtonPost’s article about the ongoing DNA testing on jan 5th:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/05/AR2006010502463_2.html

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.”

Here is the Time Cover:

A leftist author even put out a book about the case, which paints this cold hard killer as a saint. It has been adopted by the anti-death penalty gang as the holy gospel of why crime should never be punished. (This same author also wrote a pamphlet about how mosquito pesticides in Florida might be hurting fish. Of course, malaria kills millions worldwide, but that story is for another post.) This is how the editors of Amazon.Com described the book piously titled May God Have Mercy : A True Story of Crime and Punishment
see: http://tinyurl.com/8phej

On the evening of March 10, 1981, 19-year-old Wanda Fay McCoy, her head nearly severed from her body, bled to death on her bedroom floor. The small-town police who investigated the case quickly narrowed their focus on her brother-in-law, Roger Coleman.

Their suspicions made sense: Wanda had been raped; Roger had once served time for sexual assault. The facts, at least superficially, all pointed to him as the killer.

As the story unravels, though, the case seems less cut-and-dried, and the police’s decision to focus so much of their energies on Coleman seems more and more a travesty. Yet, despite growing evidence of his innocence, Coleman was quickly tried, found guilty, and condemned to die.

The ever-ultra-liberal New York Times took the book and tried to use it to abolish the death penalty altogether. This is what Roger Parloff of the Times said:

…there is no way to insure that a statute will be applied only to the truly guilty, and to favor the death penalty in any case at all means accepting the inevitability that from time to time society will put innocent people to death. John C. Tucker’s May God Have Mercy is a lucid and engrossing exploration of this problem….

Lucid and Engrossing Exploration!? More like wishful thinking in a liberal’s utopian worldview. Roger Coleman’s hot seat on old Sparky in Virginia was only a warmup to the hell he deserves to live in for the rest of eternity. But don’t worry- the leftists of this nation will continue to search for the perfect innocent victim to use to outlaw punishment.