As a supporter of capital punishment, I find no fault with Gov. Mark R. Warner’s decision yesterday to commute the death sentence of Robin Lovett, who stabbed a man to death with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery. The odds are overwhelming that Lovett was guilty of the crime he was convicted of and, thus, deserves to die. But Warner rightly notes that there is a higher principle at stake: The destruction of evidence in Lovett’s case by a court official rendered it impossible for Lovett to exonerate himself by a testing of DNA evidence. (See Frank Green’s story in the Times-Dispatch.)
To my mind, there is only one legitimate argument against the death penalty: The possibility that an innocent man (or woman) might be put to death. The criminal justice system is imperfect; people have been wrongfully convicted. Who knows how many innocents have been unjustly executed? It is incumbent upon death penalty supporters to go the extra mile to ensure that such horrors never occur.
While I object to the endless, often frivolous appeals that death penalty foes use to delay the administration of justice, I don’t object to testing DNA samples in instances where such tests had not been conducted before. The delay caused by testing is trivial. In Lovett’s situation, however, a circuit court employee violated a state law that had just gone into effect when he (or she) destroyed the evidence. I agree with Gov. Warner that Virginia’s criminal justice system must adhere rigidly to the protections granted all defendants. Failure to do so would undermine the legitimacy of capital punishment.
