ATLANTA
-- North Carolina prison officials executed a man early today whose lawyer admitted he drank 12 shots of rum a day during the penalty phase of his murder trial.
With all legal avenues exhausted, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley rejected
Ronald Wayne Frye's appeal for clemency Thursday night, saying there was no
doubt that "the defendant senselessly and brutally killed and robbed an
elderly, innocent man."
Earlier Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution. State
and lower federal courts had turned down Frye's numerous requests for a
retrial.
He was executed by lethal injection at Raleigh's Central Prison.
Frye, a 42-year-old construction worker, robbed his landlord in 1993 and
stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors. There is no doubt he
committed the crime, but during the penalty phase of his trial, Frye's
lawyer presented little evidence of a nightmarish childhood that might have
swayed a jury into sparing his client's life.
The court-appointed lawyer, Tom Portwood, admitted he was drinking heavily
during the case, downing nearly a pint of 80-proof rum every afternoon. He
also revealed he was in a car wreck around the same time and was found to
have a near-lethal blood alcohol level of 0.44 -- at 11 a.m.
"This case completely violates our sense of fairness," said Stephen J.
Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a
North Carolina group calling for a death-penalty moratorium. "This man
essentially didn't have a lawyer, and if we think that's a fair trial then
our death-penalty system is completely out of control."
Frye's is the latest case to raise troubling questions about the impact of
poor lawyers in death-penalty trials. Earlier this month, a federal appeals
court overturned the murder conviction of a Texas death-row inmate because
his court-appointed attorney slept through substantial portions of his trial.
Frye's lawyers said he would not have been sentenced to death had the jury
known the full story of his upbringing. When Frye was 4, his alcoholic
parents gave him away at a diner. His new father beat him with a bullwhip,
leaving such severe scars that police still use the pictures at child-abuse
seminars.
Frye started sniffing glue at age 10, then turned to cocaine. He was
shuffled from family to family, six changes in all, before he dropped out
of high school. He was a crack-addicted construction worker when he sank
the scissors into his 70-year-old landlord's chest in a Hickory, N.C.,
trailer park. He owed the landlord money and was facing eviction.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a defense lawyer has the
responsibility to present "mitigating" factors about a client's
background -- child abuse, drugs, an especially tough environment -- that
might persuade a jury to spare the defendant's life.
No one from Frye's family was called to the witness stand. A psychologist
did testify but shared little about Frye's childhood.
In 1997, Portwood detailed his drinking habits at a hearing and admitted he
had not worked on the Frye case outside of court. He never drank before
court, he testified, although doctors said Portwood would have been still
intoxicated in the morning from the quantity of rum he downed in the
afternoon and evenings.
Portwood, still practicing law, did not return phone calls Thursday.
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