Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 22, 1990 TAG: 9005220439
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TONY GERMANOTTA LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS LENGTH: Long
A Newport News jury took only 50 minutes to decide that Stockton should be executed for his role in the 1978 contract killing of a North Carolina teen-ager.
Stockton had been through this before. Seven years ago, a Patrick County jury convicted him of the same murder and recommended death. The sentence was overturned last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the jury had been tainted by an inflammatory comment made to them during deliberation.
Stockton took Monday's verdict calmly. He sat at the defense table staring quietly at the court clerk who read the results. Then he watched impassively as the 10 women and two men were polled.
After the jury was excused, Stockton hugged a crying member of his defense team. "Are you going to be all right?" he asked, offering encouragement. He thanked his five attorneys for their work and then was led away by guards.
Patrick County Circuit Judge Frank I. Richardson ordered a presentence report and scheduled sentencing for 9:30 a.m. July 30.
Stockton had demanded the resentencing and has frequently said he preferred execution to life in prison. During the resentencing, he was unable to attack the murder conviction because the Supreme Court had upheld that verdict. As a result, the second jury could decide only between life in prison and execution.
In his closing arguments, Patrick County Commonwealth's Attorney Anthony Giorno said the decision was difficult but that there was no choice to be made. "There can be but one alternative," he said. "This man should be sentenced to death."
Giorno hammered at the fact that the victim, Kenneth W. Arnder, was shot between the eyes, execution style, and that his hands were hacked off and have never been recovered.
"What possible reason could the defendant have had for chopping off the hands?" Giorno asked. "I can't think of one reason a normal man, a non-depraved mind, might have had for chopping off the hands."
The murder, Giorno argued, was based on greed. Stockton volunteered to kill the 18-year-old because he needed the $1,500 being offered, he said.
Among the elements that can warrant the death sentence in Virginia is depravity of mind and vileness of the crime. Giorno said Arnder's murder showed both. The jury also may consider whether the killer would be a threat to society if allowed to live.
Giorno referred to testimony in the original trial by a witness who claimed to have watched Stockton kill a man for "running his mouth" about the Arnder slaying. That witness testified that Stockton threatened to do the same to him if he were to talk and said that Stockton promised to kill his wife, his sister and his mother as well.
"Future dangerousness?" Giorno asked. "Unquestionably."
Stockton's lead defense attorney, Louis Bograd, cautioned the jury that theirs was an "awesome responsibility."
"Usually in life we get a chance to correct our mistakes," he said. "That is not true today. If you make a mistake today, Dennis Stockton will die."
He told the jurors that Stockton would be severely punished for the Arnder murder by serving a life sentence. He argued that Arnder's killing was horrible, but that there was no proof that it was an execution or that he had suffered before death. No one could say, he argued, whether the hands were cut off before Arnder died.
Bograd said prison officials had testified that Stockton was a model inmate at Powhatan Correctional Center and that the jury could assume that he would not be a future danger. Stockton had changed over the past decade, Bograd said. He should not be executed for crimes that he had committed years earlier.
And Bograd told the jury that even if they believed the government's case, "you are always free to grant mercy and to spare Dennis Stockton's life."
Giorno, however, argued that no prison was escape-proof, that Stockton had escaped custody before and that he was behaving only in prison because he was under constant supervision.
Giorno showed the jury photos of the victim's skull and the stumps of his arms. "You can commit an aggravated battery on a corpse," Giorno said. "This is what's left of the man's hands, an 18-year-old boy. . . . How could this not be an aggravated battery? Alive or dead, there is nothing in this world to justify the mutilation of this boy's body."
The jury agreed with Giorno, finding both that the crime was so horrible that it deserved the death penalty and that Stockton was still a dangerous person.
Because it is a death sentence, it will be automatically reviewed by the state Supreme Court. Stockton is also appealing his conviction in federal court, so no execution date is likely to be set soon.
After the trial, Giorno said he was "stunned" when the jury came back so quickly. He said he didn't think any panel could so quickly settle on execution. He had trouble just deciding to demand it, he said.
"It really is tough to stand there and ask for the death penalty," Giorno said. "It's one thing to talk about the death penalty in the abstract, but to sit there and have to ask 12 people to condemn this man to die is one of the toughest things I've ever had to do."
Giorno was assistant prosecutor when Stockton was first condemned. He has been working on the case for nearly nine years and over that time has come to know Stockton well. Giorno said Stockton has good points, "but that doesn't change what he did. He is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and you can't separate the two."
Arnder's mother and two sisters sat through several days of testimony but were not in the courtroom for the verdict.
Shortly after Arnder's death - and before Stockton was arrested in the case - the statue of a praying angel on the boy's grave was defaced. Someone hacked off its hands.
They, too, have never been found.
by CNB