ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 3, 1996 TAG: 9612030100
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY STAFF WRITER
Beaver, now 30, had just turned 20 when Trooper Leo Whitt pulled him over on Interstate 95 in Prince George County on the night of April 12, 1985. He had escaped from a Maryland drug treatment program, gone to Florida to see his mother, and was returning to Maryland in a stolen car.
According to a hitchhiker who was with Beaver in the car, Whitt asked Beaver for his license and registration, then moved to the front of the car to write down the license plate number. When he returned to the driver's-side window, Beaver shot him once in the neck and once in the face.
Whitt, a 48-year-old father of two, died on the highway. He had worked for the state police for 21 years.
Jailed in Prince George, Beaver was assigned two court-appointed attorneys: Thomas O. Rainey III, then the part-time prosecutor in neighboring Dinwiddie County; and John Henry Maclin, a Petersburg lawyer who was disbarred in October for neglecting his clients.
Beaver's trial began July 8, 1985, but was canceled when Beaver changed his plea to guilty after one day of jury selection. He was given a death sentence Sept. 16 of that year.
He has been fighting it ever since.
Beaver's current attorneys argue that, because he was represented by Rainey - a lawyer employed by the Commonwealth of Virginia to prosecute criminal defendants in Dinwiddie - he did not get a fair trial.
As both a prosecutor running for office and a lawyer assigned to defend an accused cop-killer, Rainey had a conflict of interest, according to Beaver's attorneys.
That Rainey advised Beaver to plead guilty in exchange for a promise that the prosecution would not make an argument during his sentencing substantiates that conflict, they say.
``Despite its uselessness to [Beaver] the plea agreement was of tremendous benefit to Rainey as it allowed him to avoid the unpleasant, embarrassing and career-threatening task of having to vigorously attack the state's case in the defense of an accused cop killer,'' Christopher M. McMurray, one of Beaver's current attorneys, wrote in a recent petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Appeals based on the issue have failed. On Monday, the Supreme Court turned down Beaver's request for a stay of execution. However, one judge, Kenneth Hall of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, condemned Virginia's practice of appointing part-time prosecutors to represent criminal defendants.
``Though the act that Beaver is accused of committing is a particularly evil one,'' Hall wrote in his dissent to an opinion issued in September, ``he should not be compelled to face the most final of judgments without ever having had the assistance of a lawyer whose loyalty is beyond question.''
Few states allow prosecutors to represent criminal defendants, said George Kendall, a lawyer and death penalty expert with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. A few, including West Virginia and Indiana, have laws prohibiting the practice. In Virginia, the state Senate killed such a law in 1990.
``I don't think anyone would want a lawyer who had to keep an eye on interests other than his own,'' said Kendall. ``Not even in a real estate closing, much less a death case.''
The execution is scheduled for 9 p.m. today at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP File 1986. Gregory Warren Beaver is escorted by aby CNBPrince George County, Va., sheriff during his 1986 trial for the
1985 murder of Virginia State Trooper Leo Whitt.