Carl Chichester was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of Timothy Rigney
According to court documents Carl Chichester would rob a pizza restaurant and would demand Timothy Rigney to open up the cash register. When Timothy Rigney was unable to do so he was fatally shot
Carl Chichester would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Carl Chichester would be executed by lethal injection on April 13 1999
Carl Chichester Photos
Carl Chichester Case
Carl Hamilton Chichester was executed by injection tonight for the 1991 murder of a Manassas pizza shop manager.
“I love my wife and my children,” Chichester said when asked for a final statement.
Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said Chichester was muttering “four-letter words” as he was led into the death chamber in the Greensville Correctional Center. But after the tubes that would carry deadly chemicals into his body were inserted in his arms, “he actually thanked the [execution] team,” Traylor said.
Earlier today, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final appeal 7 to 2, with Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting. The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a request that it review a three-judge panel’s ruling affirming the death sentence. Chichester’s final appeal, for clemency, then was turned down by Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R).
Two law professors had urged Gilmore to spare Chichester. In an affidavit sent to the governor Monday, Harvard University law professor Alan M. Dershowitz said an appellate brief filed by Chichester’s former attorneys was “incompetent, ineffective and unprofessional.”
John M. Copacino, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at Georgetown University, wrote to the governor that Chichester “would have been no worse off had no brief at all been filed in the case.”
Gilmore, in rejecting clemency, noted that the verdict and the sentence had been upheld on multiple appeals.
Chichester, 36, went to death row in 1993 after a Prince William County jury convicted him of killing 30-year-old Timothy Rigney.
Chichester was living in a Manassas hotel at the time of the murder. He was convicted of robbing a Manassas pizza shop and of shooting Rigney when the manager failed to open a cash register
Chichester’s accomplice, Sheldon Maurice McDowell, also was convicted of murder and was sentenced to 71 years in prison.
In his clemency petition and his appeal, Chichester maintained that two witnesses to the Aug. 16, 1991, robbery said McDowell shot Rigney.
Two of four witnesses originally said McDowell fired the shot, the petition said. By the time of Chichester’s 1993 trial, one of the witnesses was not sure who fired the shot, and the second witness could not be located. The other two witnesses testified that Chichester killed Rigney.
In a response sent to the Supreme Court, the Virginia attorney general’s office said lower courts ruled that even if the other two witnesses had been found, the weight of the evidence would have pointed to Chichester as the triggerman.