Dexter Vinson was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of Angela Fenton
According to court documents Dexter Vinson would force his ex girlfriend off the road. Angela Fenton would be driven to a boarded up home where she would be tortured and murdered
Dexter Vinson would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Dexter Vinson would be executed by lethal injection on April 27 2006
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When Was Dexter Vinson Executed
Dexter Vinson was executed on April 27 2006
Dexter Vinson Case
After the Supreme Court and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine declined to intervene, Dexter Lee Vinson was executed by injection last night for abducting and killing his former girlfriend. Vinson, 43, was sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of Angela Felton in Portsmouth. Felton, a 25-year-old mother of three, bled to death. She was abducted, sexually assaulted, stabbed and suffered head injuries.
Vinson was pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. He made no last statement, said Larry Traylor, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Traylor said several of Felton’s family members witnessed the execution.
Just after 5 p.m. yesterday, the Virginia attorney general’s office announced that the U.S. Supreme Court had denied requests by Vinson’s legal team for a stay. The high court heard arguments Wednesday about a lethal-injection challenge in a Florida case. Vinson’s attorneys and death-penalty opponents had asked Kaine and the Supreme Court to delay the execution while the matter is considered. Opponents of lethal injection argue that the drugs used cause extreme and unnecessary pain.
Kaine’s office released a statement after 6 p.m. announcing that the governor would not stop the execution. “Having carefully reviewed the petition for clemency and judicial opinions regarding this case, I find no compelling reasons to doubt Mr. Vinson’s guilt or to invalidate the sentence recommended by the jury and imposed, and affirmed, by the courts,” Kaine said in the statement. “Accordingly, I decline to intervene.”
Dexter Vinson and Felton had lived together in Portsmouth for about a year and a half, separating three weeks before she was killed on May 19, 1997. Wilhelmena Gatling, Felton’s former mother-in-law, said Felton’s 14-year-old daughter still has nightmares about her mother’s death. Gatling, 53, of Suffolk, helps care for Felton’s two other children, 16-year-old twin boys. Gatling said she hoped Vinson’s execution would help ease the children’s pain. “I think it will bring closure to the children, but I don’t believe in the death penalty, so it’s not going to bring closure to me,” Gatling told The Associated Press. “But as long as the children can go on, I can go on.”
The Vatican and Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty had asked that Vinson’s life be spared and his sentence commuted to life in prison. At Greensville Correctional Center last night, death-penalty opponents protested outside after an earlier demonstration in front of the governor’s office. Three protesters set up signs and posters in a field, and said they expected a couple of more to join them. “I just think state-sanctioned murder is still murder,” said Ric Creech, 39, of Jarratt. He said he has been joining protests at the prison for eight years. Stuart Wood, a 19-year-old volunteer with Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said the Church of the Brethren teaches nonviolence and that human life should not be taken, especially by the state. The Richmond rally yesterday afternoon had drawn only two protestors a half hour after it started: Wood and Jack Payden-Travers, executive director of Virginians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Payden-Travers said then that it appeared that Kaine would not act to spare Vinson’s life. “We expected a fresh breeze here. We expected open windows, but we got closed doors,” Payden-Travers complained of Kaine. He said attendance was low at the protest, held between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., because it had not been scheduled until the day before.
As a candidate for governor, Kaine, a Roman Catholic, said that while he opposes the death penalty because of his religious beliefs, he would enforce the law. The Vinson case was Kaine’s first test of that pledge, and the strain of the decision was evident during his monthly call-in show on a Washington radio station this week. “The pressure of trying to make the right decision about whether there is or is not doubt about guilt when somebody’s life is at stake is so much more pressure than whatever the political pressure that there would be that the politics of it has not even come onto my radar screen,” Kaine said on Washington Post Radio. “I take very seriously the decision, and that pressure makes whatever political pressure there would be just seem like nothing.”
In addition to requesting a stay, Dexter Vinson’s attorneys, Rob Lee and Matthew Engle with the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center, had asked the Supreme Court to review the case, claiming there were errors made in Vinson’s trial. The high court declined to do so. A witness testified during Vinson’s trial that she watched him use his car to force Felton to stop and then force her out of the vehicle. Vinson then drove off with Felton, the witness said. Shortly after that, another witness testified, she saw the couple parked behind a vacant house. She said she watched Vinson choke Felton with a rope and slam her head into the car door. A third witness said she watched Vinson drag something from the car into the vacant house where Felton’s body was found after she bled to death from deep cuts to her forearms.
But Dexter Vinson’s attorneys have questioned the credibility of one of the witnesses and complained that information was withheld from the defense. The witness who testified she saw Vinson with a rope also told prosecutors that she saw the man again later that day at a time when Vinson was at work in Williamsburg. “Prosecutors never told Vinson’s lawyers about this exculpatory evidence,” Lee said. The witness also told investigators that the man she saw had a lot of facial hair, but Vinson was clean-shaven, his attorney noted. Vinson’s attorneys said that the third witness never saw Felton at all and told police that she did not know whether she would even be able to recognize the person she saw. That information was not given to Vinson’s defense team, Lee said.
Also, only a small amount of Felton’s blood was found on a pair of Vinson’s shorts. “Such a brutal crime, nobody is going to get only a [speck] of blood on himself,” Engle said. In addition, Vinson’s attorneys argued that much of the forensic evidence collected in the case was never tested and it was never explained how investigators established a positive identification of Vinson’s palm print inside the vacant house where Felton’s body was found.
There have been 94 executions in Virginia since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume. The toll is second among the states to Texas, which has executed 362 killers