Dwayne Wright was a teen killer who was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of Saba Tekle
According to court documents Dwayne Wright, 17, would attempt to sexually assault and would then murder Saba Tekle. Earlier in the same week Dwayne Wright had murdered two other people
Dwayne Wright was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Dwayne Wright would be executed by lethal injection on October 14 1998
Dwayne Wright Photos
Dwayne Wright Case
Murderer Dwayne Allen Wright died by injection tonight, becoming the first Virginia inmate since 1924 to be executed for crimes committed while a minor.
Asked by a prison official whether he had a final statement, Wright, 26, replied, “My attorney has my statement.” He was pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center here.
The execution followed a week of furious legal and political maneuvering that reflected how Wright’s case drew national attention because of his age at the time of the crime — 17 — as well as his mental illness and possible brain damage.
When asked about the statement Wright referred to, Robert Lee, who represented him in appeals, said it was private and intended for Wright’s family. He added that the execution “tragically returns the commonwealth to a practice that it abandoned long ago, like slavery and segregation — the execution of children.”
Noting the refusal of Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) to grant clemency, Lee said, “Finally, he added his name to the long list of those who failed this child.”
Wright fatally shot Saba Tekle, 34, an Annandale mother of three, outside her apartment in October 1989. The killing, coming after an attempted rape, was part of a five-day shooting rampage in which Wright shot two other people, one fatally, in Prince George’s County. A third murder charge, in Washington, was later dropped.
Today, as African American religious and civic leaders led about 30 people in a protest at Richmond’s Capitol Square to encourage Gilmore to commute Wright’s sentence to life in prison, Wright, of Northeast Washington, prepared for death. He met with his mother, two brothers and an aunt and ate a final meal of pizza, a cheeseburger, french fries and apple pie, said prison spokesman Larry Traylor
In their appeal to the governor, Wright’s attorneys said the jury at his trial should have been told that he suffered brain damage as a child and is borderline retarded — issues they said Wright’s original attorney played down during the trial.
But in a statement late today, Gilmore said the appeal “fails to raise any substantially new issue,” and he focused on the rights of Wright’s victim, an Ethiopian immigrant whom Wright first spotted when she drove past him on a highway.
“Saba Tekle’s hopes and aspirations for herself and her three children died with her on the stairs of her apartment building when Wright shot her in the back as she fled his attempted rape,” Gilmore said.
The governor added that “today {Wright} is 26. He is not a child, nor is he a model prisoner,” noting that Wright has been sanctioned by prison officials for making a knife and assaulting other inmates
Gilmore’s decision echoed the U.S. Supreme Court, which earlier in the day refused to stop Wright’s execution.
Wright was the 10th criminal put to death this year in Virginia, a modern record for a state that now is second only to Texas in executions.
The Wright case drew protests from the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Jesse L. Jackson.
“Virginia is poised to do something it has not done for three-quarters of a century: take the life of an African American person for an act committed as a child,” Jackson wrote in asking Gilmore to give Wright’s attorneys more time to investigate the case. “It would be unconscionable to permit it to proceed when there has not been a full presentation of the mitigating facts.
Wright’s defenders portrayed him as a victim of a combination of physical and social problems, made worse by the failures of the government safety net and his own trial attorney.
His umbilical cord choked him at birth, possibly causing the brain damage that doctors later diagnosed. His mother was mentally ill, his father in jail, and his older brother — who had been a stabilizing figure in Wright’s life — was shot to death when Wright was 10.
Doctors first diagnosed Wright with a variety of mental problems when he was 12, citing brain damage, depression, psychotic episodes and hallucinations. They estimated his IQ at 75 and noted severe language deficiencies.
Wright spent part of his youth in troubled juvenile homes — including one that a court order later closed — and did not receive psychiatric help, as doctors had urged
The attorneys handling Wright’s appeals say that such issues were played down by Wright’s original trial lawyer.
Two of the jurors who voted to impose the death penalty on Wright recently filed affidavits opposing tonight’s execution, saying they were not given information about Wright’s mental illness or intellectual shortcomings.
“Had I been told the truth about Dwayne during his trial, I never would have voted to impose a death sentence,” wrote juror Pamela Stilson Rogers. But Tekle’s family called Wright a “coldblooded murderer.”
“It is not our desire to see vengeance,” the family wrote in a statement on Sunday. “What we want is justice to reign.” Staff writer R.H. Melton contributed to this report
