Michael Lenz was executed by the State of Virginia for a prison murder
According to court documents Michael Lenz and the victim Brent Parker were at a meeting at the Augusta Correctional Center when Lenz would attack Parker stabbing him over thirty times causing his death
Michael Lenz was convicted and sentenced to death
Michael Lenz was executed by lethal injection on July 27 2006
Michael Lenz Photos
Michael Lenz FAQ
When Was Michael Lenz Executed
Michael Lenz was executed on July 27 2006
Michael Lenz Case
Michael W. Lenz last night became the first Virginia inmate to be executed for killing another inmate since the death penalty resumed in 1976. Lenz, who participated in the stabbing death of Brent H. Parker on Jan. 16, 2000, during a pagan religious ceremony, was put to death by injection at Greensville Correctional Center. He was pronounced dead at 9:07 p.m. Lenz gave no last statement, according to Larry Traylor, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections.
In a field outside the prison last night, four death-penalty opponents held a vigil. They carried candles, and just before 9 p.m., they began ringing a bell that they had brought. They rang it 97 times, once for each person who has been executed in the state since the death penalty resumed. Brian Jablonski, a 46-year-old schoolteacher from Lynchburg, said, “I find the death penalty to be a poor form of justice. In my faith, I don’t believe anything justifies taking the life of another person.” As the group was setting up banners, Jack Payden-Travers, director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said, “We kind of always hope we make these trips for nothing.”
Attorneys for Lenz, 42, had asked Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for clemency, citing the use of defective verdict forms at Lenz’s trial. But Kaine’s office released a statement just before 6 p.m., saying the governor had reviewed Lenz’s petition and judicial opinions in the case and found no reason to set aside the jury’s recommended sentence.
Lenz is the third person executed since Kaine took office in January. Last month, Kaine delayed until December the execution of Percy Walton, whose mental state has been debated for nearly a decade. Not long before Kaine released his statement yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Lenz’s petition and his request for a stay of execution, though a court spokesman said two of the justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, said they would have granted the application for a stay.
Attorneys for Lenz had argued that their client’s right to a fair and impartial jury was violated because jurors consulted a Bible while considering whether Lenz should be sentenced to death. At least one juror recalled that the Bible passages referred to by the jury indicated death is the appropriate punishment for murder, the appeal said. However, during an evidentiary hearing, the jurors said the Bible did not influence them, and appeals courts had rejected the contention that it violated Lenz’s rights.
On Tuesday, a federal court rejected Lenz’s challenge to the way lethal injections are performed in Virginia, noting that his last-minute effort was “obviously to unjustifiably delay the inevitable.” Lenz’s attorneys decided not to challenge the court’s decision.
Lenz, who had no spiritual adviser, met with immediate family members yesterday, Traylor said. No members of the victim’s family planned to attend the execution, Traylor said. Parker’s mother, Bonnie Parker, 71, of Paw Paw, W.Va., told The Associated Press she was ambivalent about the execution, although she said her granddaughter Heather — Parker’s daughter — believed Lenz deserved to die. Parker said she misses her son, whom she described as a good person led astray by alcohol. “It’s been so long since he’s been gone — it really hurts me even to talk about him,” Parker said. “He was very good to me.”
Lenz and Jeffrey Remington, a fellow inmate and friend, stabbed 41-year-old Parker to death during a pagan religious ceremony at Augusta Correctional Center. Parker was stabbed 68 times. The three inmates practiced an ancient Norse religion called Asatru. Lenz had been serving a 29-year sentence after being convicted in Prince William County of burglary and weapon possession.
Remington said in a 2001 interview with The Times-Dispatch that he killed Parker because he was “disrespecting the gods” and because of a history of friction between them. Lenz said Parker blasphemed by “saying that he was teaching Asatru but what he was teaching was not Asatru.”
The appeal filed with the U.S. Supreme Court said Parker had also threatened Lenz and Remington. Remington also was sentenced to death, but he committed suicide on death row in 2004. The state attorney general’s office has said that one other prisoner had been sentenced to death under the “killing by an inmate” provision of the state’s capital-murder law, and his sentence was commuted to life without parole.