Ronald Watkins was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of William McCauley
According to court documents Ronald Watkins would rob a store and in the process of the armed robbery would murder the store owner William McCauley
Ronald Watkins would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Ronald Watkins would be executed by lethal injection on March 25 1998
Ronald Watkins Photos
Ronald Watkins Case
Ronald L. Watkins, a murderer whose religious conversion while on death row drew a plea for mercy from former first lady Rosalynn Carter, was put to death tonight after delivering an apology.
“I’m sorry to the McCauleys and to my family for the pain and suffering I’ve caused,” said Watkins, who was executed by injection. He was declared dead minutes later, at 9:17 p.m., at the Greensville Correctional Center.
Watkins fatally stabbed William M. McCauley, 29, a Danville shopkeeper, in 1988. This afternoon, Gov. James S. Gilmore III (R) rejected a final clemency petition, saying. “No question has been raised concerning Watkins’s guilt. . . . I decline to intervene.”
Hours earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request by Watkins’s attorneys for a stay of execution, rejecting the argument that the Southside Virginia court that sentenced Watkins to death was racially biased. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens dissented in the 7 to 2 ruling
Watkins, 35, was black. McCauley, his onetime employer, was white. Watkins was on parole for the abduction of an elderly woman when he surprised McCauley in his shopping center package store on May 26, 1988. He later confessed to robbing McCauley of $1,200 and killing him.
A medical examiner testified that McCauley was stabbed seven times in the back and that his neck was slashed three times while he was kneeling or lying down. A jury of 10 whites, one black and one Asian sentenced Watkins to death.
Watkins’s attorneys, Mark E. Olive and Robert Lee, argued that, of four capital murder cases heard by juries in Danville since 1977, when the death penalty was reinstated in Virginia, all involved black defendants and resulted in death sentences. They said all seven killers sentenced to death in Danville since 1977 have been black
The Virginia and U.S. high courts rejected the argument that the city was disproportionately prone to putting black men on death row.
“Danville juries have brought in the same verdict when the victims were black as when they were white,” said William H. Fuller III, who has been the Danville commonwealth’s attorney since 1970. “We don’t have any control over who commits capital murder . . . or who they select as victims.”
Watkins’s supporters said he had changed in prison, having become a born-again Christian.
In a letter, Carter, who opposes the death penalty, asked Gilmore to commute Watkins’s sentence to life in prison, saying he had become “an individual of great value.”
“He has been a positive force in prison for both the administration and his fellow prisoners,” she wrote. “I hope you will spare his life and allow him to continue his service to God