Deadline Death

An eleventh-hour court O.K.

One by one, the Justices were reached by court operators setting up an extraordinary conference call of the U.S. Supreme Court. Only Sandra Day O'Connor, who was traveling in Africa, was not available for the hurriedly arranged session. The Justices had been asked, at the very last hour, to decide whether to allow the execution later that night of Frank J. Coppola, 38, a convicted murderer who wished to die. After discussing the case, Chief Justice Warren Burger and four others voted to overturn a stay that had been issued by an appeals judge earlier in the day. About 45 minutes later, that news reached Coppola at Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. At 11:18 p.m., the prisoner walked 30 paces and, with outward calm, sat down in an oak electric chair built by inmates 74 years ago. At 11:27, after two 55-second jolts of electricity, Coppola died.

Despite the dramatic swiftness of the denouement, the early stages of the case were drawn out with all the familiar rounds of inventive appeals. Coppola, a former seminary student and policeman, had been convicted of brutally killing a woman during a 1978 robbery. By last spring, 34 judges had heard his various legal arguments, and still he sat on death row at Mecklenburg Correctional Center. Though maintaining his innocence, he dropped his appeals and asked that the execution proceed. "Further incarceration," he said, "can only lead to my being stripped of all personal dignity." His one request: a summer date, to minimize the taunts to his two school-age sons.

The prisoner persuaded his family not to intervene, but Attorney J. Gray Lawrence, whom Coppola had fired, filed an appeal anyway. It was rejected by a federal district court judge. But with 8 1/2 hours to go, Judge John Butzner of the U.S. court of appeals in Richmond called a halt, saying that the years on death row might have robbed Coppola of the capacity to decide the question and noting that a constitutional review of Virginia's death penalty was pending in another case. Governor Charles Robb ordered an immediate appeal. Two state attorneys flew to Washington, D.C., and rushed to the Supreme Court, where they found the main door locked. They finally got in a side door and submitted their request for a reversal at 7:25 p.m. At 10:25 the court ruled, apparently without reading the arguments of anti-death-penalty lawyers who had arrived with their papers at 10:22.

Coppola's execution was the first in the U.S. since March 1981 and only the fifth since the 1976 Supreme Court decision declaring capital punishment constitutional. More than 1,000 prisoners now wait on death row. Two weeks ago, New Jersey became the 37th state to adopt a death penalty. Due to the appeals process, few inmates are expected to be executed soon. But by late 1984, experts predict, there may be a surge in executions. By then, perhaps the Supreme Court will have worked out a more seemly system for deciding the many last-minute appeals it is sure to face.

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