By CHELYEN DAVIS
RICHMOND--As Republican Jerry Kilgore spent a third day slamming Democrat Tim Kaine on the death penalty, Kaine said a Kilgore ad on the subject is outright false.
In a 2 p.m. conference call with reporters, Kaine said that a Kilgore ad claiming that Kaine volunteered to defend convicted murderer Mark Sheppard is demonstrably incorrect.
Kaine said another lawyer in his firm, Dana Finberg, was asked by a judge to represent Sheppard in his appeals. He said Finberg asked Kaine to allow his name to be put on court documents and to advise Finberg if needed. Kaine agreed, and said that out of 1,000 billable hours his firm filed with the court, not one of them was billed to him.
"I never met Mark Sheppard. I didn't know Mark Sheppard. I never visited him, I never spoke with him," Kaine said. "I spent 48 minutes advising [Finberg] during the course of two years he spent on this case. It is completely wrong to suggest that it was Tim Kaine that was voluntarily representing Mark Sheppard."
In the ad, Stanley Rosenbluth, the father of the man whom Sheppard killed, is the one accusing Kaine of defending Sheppard.
Kaine was careful not to accuse Rosenbluth of lying, saying that the man might not have known he wasn't really Sheppard's lawyer, since Kaine's name did appear on court documents.
"I understand and sympathize and feel horrible about his grief and the loss of his son," Kaine said. "[But] that statement and that representation in the ad is frankly false. And without that fact, the whole ad really sort of falls apart."
But he pulled no punches in criticizing Kilgore for what he said were lies and the inappropriate use of a grieving father.
"Time and again in this campaign, Jerry Kilgore has been called out by the press and others for an egregious misrepresentation of facts," Kaine said. "The claim that Jerry Kilgore is carrying in this ad is the most egregious and prejudicial kind of statement by a desperate candidate. It's far below the standard that somebody should try to meet if they want to be governor of 7 million Virginians."
Kaine said he did represent two other convicted murderers in their appeals.
Kilgore, reacting to Kaine's accusations in a hastily called conference call at 5 p.m., said he stands by the ad.
"These comments are disturbing in their cynical spin and in their intentional misrepresentation of Tim Kaine and his activist stand," Kilgore said. "Stanley Rosenbluth knows exactly who represented the man who killed his son and daughter-in-law."
Kilgore said Kaine represented two other convicted killers before the Sheppard case, and that Kaine's name on the Sheppard documents means Kaine was indeed responsible for stepping in on the case.
"He tried to get a cold-blooded killer out of death row," Kilgore said. "We all know you don't turn in all the hours, you only turn in those your firm's going to get reimbursed for. It's horrible to watch a person who has always advocated for the elimination of the death penalty to now hide behind a junior associate of his firm. He's running for cover."
At a press conference yesterday morning--joined by his ticketmates, Sen. Bill Bolling, R-Hanover, and Attorney General Bob McDonnell--Kilgore had again argued that the issue is Kaine's years of activism against the death penalty.
He does not believe Kaine's repeated vows that he will uphold the death penalty and not use the governor's power of clemency any differently than other governors have, despite his personal religious objection to capital punishment.
Kilgore said he doubts someone who has supported a moratorium on the death penalty, and represented death-row inmates, as Kaine has done, would "suddenly change their position and uphold the very law they've spent their life trying to [strike down].
"It's far beyond pro bono work," Kilgore said. "He's in the public arena, making his positions known."
Kaine supported a moratorium on the death penalty in 2001, a time when a number of states were finding they had put wrongly convicted, innocent people on death row. Virginia released death-row inmate Earl Washington of Fauquier County after DNA testing showed the Bealeton man had not committed the murder for which he was sentenced to death. At the time, supporters of a moratorium wanted a halt to executions in Virginia until a study of the system could be done to ensure the fairness of the process.
While studies have shown that the poor and the black are disproportionately represented on death row, Kilgore said he believes Virginia's system is fair and has adequate safeguards to prevent innocent people from being wrongly convicted.
"There are so many checks in this system I do not believe it is unfair," Kilgore said. "This isn't about race, it's about the crime. It's about an individual who has chosen to commit a crime. Prosecutors have the discretion to make those charges, and I believe they're making the charges fairly."
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