1996: Lem Tuggle, Tim Kaine client

Posted on by

Tim Kaine, who governed the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2006 to 2010 and was just last month elected to the U.S. Senate, had a different service to perform on this date in 1996.

Kaine saw his client, double-murderer Lem Tuggle, to the Virginia execution chamber on December 12, 1996.

In 1983, fresh off parole for a 1971 homicide, Tuggle raped and shot 52-year-old Jessie Geneva Havens.

“From past experience, I would like to talk to an attorney,” he told the officer who arrested him. “I’ll probably tell you the full story later.”

In this selfsame spring of 1983, 25-year-old Timothy Michael Kaine was receiving his J.D. from Harvard Law. He moved to Richmond, Va., with his classmate Anne Holton, daughter of the state’s former governor.

Kaine and Holton married in 1984.

This was also an eventful year for the now-twice-convicted killer Lem Tuggle: together with five other condemned inmates, Tuggle sensationally busted out of Mecklenburg Correctional Center — capturing several prison guards, making up a phony bomb threat, and simply strolling out the gates in their stolen uniforms during the confusion.

The “Mecklenburg Six”* cast a terrifying pall in the headlines of June 1984; it took weeks to recapture them all. Tuggle, sensibly, made a bid for Canada’s death-penalty-free soil, only sparing Ottawa a major diplomatic headache when he stopped to rob a Vermont diner for gas money and got arrested.

Kaine’s path was destined to cross with this notorious convict, but not for some years yet. In the meantime, the idealistic young J.D. in his first year at the bar was getting acquainted with death row when he accepted a pro bono legal appointment to represent condemned killer Richard Lee Whitley.

A lifelong Catholic who had spent a youthful finding-himself year working at a mission in Honduras, Kaine was (and remains) a death penalty opponent. This would later prove a sticky wicket, but mid-1980s Kaine didn’t have a career in politics on his radar, as evidenced by his distinctly impolitic remark that “murder is wrong in the gulag, in Afghanistan, in Soweto, in the mountains of Guatemala, in Fairfax County … and even the Spring Street Penitentiary.”

Later, when he was in politics, Kaine would tell a reporter profiling him during the 2005 gubernatorial campaign that he didn’t want the assignment but would have felt like a “hypocrite” to refuse it. The Commonwealth was less easily overcome than Kaine’s scruples, and Whitley died in Virginia’s electric chair on June 6, 1987.

“I just remember sitting on my back step late and just having a couple of beers and just staring out at my backyard,” Kaine recalled of the night he lost his client.

Having had this first taste of failing with a man’s life on the line while being publicly vilified for his work, Kaine signed on to represent Tuggle in 1989.

By the time Tuggle’s legal rope ran out in 1996, Tim Kaine was a 38-year-old Richmond city council member — the trailhead for his new and now-familiar career in politics.

As Kaine elevated himself into a statewide figure in the early 2000s, his death penalty position came in for some controversy which Kaine finessed by taking the position that while he himself opposed capital punishment, he would enforce the state’s death penalty law in his capacity as governor.**

Death penalty stuff has ample third-rail potential, but especially in Kaine’s gubernatorial race, his own personal legal work at the defense bar became fodder for some truly repellent attack ads by the mouthbreather lobby who tried to put Kaine personally on the hook for Tuggle’s crimes by virtue of having represented the man in court.

* The other five were Linwood Briley, James Briley, Earl Clanton, Willie Leroy Jones, and Derick Peterson. All of these men were also executed.

** That was indeed the case. Gov. Kaine commuted only one death sentence, that of Percy Walton, while allowing 11 others to go forward. D.C. sniper John Muhammad was the most notorious man with Kaine’s signature on his death warrant.

On this day..

Possibly related executions:

6 thoughts on “1996: Lem Tuggle, Tim Kaine client”

  2. Hi Meaghan– True, he might have hated it. Still, I just have that deep and abiding feeling that all monsters should go the way of their victims. For me it’s a case of justice, and very often, a true sense of closure only comes for the families when the killer is dead.

    I just believe execution is the way to handle these folks. 🙂

  3. I don’t know, Kevin, about executing Hitler. I hate the guy as much as anyone else, and dearly wish my beloved Johan Georg Elser had succeeded in his 1938 assassination attempt. But Hitler himself proved he would rather be dead than witness the collapse of his precious Third Reich and the dismemberment of everything he’d hoped and strived for. It might have been more cruel, and more fitting, to just lock him in a six-by-eight cell for the rest of his life, and keep him updated on all the news about the founding of Israel.

    • I think your belief that the official founding of Israel would have some torturous effect on Hitler is misplaced. The Nazi regime in Germany had extensive ties with Zionist groups in Palestine with the full knowledge and participation of Hitler for the better part of a decade, from the signing of the Haavara Agreement to the Wansee Conference. It was a sick sort of symbiosis, a ‘win/win’ made possible by the insane violartion of human rights the Nazis were willing to inflicy on people of Jewish faith or heritage.

      The Zionists were able to recruit/liberate German Jews, the alternative to having rights and protections as citizens being dismantled systematically. Back then, the Israeli zionists were terrorists, at least in the eyes of the British. So increasing the flow into Palestine was to increase the base of support that such terrorist groups had, meaning a bigger pain in the ass for the British. Eventually, England refused to recognize travel documents from Germany, putting an end to the major link between the Nazis and Zionism. Incidentally, this is also around the time that Bernard Montgomery got his first promotion to general for fighting Zionist terrorist organizations

      “The anti-semites will become our most loyal friends,” the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote.”

      It is weird how the world turns sometimes…

      Have a great day!

  4. Tim Kaine’s statement that “murder is wrong in the gulag, in Afghanistan, in Soweto, in the mountains of Guatemala, in Fairfax County … and even the Spring Street Penitentiary.” is telling indeed. That he can neither see or understand the difference between actual murder and state sponsored killing, is remarkable indeed, and speaks of an ignorance that belittles his Harvard education. In layman’s terms, we might say he was wallowing in gross stupidity.

    People who wantonly rape, murder, and destroy the families of their victims, need to be executed. It is the MOST appropriate response to these acts, and anything less is not justice.

    I actually feel sorry for those in our society who wring their hands at the thought of a diabolical killer being put to death. They believe these killers have a “right” to live; that there is good in them; that they are redeemable, etc. And I’ve noticed, the greater the feelings in these areas, the farther they get from from the families of the victims and their suffering. Sometimes it comes to be a spectacle of sorts; a cause celeb, if you will, and those on the band wagon to save a particular life will prattle on about how the person needs to be saved from death, and on and on and on. It really is interesting to watch. many time it will amaze the killer, for even they don’t think like this.

    I was once on a radio talk show, where the moderator was against the death penalty, and we were talking. Finally I said “So in other words, if we had captured Adolf Hitler, he should not be put to death? After all the millions he’d killed, we should just house him, feed him, take care of him?” She responded by saying (I swear to God this is all she could say) “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

    Lastly, concerning the info from above: ” In 1983, fresh off parole for a 1971 homicide, Tuggle raped and shot 52-year-old Jessie Geneva Havens.” Gee, I wonder if Mr. Tuggle could have raped her if we (society) had put him to death instead of releasing him from prison?

    Nuff’ said.

    • It’s a personal issue for me, I had friends who were killed in their home and their kids had the misfortune of finding their murdered parents. The killer or killers were never found, there was suspicion but nothing provable. But even if the perp was executed that would not undo the trauma their children had finding the bodies of their mom and dad.

      I don’t have sympathy for those who commit such atrocities, whether state sponsored or not. But I’m most interested in what shapes someone to have zero empathy for others, understanding that and shifting it seems essential if civilization is going to survive. Plus, places that do not execute tend to be less violent than places that do, although there are exceptions to this pattern. It’s also no surprise that those who get executed tend to be those who are poor, not well educated, without political power while killers who are not executed generally have better attorneys, more money, etc.

      I’m a fan of the Truth and Reconciliation process that South Africa had after Apartheid, where politically motivated crimes were amnestied if the perps told the truth in public (televised). It’s imperfect, and some of the relatives of victims were strongly opposed (can’t blame them for that) but I’d like to know what would work better. Perhaps if there was more compassion in the world stupid crimes of violence would be less commonplace. The epidemic in the USA of alienated young men randomly shooting up schools and stores suggests a bigger psychological breakdown that debates on capital punishment, incarceration, “justice” don’t begin to address (from either side of the debates).

      I appreciate the excellent historical narratives on your site.

Comments are closed.