The Nation - News from Aug. 1, 1986
Condemned murderer and rapist Michael Marnell Smith, 40, who spent more than eight years on Death Row, was executed in the electric chair at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond less than an hour after losing a last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. He had been convicted of raping, strangling, drowning and stabbing a divorced mother of two who was attacked on a riverside stroll near Jamestown, Va., in 1977.
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