Killer Gets Stay With 19 1/2 Hours Left to Live

An inmate on San Quentin’s Death Row was moved out of his cell and notified that he would be receiving his last meal Thursday before a Los Angeles federal judge granted a last-minute stay, 19 1/2 hours before his scheduled execution.

Though the stay was expected, “this one got kind of close to the wire,” admitted Deputy Atty. Gen. Frederick R. Millar Jr. after U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real signed an order on behalf of Melvin Wade, facing the death penalty for the 1981 torture murder of his 10-year-old stepdaughter.

“I probably gained about a dozen new gray hairs between now and yesterday,” Deputy California Public Defender Donald Ayoob said Thursday after Real acted.

Wade, a San Bernardino resident, was accused of beating his stepdaughter with a board, confining her for hours in a duffel bag, wrapping a dog leash around her neck and finally stomping and punching her to death, shouting that he was “Michael the Archangel” killing “a devil.”

A Superior Court judge had set the June 23 execution date earlier this year, a little less than a year after the California Supreme Court upheld Wade’s death sentence.

Defense lawyers filed a new appeal last month, claiming to have uncovered additional evidence that warranted detailed forensic review, and based on the petition a stay was granted on June 7. However, the state Supreme Court denied the appeal and dissolved the stay Wednesday afternoon.

“That left us at 3 p.m. yesterday with what, in the parlance of this particular business, I’m learning, is called a live execution date of 10 a.m. June 23,” Ayoob said Thursday.

Ayoob and two other lawyers worked through the night to prepare an emergency petition to the federal courts, which they telefaxed to Los Angeles from San Francisco on Thursday morning. The stay was granted at 2:30 p.m.

San Quentin prison officials, meanwhile, launched the normal pre-execution procedures required by law.

“Normally, when we have an active date like that, when we get down that close to it, certain things drive our operational procedures,” Lt. Cal White said. “We were in motion at that point.”

The preparations were limited to notifying Wade and prison staff of the execution date and moving Wade to a cell where he could be more closely observed, White said.

“They took my client out of his cell, and they were preparing to move him into the cell next to the gas chamber, and they told him if he didn’t get a stay, they’d be giving him his last meal tonight,” Ayoob said Thursday.