Execution Ends Debatable Case

North Carolina prison officials executed a man early today whose lawyer admitted he drank 12 shots of rum a day during the penalty phase of his murder trial.

With all legal avenues exhausted, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley rejected Ronald Wayne Frye’s appeal for clemency Thursday night, saying there was no doubt that “the defendant senselessly and brutally killed and robbed an elderly, innocent man.”

Earlier Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution. State and lower federal courts had turned down Frye’s numerous requests for a retrial.

He was executed by lethal injection at Raleigh’s Central Prison.

Frye, a 42-year-old construction worker, robbed his landlord in 1993 and stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors. There is no doubt he committed the crime, but during the penalty phase of his trial, Frye’s lawyer presented little evidence of a nightmarish childhood that might have swayed a jury into sparing his client’s life.

The court-appointed lawyer, Tom Portwood, admitted he was drinking heavily during the case, downing nearly a pint of 80-proof rum every afternoon. He also revealed he was in a car wreck about the same time and was found with a near-lethal blood-alcohol level of 0.44%--at 11 a.m.

“This case completely violates our sense of fairness,” said Stephen J. Dear, executive director of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a North Carolina group calling for a death penalty moratorium. “This man essentially didn’t have a lawyer, and if we think that’s a fair trial, then our death penalty system is completely out of control.”

Frye’s is the latest case to raise troubling questions about the effect of bad lawyers in death penalty trials. Earlier this month, a panel of federal judges overturned the murder conviction of a Texas death row inmate because his court-appointed attorney had slept through substantial portions of his trial.

Frye’s lawyers said he would not have been sentenced to death had the jury known the full story of his hellish upbringing. When Frye was 4, his alcoholic parents gave him away at a diner. His new father beat him with a bullwhip, leaving such severe scars on his back that police still use the photographs at child abuse seminars.

Frye started sniffing glue at age 10, then turned to cocaine. He was shuffled from family to family, six changes in all, before he dropped out of high school. He was a crack-addicted construction worker when he sank a pair of scissors into his landlord’s chest in a Hickory, N.C., trailer park. He owed the landlord money and was facing eviction.

“None of this justifies what he did, but had the jury known how he grew up, they would have felt mercy for him,” said Frye’s appellate lawyer Marilyn Ozer.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a defense lawyer has the responsibility to present “mitigating” factors about a client’s background--child abuse, drugs, an especially tough environment--that might persuade a jury to spare a client’s life.

None of Frye’s family members was called to the witness stand. A psychologist did testify but shared little about Frye’s childhood.

After he was convicted of first-degree murder of the 70-year-old landlord and sentenced to death, a new set of court-appointed lawyers based an appeal on Portwood’s admitted incompetence.

In 1997, Portwood detailed his drinking habits at a hearing and admitted he had not worked on the Frye case outside of court. He never drank before court appearances, he testified, though doctors said Portwood would have been still intoxicated in the morning from the quantity of rum he downed in the afternoon and evening.

Portwood, still practicing law in Hickory, did not return phone calls Thursday.

Two jurors have said they might have voted for life without parole had Portwood offered evidence of Frye’s past.

The Frye case comes at a time when the death penalty is an increasingly controversial issue in North Carolina and beyond. This month, Easley, a Democrat, signed a bill into law that prohibits the execution of mentally retarded people.

A push is intensifying across the country for a moratorium on executions. Revelations of wrongful convictions, the advent of DNA technology, stories about inept lawyers and a nationwide decrease in crime have led many people to reexamine the value of executing criminals.

Several North Carolina cities have passed resolutions urging state legislators to halt executions. Eighteen people have been put to death in North Carolina since a nationwide moratorium was lifted in 1977.

In an interview Tuesday, Frye said he was ready to die.

“I gave this to the Lord a long time ago,” Frye told the Charlotte Observer. “I cherished life--and I still do.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.