Is It A Horrible Mistake Or A Fitting Execution?

Roger Keith Coleman is on the telephone from his cell at the "Death House," talking about the recurring nightmare he has had since he realized the state of Virginia was going to kill him for a murder he says he didn't commit.

Guards lead him to the execution chamber, strap him snugly into the electric chair and throw the switch. He doesn't feel the voltage, but he has "knowledge" that he is being killed. The details are so vivid that the former Appalachian coal miner wakes up in a cold sweat.

Depending on which side you believe, Coleman's execution, scheduled tonight at 11 in Greenville Correctional Center, would be either the most horrible of mistakes or a fitting send-off for a cold-blooded killer.

Coleman had been in jail for several years before he started having the dream. It was months before he came to grips with it, he says, because when you first arrive, execution is so far away that it doesn't seem real. But the passage of time has a way of changing all that. He has been on Death Row since 1982, during each of the 13 executions Virginia has carried out since it reinstated the death penalty in 1977.

"As people you know are led away and never come back, as your appeals are denied, it begins to dawn on you that you're really going to die," he says.

His lawyers plan a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But Coleman's chances appear to be slim since the high court in recent years has rarely heard 11th-hour appeals.

Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder and a federal appeals court in Richmond have rejected a number of pleas.

The controversy over Coleman's execution has attracted worldwide attention. He was interviewed from his cell yesterday by talk-show host Phil Donahue. He has been on the cover of Time magazine.

In March 1981, Coleman was a 22-year-old working man who had married after serving 20 months of a three-year prison sentence for attempted rape. He also had been convicted of making obscene phone calls.

On March 10, the night he showed up for work and found out his mining crew was being laid off, his 19-year-old sister-in-law, Wanda Fay McCoy, was raped in her home and nearly beheaded with a vicious slash to her throat. The crime shocked the residents of Grundy, a small, close-knit mining community in the rugged mountains of southwest Virginia.

Coleman was a pallbearer at McCoy's funeral, but a five-week investigation resulted in enough evidence to indict him for McCoy's murder. After a four-day trial the following March, a jury recommended a death sentence.

Coleman has denied involvement in the crime.

He recently has spent large chunks of his days talking to journalists, posing for photographs and giving television interviews. He said he has averaged two to five interviews a day.

Coleman maintains his innocence and contests several key elements of the prosecution's case. He insists he was the victim of small-town hysteria and poor legal representation by two inexperienced defense lawyers.

There are also duels over interpretations of a genetic test, questions over a possible pry mark on the dead woman's front door and statements from several people that someone else admitted to the crime.

The attorneys handling Coleman's appeal, with the help of a dedicated group of anti-death penalty activists and a nationally known investigator who specializes in freeing the wrongly accused, have created in the media a whodunit out of what prosecutors contend was an open-and-shut murder case.

Last week's issue of Time, for example, has on its cover a picture of Coleman shackled inside the "Death House" and the headline: "This man might be innocent, this man is due to die."

Sympathetic treatment by the national media - Time and Newsweek in particular - has rankled the men who secured the conviction and death sentence against Coleman. They say the coverage ignores key pieces of evidence, and they detect in the news reports a bias against capital punishment.

"I thought when I read Time, I thought they'd made him Time's Man of the Year," said Tom Scott, a Grundy defense attorney who was called in as a special prosecutor.

"What we're hearing from the defendant is a bunch of bull," added Michael McGlothlin, the former commonwealth attorney in Virginia.

Scott and McGlothlin have given several interviews themselves in an attempt to give the state's story. They strongly deny that Coleman was harmed by community anger over McCoy's death.

"It's not like we never had a murder in this community," said Scott, who admits that McCoy's death was exceptional in its brutality and probably did cause a lot of people in the relatively safe town to start locking their doors.

To these two men, nothing that Coleman can say will invalidate the central facts:

-- Blood matching McCoy's type was found on the pants he admits wearing the night of the crime. Coleman said he doesn't know how the blood got there.

-- Two pubic hairs found on the dead woman match Coleman's pubic hairs, but cannot be linked exclusively to him.

-- The person who raped McCoy was a secretor - meaning he had blood in his semen - and had type B blood. Coleman is a type B secretor.

The prosecutors further note that DNA tests requested by the defense as part of the appeals process show that Coleman is among 0.2 percent of the population that could have raped McCoy.

Coleman argues that the test results were misinterpreted and show semen left by two men.

On Coleman's side is James McCloskey, a former theology student who has committed his life to help the wrongly accused and whose investigative work has helped overturn convictions against 12 people.

McCloskey said that after spending several months in Grundy interviewing people and poring over documents related to the case, he is convinced that Coleman is innocent. He thinks a neighbor killed McCoy.

McCloskey claims to have affidavits from five Grundy women who say they were sexually assaulted by the neighbor. He also has affidavits from three people who claim the neighbor confessed to them. One of the accusers, Teresa Horn, died in March.

Prosecutors say that the neighbor has a different blood type than the person who raped Wanda McCoy and that he passed a lie-detector test. Coleman, they say, has refused to take a polygraph.

Coleman says he has had a lot of time to prepare himself for death. He knows men on Death Row who faced the same nightmares he has had and gave up: One hanged himself in his cell and two others dropped their appeals and were put to death.

Coleman opted to fight.

"You either survive," he said, "or you don't."