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Virginia Executes Robert Gleason, Who Killed Two Fellow Prisoners Seeking a Death Sentence, in the Electric Chair

Gleason, 42, chose electrocution and waived his appeals. The governor declined to intervene, saying he had been found competent and showed no remorse.

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Illustration of three crows on a fence post in a frosty field in front of a low prison complex at dawn. Not the actual prison.

Robert Gleason Jr. killed two fellow prisoners and said he would keep killing unless he was put to death. On January 16, 2013, Virginia executed him in the electric chair.

Gleason, 42, was pronounced dead at 9:08 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. He was the first Virginia inmate to choose electrocution over lethal injection since March 2010. Lawyers who argued he had a long history of mental illness filed last-minute appeals that Gleason himself opposed; the U.S. Supreme Court denied a final appeal that evening, and Gov. Bob McDonnell declined to intervene, saying Gleason had expressed no remorse and had been found competent. "The only way to stop me is put me on death row," Gleason told the Associated Press after the first prison killing.

Gleason, a former tattoo artist, was serving time after pleading guilty to the 2007 murder of Michael Kent Jamerson when he killed his cellmate, Harvey Watson, 63, at Wallens Ridge State Prison on May 8, 2009. After he was moved to solitary confinement at Red Onion State Prison, he killed Aaron Cooper, 26, through the wire fence between their recreation pens on July 28, 2010. He pleaded guilty in Wise County Circuit Court to the capital murder of Watson on December 21, 2010, and of Cooper on April 22, 2011, and received two death sentences on findings of vileness and future dangerousness. He waived his appeals, and the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed both sentences on June 7, 2012.

The BBC reported that Gleason killed Aaron Cooper while awaiting sentencing for the first prison killing, while the Supreme Court of Virginia recorded that he did not plead guilty to that killing until five months after Cooper's death.

Sources