year-old woman, and John Hicks in Ohio, who was convicted of suffocating his 5-year-old stepdaughter in 1985. If both of these are executed, the 1,000th defendant to die could be Robin Lovitt, scheduled to be executed in Virginia on Wednesday. His case has attracted worldwide attention with several prominent conservatives, including former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr who investigated then-President Bill Clinton's extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, urging Gov. Mark Warner to commute the sentence. Lovitt was sentenced to death in 1999 for the murder of a night manager in a pool hall the previous year. He claims another man committed the murder and his lawyers argued he could have proved his innocence if DNA evidence used at his trial had not been illegally destroyed. Warner, a popular Democrat, is widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2008 and his decision will be closely watched. He has denied each of the 11 previous clemency petitions that have come before him as governor. If Lovitt is not executed, Kenneth Boyd, scheduled to die Friday in North Carolina and Shawn Humphries on the same day in South Carolina, could be the 1,000th and 1,001st executions since the end of what amounted to a voluntary, decade-long moratorium on executions by the states as the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue.
