Supreme Court halts execution of Manassas murderer

The order came as Virginia corrections officers were practicing electric chair procedures for the 31-year-old Powell, who in 1999 drove a knife into the heart of teenager Stacie Lynn Reed before raping and stabbing her 14-year-old sister, Kristie.

Powell was convicted and sentenced to death in 2000, but the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the verdict. Prosecutors had tried to link Stacie’s killing to Kristie’s rape, arguing that they were part of the same crime. Powell had been charged under a provision of Virginia’s death penalty law that makes it a capital crime to commit a rape and murder as part of the same incident. The court ruled that the crimes were separate.

Powell was looking at a life sentence until he penned a four-page letter mocking prosecutors and bragging that he tried to rape Stacie before killing her.

“Since … I can’t be charged with capital murder again, I figured I would tell you the rest of what happened on Jan. 29, 1999, to show you how stupid all of y’all … are,” Powell wrote from his cell.

With the admission, prosecutors said they had the evidence to charge him with capital murder for a second time. They say the original charge was different because Powell was not accused of attempting to rape Stacie the first time.

Powell’s lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the execution until the court could decide whether his second capital murder charge violated the Fifth Amendment’s protection against being tried twice for the same offense.

Prosecutors said Powell, a self-avowed white supremacist, killed Stacie because she had a black boyfriend. Powell confronted Stacie, stabbed her and stomped on her neck. He went downstairs and poured himself an iced tea and smoked a cigarette. When Kristie came home from Parkside Middle School, Powell raped her, bound her, and slashed her wrists and throat, leaving her for dead.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this story.

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