By Tim McGlone
The Virginian-Pilot
NORFOLK, Va. — One-time federal death row prisoner Richard Thomas Stitt was sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday.
Stitt, one of Portsmouth’s more notorious gang leaders who had the nicknames “Death” and “Tom-Tom,” remained defiant, proclaiming his innocence and telling the judge he was framed.
“I had nothing to do with these murders,” Stitt told U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson. “I never had nobody killed or shot.”
He said if a number of co-defendants hadn’t cut deals with the government to testify against him, “the truth would have come out.”
Stitt, now 37, ran a violent drug gang in Portsmouth for nearly a decade before his arrest in the late 1990s. He was convicted in 1998 and received three death sentences - one for each of three killings he ordered.
Wayne A. Griffin Sr. testified Tuesday that his family remains impacted by the 1993 murder of his brother, James Michael Griffin Jr. Stitt was convicted of ordering the killing.
“It’s like a hole in your heart,” Griffin said. “It’s something missing.”
In 2005, Jackson overturned the death sentences based on ineffective counsel at Stitt’s trial, and he gave Stitt a life prison term. The federal appeals court overturned that decision and ordered Stitt to be re-sentenced with a death penalty option.
The government last month dropped its attempt to seek a new death sentence.
The U.S. attorney’s office has never publicly said why it dropped the death penalty option. Peter Carr, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride, said Tuesday that the decision was based on “internal deliberations” between their office and the Department of Justice.
A series of adverse judicial rulings likely played a part in the decision.
Jackson limited federal prosecutors in what evidence they could use against Stitt in a new sentencing, despite allowing it in the original sentencing. But that occurred without objection by Stitt’s lawyer at the time, which led to the ineffective assistance claim.
Jackson also refused to allow much of Stitt’s juvenile delinquency record, and he refused to allow any new violent acts or threats discovered after Stitt’s original sentencing in 1999.
Federal prosecutors Fernando Groene and Darryl Mitchell told the court at an earlier hearing that they had uncovered new evidence of violent acts committed by Stitt, including threatening to kill Portsmouth sheriff’s deputies and threatening to shoot a police sergeant in the head.
Groene said investigators have linked Stitt to 10 additional shootings above what was charged in the indictment as well as “several murders that he committed in Miami.”
Jackson refused to allow any of that into evidence at sentencing.
Stitt’s defense lawyers said that there has been no evidence that Stitt has been a continuing danger while in prison, something else the government argued. His lawyer Gerald Zerkin said Stitt has an “unblemished” prison record.
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