Robin Lovitt

He was granted clemency by Virginia Governor Mark R. Warner on November 29, 2005, the day before he was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center.

His execution was originally scheduled for July 11, 2005, but was stayed by the Supreme Court of the United States to give themselves more time to consider his appeal. They decided not to hear the case again, resulting in a new execution date of November 30, 2005 being set.

Robin Lovitt would have been the first person executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia since James Edward Reid on 9 September 2004. It would have been the 1000th execution in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that new capital punishment laws were constitutionally permissible in 1976.

On May 2, 2001 a new law came into effect in Virginia that required all biological evidence in capital cases to be sent to a state laboratory for safe-keeping. But less than three weeks later, Robert C. McCarthy, Chief Deputy Clerk of the Circuit Court of Arlington County had the evidence in the Lovitt case destroyed. Two other clerks said they told McCarthy not to order the destruction of the evidence because it was a capital case. McCarthy told them that he thought he was authorized to destroy the trial exhibits after Lovitt's convictions were affirmed by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

In October 2000, Lovitt's case was taken up on a pro bono basis by the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Kirkland worked with the University of Notre Dame's Washington Semester Program in pursuing Lovitt's appeals. Lovitt was also represented by the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center. When Kirkland began representing Lovitt, Kenneth Starr, currently Dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law and former United States Solicitor General, became involved in the case. Starr is pro-capital punishment and has stated that:

Lovitt was arrested on November 24, 1998 and convicted by a jury of capital murder during the commission of a robbery on September 20, 1999.

It was revealed during the penalty phase of the trial that Lovitt had been charged with assault and placed in protective supervision at age of 11 in October 1975. Then in August 1979 he was charged with burglary and larceny. Between 1983 and the murders he was convicted multiple times of larceny, burglary and possession of marijuana and cocaine.

Robin McKennel Lovitt (born November 6, 1963) is a convicted murderer in the U.S. state of Virginia. He is serving life in prison without parole after being convicted of the November 18, 1998 stabbing murder of Clayton Dicks in Arlington County, Virginia.