Karu White One Step Closer to Execution

The perpetrator of a gruesome 1979 triple murder in Breathitt County is one step closer to execution after the Sixth Federal Circuit of Appeals rejected his attempt at another trial.

The Appeals Court voted 2-1 against White’s effort to avoid execution, Russell Coleman, the Kentucky Attorney General, announced on Monday.

“This violent criminal committed these horrific murders more than 40 years ago, and he’s spent the decades since attempting to dodge the justice lawfully delivered by a jury,” Attorney General Coleman said.  In a press release issued on Monday, the Sixth Circuit’s decision “upholds the jury’s verdict, gives relief to the victims’ families and clears the way for long-overdue justice.” 

Karu Gene White, now 66, was convicted in 1980 at the age of 20 of the robbery and savage beating murders of Charlie Gross, 75, his wife Lula Gross, 74, and Lula’s blind brother, Sam Chaney, 79, at a small country store at Fishpond in Haddix.  White is Kentucky’s longest-incarcerated Death Row inmate, having been held for more than 40 years.

White and his attorneys had attempted to argue that his defense team in 1980 had “failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence.”  The eighty-six-page decision can still be appealed, and White continues to look for ways to avoid his court-ordered fate.

“This is not the end,” a relative of the murder victims’ family said.  “He still has an appeal left to the Supreme Court, but I think he knows he is running out of time and excuses.  He is looking into the face of justice, which has been a long time coming.  But for me, it can’t come fast enough.”  

White has a long history of legal challenges to delay his execution.  In 2010, a judge halted his White planned execution after White’s attornies raised numerous questions.  He has had several trials and appeals through the years but has nearly exhausted the arguments he used to delay the execution of the jury’s decision.  

Marco Allen Chapman was executed at the Kentucky State Reformatory in Eddyville by lethal injection by the Commonwealth of Kentucky on November 21, 2008.  No executions have occurred since that time.  There are twenty-five convicted felons currently on Kentucky’s Death Row awaiting execution.

White and his attornies have not filed a request for review by the United States Supreme Court of the Sixth Circuit’s latest decision.