Death penalty foes await decision in Va.

''I think it would be the final straw for a lot of people who are on the fence on the death penalty," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

A Gallup poll in October indicated that 64 percent of the respondents supported the death penalty. That is the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80 percent in 1994.

Warner, a potential Democratic presidential contender for 2008, hopes to complete negotiations over how the test would be conducted before his term ends Jan. 14, said spokesman Kevin Hall.

Coleman was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of 19-year-old Wanda McCoy, his wife's sister, who was found raped, stabbed, and nearly beheaded in her home.

The case drew international attention as Coleman pleaded his case on talk shows and in magazines and newspapers. Time magazine featured Coleman, a coal miner, on its cover. Pope John Paul II tried to block the execution. The office of the governor at the time, L. Douglas Wilder, was flooded with thousands of calls and letters of protest from around the world.

Coleman's lawyers argued that he did not have time to commit the crime, that tests showed semen from two men was found inside McCoy, and that another man bragged about murdering her. Coleman was executed on May 20, 1992.

DNA tests in 1990 placed Coleman within the 2 percent of the population who could have produced the semen at the crime scene. Additional blood typing put Coleman within a group consisting of 0.2 percent of the population. His lawyers said the specialist they hired to conduct the test misinterpreted the results.

Warner's decision on retesting has been delayed in part because the sample is not in the state's possession, Hall said. The evidence was stored in a Richmond, Calif., laboratory by Edward Blake, the forensic scientist who conducted the initial DNA tests.