Philly judge stays execution of killer

A Philadelphia man who murdered a University graduate student in 1981 and was sentenced to death for the crime received a stay of execution yesterday, the Casey administration said. Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Francis Biunno postponed the planned December 11 death of Raymond Whitney, 32, said Casey spokesman John Taylor. A jury sentenced Whitney to death in 1982 for stabbing to death Jehad Taha, a 25-year-old Electrical Engineering student. Whitney broke into a second-floor apartment overlooking Powelton Avenue and robbed a woman, Julia Minor, at knifepoint before fleeing to Taha's apartment several houses down the street. He demanded that Taha, a Computer and Information Sciences student, and his wife, Mahim Murtaza, give him money and jewelry, the reports said. Whitney then ordered the couple into the kitchen and told Murtaza to undress. When Whitney began to undress, Taha attacked him. By this time, Minor had called the police and officers were in her apartment when Murtaza ran screaming into the street, clad only in her underpants. The police entered the apartment and found Whitney standing over Taha's body. Taha and Murtaza had been married two months when the murder occurred. Without yesterday's stay, Whitney would have been the first criminal executed in Pennsylvania since 1962 when Elmo Smith was electrocuted for murdering a 16-year-old Montgomery County woman. Whitney would also have been the first inmate to die in Pennsylvania by lethal injection. Governor Robert Casey signed a bill yesterday changing the form of execution from electric shock to a dose of lethal chemicals. Corrections Secretary Joseph Lehman said the department would have been able to make the switch to lethal injection before December 11 by enlisting the help of an outside contractor. He would not give any details about the contractor. The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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