By Garren Shipley -- Daily Staff Writer

WINCHESTER — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear Edward N. Bell's last appeal and has stayed his execution until the case is decided, the court announced Monday.

Bell, 40, is on death row for the 1999 murder of Winchester Police Sgt. Ricky L. Timbrook. Since his conviction in 2001, Bell has exhausted all of his state and federal appeals except for a final plea to the nation's highest court.

"We do appreciate that the Supreme Court would be willing to hear it," said James G. Connell, a member of Bell's appellate team.

The decision is gratifying not only because it's a matter of life and death for Bell, but also in that the case will likely settle a major dispute over federal law, he said.

A spokesman for Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell, whose office represents the commonwealth in the case, took the decision in stride.

"The office of the attorney general will diligently represent the interests of the commonwealth before the Supreme Court to ensure that justice is done," said spokesman Tucker Martin. "Our thoughts and prayers remain with the family of police Sgt. Rick Timbrook."

At a bare minimum, the decision to take the case has likely added several months if not a year or more to Bell's life.

His first serious date with the death chamber was set earlier this year for April 8. But Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine stepped in and stayed the execution until July 24 in order to give the Supreme Court time to rule on the constitutionality of lethal injection.

That decision came down just

weeks later, setting the execution

process in motion again.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take the case on a very narrow question: Did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit show too much deference to the Virginia Supreme Court when it considered his case in 2007?

At issue is how the Fourth Circuit applied the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, in which Congress overhauled the way federal habeas corpus petitions are handled.

Habeas corpus proceedings challenge the legality or conditions of a prisoner's detention. Over the years habeas proceedings had grown into a prisoner's filing of last resort.

In Bell's case, the habeas petition covered a laundry list of challenges to his death sentence, ranging from inadequate assistance from his first legal team to claimed violations of a federal treaty dealing with how foreign nationals are informed of their rights when arrested.

After years of hearings, Bell's claims were whittled down to one key issue — did his lawyers do an adequate job in their efforts to convince a jury to sentence him to life in prison, rather than death.

Before the 1996 act, federal courts would review each of an inmate's claims in an independent light and rule on their merits.

But the slow nature of the process, plus repeated federal habeas filings for most condemned inmates, had the net effect of delaying a significant number of executions for years.

The 1996 law, signed by President Clinton, limited state inmates to one federal habeas appeal in most cases.

It also put federal courts under strict orders to respect the outcomes in state courts unless those decisions were based on an "unreasonable" finding of clearly established federal law or Supreme Court precedent or an "unreasonable" reading of the facts of the case.

In Bell's case, the Virginia Supreme Court made a decision that Bell's legal team at the time did not act unreasonably in not putting on much of a case during sentencing, the part of the trial where they failed to convince jurors to sentence Bell to life in prison rather than death.

Two federal courts, including the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, showed significant deference to the Virginia Supreme Court's decision.

But Bell's appellate team managed to produce a raft of mitigation witnesses during a 2006 hearing that the commonwealth's highest court never knew existed when they rendered their decision.

"The question that we have is, does it make sense to ask if the Supreme Court [of Virginia] was unreasonably wrong if they didn't have all the facts when they made their decision?" Connell said.

If the high court sides with Bell, the matter would be sent back to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond for more consideration with an instruction to consider the case with fresh eyes, rather than respecting the Virginia Supreme Court's decision.

From there, "the best result would be a new sentencing hearing," Connell said.

Even if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Bell and lifts the stay of execution, he would still have yet another legal avenue available to him — a federal civil rights challenge of Virginia's lethal injection protocols.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871, better known as the Ku Klux Klan act, gives private citizens the ability to sue officials acting under color of law if their civil rights have been denied.

The U.S. Supreme Court authorized condemned inmates to use the statute to challenge their means of execution in a 2006 case, on the grounds that their execution may violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel or unusual punishments."

A similar case, that of Christopher Scott Emmett, is due to be argued at the Fourth Circuit in Richmond this week. Emmett argues that Virginia's lethal injection protocols are different enough from those approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees to constitute a civil rights violation.

Both parties will brief the case over the summer. Oral arguments will be held sometime after the high court begins its 2008 term on Oct. 6.

* Contact Garren Shipley at gshipley@nvdaily.com