DNA tests have confirmed the guilt of Roger Keith Coleman, whose dying claim of innocence had lived on since his 1992 execution.

The results were announced this afternoon by Gov. Mark Warner, who took the unprecedented step of ordering the tests after years of arguments by Coleman's supporters that he was innocent.

"We have sought the truth using DNA technology not available at the time the Commonwealth carried out the ultimate criminal sanction," Warner said. "The confirmation that Roger Keith Coleman's DNA was present [at the crime scene] reaffirms the verdict and the sanction."

Coleman was convicted in 1982 of killing and raping his sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy, in her Grundy home. He was executed 10 years later, maintaining his innocence from the electric chair.

Warner is the first governor in the country to test the validity of an execution by ordering posthumous DNA tests, according to Eric Ferrero of The Innocence Project in New York, a network of attorneys that advocates for the wrongfully convicted.

Over the past five years, the request for testing has been a potential Holy Grail for opponents of the death penalty and a lingering irritant to the family of Coleman's victim and the community that convicted him.

There is no case in the United States in which scientific evidence has shown that an innocent person was executed, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

If the tests had proved Coleman innocent after the fact, some have reasoned, it could have undermined public support for capital punishment that has been declining slightly in recent years as DNA analysis has turned up more and more examples of wrongful convictions.

A post-execution exoneration might also have forced Virginia legislators to reconsider a moratorium on executions -- a proposal that has been voted down consistently in recent years.

"If that doesn't move them, what are they waiting for?" Jack Payden-Travers of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said before the results were announced.

While death penalty opponents had eagerly anticipated an announcement of the test results, the reaction from Grundy has been more cautious and apprehensive.

Many Buchanan County residents have said the national publicity that accompanied Coleman's 1992 execution unfairly portrayed them as a backwoods populace inflamed by the brutal murder and eager to convict anyone on sketchy evidence.

The family of Coleman's victim, Wanda McCoy, has expressed concerns about resurrecting such a painful part of their lives.

"Basically, you're opening hurt back up to me," McCoy's husband, Brad, told The Roanoke Times in 2000 when the tests were first proposed. "You finally have a little peace of mind for a while and you hope that it will continue. And it has up until now. But it brings a lot of things back."