07 December 2017 :

Ex Death-Row Prisoner With Strong Claim of Innocence Get Parole. Joseph M. Giarratano, 59, White, a former Virginia death-row prisoner who came within two days of execution, has been been granted parole after 38 years in jail for a rape and double murder that lawyers and supporters have long said he did not commit. On November 20, twenty-six years after Governor L. Douglas Wilder commuted Giarratano's death sentence to life, the Virginia State Parole Board voted to grant him parole. Giarratano was convicted Giarratano was convicted in May 1979 in a trial before Norfolk Circuit Court Judge Thomas R. McNamara, of the Feb. 4, 1979, rape and capital murder of Michelle Kline, 15, and the murder of her mother, Toni Kline, 44. Giarratano was later sentenced to death. After several confessions he later said he had no recollection of what happened in their apartment. He said he woke, discovered the bodies, assumed he was guilty and fled to Florida, where he turned himself in to a sheriff at a Jacksonville bus station and confessed to the murders. Over the course of time, Giarratano gave a total of five confessions, which were inconsistent with one another and conflicted with the evidence at the crime scene. Footprints, fingerprints, and pubic hairs were recovered at the crime scene and did not match either Giarratano or the victims. Experts indicated that the killer was right-handed, but Giarratano is left-handed. Giarratano's confessions were so inconsistent that detectives told him they did not believe him and, he said, provided him with detailed information that he then parroted back to them in his fifth confession. In 1991, 2 days before his scheduled execution, Gov. L. Douglas Wilder commuted Giarratano's sentence to life after his case won national and international attention from celebrities, liberal and conservative commentators, religious and political figures and others who raised questions about his guilt. His was apparently the only death sentence commuted to life in Virginia in modern times allowing for the possibility of parole. Gerald Zerkin, one of Giarratano’s lawyers, said "There is nothing in the physical evidence that links Joe to the murders.... The prosecution’s whole case hinged on Joe’s confessions, which were total nonsense.” Leading experts on false confessions concluded in 2001 that there was "not a shred of significant or credible physical evidence supporting the conclusion that Joseph Giarratano’s contradictory and inconsistent confessions are reliable" and that considerable evidence led to "the conclusion that his confessions are false." While on death row, Giarratano became an avid reader and an advocate for other condemned prisoners, assisting in the exoneration of Earl Washington, a wrongfully convicted intellectually disabled man who came within eight days of execution. Giarranto was also the named party in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Murray v. Giarratano, in which Giarratano and others challenged Virginia's failure to provide post-conviction attorneys for condemned prisoners. The Court ruled 5-4 against the prisoners. Following his transfer off death row to the Augusta Correctional Center, Giarratano helped found the Center for Teaching Peace, a peace education program for prisoners. The state parole board's decision marks the first time in modern Virginia history that a defendant whose death sentence was commuted was granted parole. Giarratano was approved for release on Monday. Adrianne L. Bennett, chair of the Virginia State Parole Board, said it may take a month before Giarratano is actually freed. In recent years, Giarratano lost a leg to diabetes and is now an inmate at the Deerfield Correctional Center in Capron where many aged and ill inmates are held. He has a blog, freejoeg.com in which, among other things, he took the Department of Corrections to task for allegedly failing to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.