On The Front Lines
John Whitehead, President of The Rutherford Institute, Calls on Gov. Kaine to Order Retrial for Jailhouse Lawyer Joe Giarratano
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.--In a letter to Governor Tim Kaine, John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, is urging the Virginia governor to exercise his discretion and order the retrial of Joseph Giarratano, an inmate in the custody of the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) who has worked tirelessly over the past 30 years to improve prison conditions for other inmates and exonerate those wrongfully convicted.
A copy of Whitehead's letter is available here.
"It is a hard road the United States judicial system must walk in doling out judgment. Yet as our leaders strive to uphold the rule of law, I believe we must endeavor to be willing to acknowledge the flaws within our judicial system and government and work to fix them," stated Whitehead. "It is my hope that Governor Kaine will govern boldly and courageously by letting one of his final acts of office be to show compassion and clemency to Joseph Giarratano."
After a hurried half-day trial, Giarratano was tried, convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the 1979 murder of 44-year-old Barbara Kline and her 15-year-old daughter, Michelle. The conviction was based on circumstantial evidence and five mutually contradictory confessions from the drug-addled Giarratano, who, despite the fact that he was unable to remember the events of that day and unsure of what had happened, turned himself into the police and confessed to the murders. New evidence has since emerged which renders the case made against him demonstrably weak and his subsequent conviction highly questionable.
An eleventh-hour intervention by Governor Douglas Wilder in 1991 led to Giarratano's sentence being commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Unfortunately, the courts have been so procedurally limited by way of laws created by the Virginia legislature that no court has ever considered all of the evidence casting doubt about Giarratano's guilt. Yet as Whitehead points out in his letter, "Joseph Giarratano, who has been a tireless champion of civil rights, writing for the Yale Law Journal and acting as a tenacious advocate for others in jail, deserves the chance to stand before a judge and jury and attempt to prove his own innocence."
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