Ex-Virginia Death-Row Prisoner With Strong Claim of Innocence Get Parole After 38 Years

Joseph M. Giarratano (pictured), 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 and sentenced to death in Norfolk, Virginia in 1979 for the rape and capital murder of a fifteen-year-old girl and the murder of her mother. Giarratano had lived in their apartment—which was known as a “party house” with a free flow of visitors—in the month before the murder and was there the night of the murders, but because of drug use, he says, he has no recollection of what happened. He said he woke up on the couch, discovered the bodies, and because no one else was in the apartment, he assumed he had committed the killings. He 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.

Gerald Zerkin, one of Giarratano’s lawyers, said “[t]here 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.

Richmond lawyer Stephen A. Northup represented Giarratano before the parole board and said, “For all the reasons that caused Governor Wilder to give Joe a conditional pardon more than 26 years ago, I believe Joe is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted.”