In a recent editorial, the Washington Post called attention to the case of Earl Washington, who was wrongly convicted and almost executed in Virginia before being freed following DNA tests. The editorial notes that even a confession is far from definitive proof that the right person has been convicted. Washington was spared through the clemency process after courts denied his claims. Now a new defendant, whose DNA matched evidence from the crime scene, has been charged.
A Prosecution in Virginia
After two decades and one giant miscarriage of justice, Virginia prosecutors start over.
Saturday, August 26, 2006; Page A20; Washington Post Editorial
VIRGINIA prosecutors this week brought belated charges against a man named Kenneth Maurice Tinsley in the 1982 rape and murder of a Culpeper woman named Rebecca Williams. Mr. Tinsley, a serial rapist already serving life in prison, was connected to the Williams killing by DNA testing. And his prosecution would be simply a happy resolution of a long-cold case, except for one thing: A man named Earl Washington Jr. served more than 17 years in prison and came within nine days of being executed for this crime.
Mr. Washington’s case is a tragedy in a criminal justice system that at every stage refused to admit the magnitude of its error. Mildly retarded, Mr. Washington was convicted almost entirely on the basis of a disturbingly weak confession — one that a civil jury later found had been fed to him by investigators. He sat on death row until DNA tests in 1993 cast serious doubt on his conviction by showing that someone other than he or the victim’s husband had had intercourse with Williams before she was killed. Then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder responded by commuting his sentence to life in prison, but did not pardon him, arguing that the evidence of his innocence remained inconclusive. Only in 2000, after a second round of DNA testing, did then-Gov. James S. Gilmore III finally pardon him. Yet even then, he acknowledged merely that a jury would have acted differently had it seen these test results, not that Mr. Washington was innocent.
What’s more, while some of the state crime lab’s tests that year identified DNA from Mr. Tinsley on the victim’s blanket, the lab erroneously excluded him as a DNA contributor in the samples taken from her body. Not until still another round of testing, this one in connection with Mr. Washington’s civil lawsuit, was Mr. Tinsley’s DNA found in samples taken from the victim’s body.
The lessons of the Washington case will be familiar to anyone who has watched the flood of wrongful convictions come to light in recent years. Not all confessions are real; DNA testing should be liberally and swiftly available whenever doubts arise. Most important, there is no place for arrogance in a state’s criminal justice system. In any number of cases pending now, including some that seem all too weak, Virginia authorities are certain they have the right man locked up. They were once that certain about Earl Washington, too.
(Washington Post, Aug. 26, 2006). See Innocence and Editorials.
