Joseph Giarratano, who spent 38 years in a Virginia prison, 13 of them on death row, for a crime he didn’t commit, died on October 6 at his home in Salem. He was 67.
In 1979, Giarratano was arrested for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Michelle Kline and the murder of her mother, 44-year-old Toni Kline, his roommates.
A scallop boat fisherman who also smuggled drugs, Giarratano said he woke up from a drug and alcohol-induced stupor to find their bodies and fled the scene before turning himself in a few days later in Florida. Although he said he had no memory of the murders, he confessed five times and, after a half-day trial, was sentenced to death.
His case was a terrible miscarriage of justice. There were so many holes, from his inconsistent confessions to the fact there was no DNA or physical evidence linking him to the murders to the fact that Toni Kline had been stabbed by someone who was right-handed, and Giarratano was left-handed. Encouraged by Marie Deans, the legendary mitigation specialist and prison rights advocate, Giarratano worked on his own legal defense and eventually garnered much high-level support from attorneys, celebrities, corrections officials, at least one warden, and citizens from all over the world.
While in prison, awaiting execution, Giarratano immersed himself in law books and soon became a death-row lawyer, filing appeals for himself and others, including Earl Washington, who spent 17 years in prison, nine-and-a-half of them on Virginia’s death row, for the 1982 rape and murder of 19-year old Rebecca Lynn Williams. But Washington, who had an intellectual disability and couldn’t read or write, gave a false confession, getting the basic details of the murder wrong, including Williams’s race. Giarratano became friends with Washington after Washington asked for help reading a legal document he had received in the mail. A skilled jailhouse lawyer, Giarratano recognized the problems with Washington’s case and the urgency of his situation. He helped him get legal representation and assisted Washington’s lawyers with his appeal. Washington, who had come within nine days of being executed, was eventually exonerated based on DNA evidence and released in 2001. A jury later awarded him $2.25 million, and he settled for $1.9 million in 2006.
In 1991, two days before Giarratano was scheduled to be executed, his sentence was commuted to life by Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, making him eligible for parole after serving 25 years. In December 2017, Giarratano was released from prison, 38 years after he was sent to death row. But he wasn’t pardoned because, he said, “If you’re exonerated, they have to pay you a lot of money.”
His post-prison life included working as a paralegal for one of the attorneys who had represented him and at the University of Virginia School of Law Innocence Project.
But those 38 years had exacted a terrible physical and psychological toll on Giarratano. Poor medical care in prison resulted in the loss of his right leg, and during those 38 years, 38 prisoners were executed, and “I knew almost all of them,” he said. “When I think about that it makes me angry.” When he was first released, he couldn’t sleep in his own bed because it was too soft. “I slept on the floor, I just couldn’t handle the softness of the bed.” He said he also had “a little PTSD, but my way of dealing with it is to deal it with it head-on. I go into prisons, doors clanging behind me, I still get tense, but I won’t back away from it. It’s immersion therapy my way.”
In 2022, Death Penalty Focus presented Giarratano with its Mike Farrell Human Rights Award for his courage and continued advocacy against the death penalty. The award was significant for Giarratano and Farrell, now DPF Board of Directors President. Their friendship stretched back decades, beginning in 1984 when Marie Deans brought the two together for a meeting on Virginia’s death row at Mecklenburg Prison. Deans and Farrell partnered in a campaign to free Giarratano, recruiting politicians and celebrities as well as lobbying legislators and Governor Wilder.
Giarratano’s sentence was commuted to life on the basis of “possible innocence” in 1991. Still, the campaign to free him continued because he was now infamous for “having beaten the death penalty” and a target of those in the system who objected. After he was stabbed in the first prison he was sent after leaving death row, Farrell made a point of visiting and supporting him in every prison, in and out of Virginia, to which he had been sent by a cruel system. The two close friends were truly able to celebrate only when Joe Giarratano was finally released in 2017.
“What so many of us learned from Joe is, as Dan Berrigan put it,” said Farrell, “Unless the cries of the war victims, the hopeless poor, the prisoners, the resisters of conscience, unless the cry of the world reaches our ears, and we measure our lives and deaths against that of others, nothing changes, least of all ourselves.”
