Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102040265
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES J. KILPATRICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I have written of this deeply troubling case several times before. The story goes back almost 12 years, to the night of Feb. 5, 1979, when 21-year-old Joe Giarratano arrived at the bus station in Jacksonville, Fla. He walked up to a deputy sheriff and said he had killed two women in Norfolk, Va. He wanted to turn himself in.
That set in motion a chain of events. The Florida police took a confession. In Virginia he signed three other confessions. In several key respects the confessions were contradictory and inconsistent. On May 22, 1979, at the close of a one-day bench trial, Joe was found guilty of murdering Barbara Kline and her daughter, Michelle. In August he was sentenced to death.
Under law, Virginia had to prove Joe's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." Other than the confessions, the evidence is singularly unconvincing.
What of the confessions? They have to be considered in context. Joe Giarratano in 1979 was a worthless drifter. A presentence report found that he had begun taking drugs as a 10-year-old boy in a sordid household. In 1979 he was a drug addict and an alcoholic, suicidally depressed. He begged the trial judge to "end my pain" by imposing a death sentence.
Were the confessions reliable? A small fund was raised to bring Dr. J.A.C. MacKeith and Dr. Gisli Gudjonsson from London to Virginia in March of last year. MacKeith ranks among the foremost forensic psychiatrists in the world; Gudjonsson is as eminent in the field of criminal clinical psychology.
They questioned Giarratano for 12 hours. In the prisoner's confused and suicidal condition at the time of the crime, he accepted "plausible scenarios provided by other people." He signed statements presented to him. They concluded no confidence can be placed in the reliability of those self-incriminating statements.
During the first three or four years that Joe was in prison, he was a sorry specimen of humanity. But, as the effects of drugs and alcohol wore off, Joe began to develop some sense of self-esteem. He plunged into the study of law, so successfully that his name now appears on a leading Supreme Court case having to do with the right to counsel in capital cases.
A single aggravating factor was decisive when the death penalty was imposed: Joe's bad record as a juvenile, coupled with his sullen behavior in court, created "a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing, serious threat to society."
But every psychiatrist and psychologist who has examined Joe in recent years has concluded that this "serious threat" no longer exists. Why, then, I ask the governor, why kill him now? What useful purposes would thereby be served? I have tried, but I cannot think of a single one. Universal Press Syndicate
by CNB