Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991                   TAG: 9102100069
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TOO LITTLE EVIDENCE, TOO LATE TO SPARE GIARRATANO'S LIFE?

We paused there, speechless for a moment in a great, cold vestibule, surrounded by steel mesh fences and locked doors. What do you say to a man being led back to a cell on death row?

What do you say to Joe Giarratano?

I can't remember saying anything 18 months ago at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Southside Virginia.

But it's easy to remember the feeling that rendered me dumb.

Why was Giarratano being led back to prison? And why was I walking toward the parking lot? We are the same age. He is easily as articulate as I. His sense of humor is keen. He likes to read. He reads law books.

The difference, said a veteran worker in the Virginia attorney general's office later, is that Joe Giarratano killed two women.

He was convicted of killing two women, some would say.

Twelve years ago last Wednesday, Giarratano walked up to a cop in the Jacksonville, Fla., bus station and admitted killing Barbara and Michelle Kline in Norfolk.

Two Fridays from now, Giarratano is to die in Richmond for the crime.

The dozen years between crime and punishment have been, for Giarratano, a metamorphosis from a drug-addled 21-year-old to a thoughtful 33-year-old.

And they've meant self-doubt. Though he confessed to the crime five times, though he asked for the death penalty and though he refused to cooperate with his own attorneys, Giarratano now says he can't remember killing anyone.

He says his original trial was botched. He says there is new evidence. He says he ought to be spared.

State and federal judges haven't agreed with him, and he is losing critical procedural battles.

Judges rule that Giarratano is repackaging old evidence to fit a new alibi. He is producing too little evidence, too late.

The legal appeals are nearly exhausted. Gov. Douglas Wilder can commute Giarratano's sentence to life imprisonment, but that's an unlikely move for a politician with national aspirations.

Giarratano's execution would be a stinging defeat foranti-death penalty groups that have poured their resources into his case. They can mount no better coordinated, no better funded, no more high-profile campaign than this one to spare a convict's life.

But last week, Giarratano was moved to the old state penitentiary in Richmond. He is its only resident. Other inmates have been moved to newer quarters elsewhere in Virginia. Giarratano is in Richmond because that's where the electric chair is.

"Mercy has nothing to do with justice," Giarratano said. "Society doesn't kill me for me. Society has a legitimate need for revenge."

It was a coldly intellectual approach to a process that may soon take his life. And a system void of emotion is plodding toward buckling him into the chair.

There's a very good chance Giarratano murdered two women a dozen Februaries ago.

There's a chance, too, he didn't.

If we kill him, and later figure out that he was no murderer, what would we say to Joe Giarratano?