ROANOKE TIMES 

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

DATE: TUESDAY, February 19, 1991                   TAG: 9102190452
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium

HARVARD SCHOLAR BACKS PARDON FOR GIARRATANO

Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe said he sees no constitutional impediment to granting a conditional pardon to Virginia death row inmate Joseph Giarratano.

In a letter to one of Giarratano's legal advisers, Tribe rejected Virginia Attorney General Mary Sue Terry's arguments that Giarratano's legal case has run its course and he is not entitled to another trial.

"My conclusion is that no genuine constitutional doubt exists regarding the authority of the governor to issue a pardon under the admittedly novel conditions that have been proposed," Tribe wrote in the letter dated Feb. 13 and released today.

Tribe is a constitutional scholar and author of a bestselling book on the Supreme Court.

Giarratano is scheduled to die Friday for the 1979 rape and murder of a Norfolk teen-ager and the murder of her mother. He confessed, but now claims he does not remember the crimes and believes he did not commit them.

Giarratano supporters have asked Gov. Douglas Wilder to pardon the 33-year-old former Norfolk waterman with the understanding that Giarratano will submit to a new trial on murder and rape charges.

Under the state's constitution, Wilder has the power to grant a pardon, but cannot order the state's judicial branch to try Giarratano again.

But Tribe said neither the state nor federal constitution "contains any provision or suggests any principle, whether involving the separation of powers or involving individual rights, that would be violated in the slightest by the proposed conditional pardon."

Giarratano's supporters argue evidence uncovered after his 1979 trial cast serious doubt on his guilt. But courts refused to admit that evidence during a long appeals process.

Tribe adds his name to a lengthy list of liberal and conservative legal scholars and celebrities who have endorsed the idea of a conditional pardon. Tribe's letter was addressed to Richard Schaeffer of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons, an anti-death penalty group advising Giarratano. 


 by CNB