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

DATE: FRIDAY, April 23, 1993                   TAG: 9304230477
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RAPE CASE

IN 1985, WALTER T. Snyder Jr. was living in an Alexandria apartment building across the street from a woman who was raped. For a while, the victim could not identify her assailant. Eventually, however, she identified Snyder as the rapist.

Her identification, and the fact that Snyder shares the same blood type as the rapist (as does 30 percent of the male population), were key to his 1986 conviction. He's been in prison since.

But there's a slight problem: Snyder almost certainly did not commit the crime. Alexandria prosecutors agree, and want him freed. Overwhelming evidence of his innocence - results of a test that show Snyder's DNA is not that of the assailant - has been available for more than four months.

Yet Snyder continues to languish in prison, a hostage to the bureaucracy of the legal system that sometimes seems to care more about gamesmanship than the issue of guilt or innocence.

Snyder's parents looked for years before finding a lawyer willing to pursue the DNA testing that could prove or disprove their son's guilt. When the lab results came back in early December, showing that the commonwealth of Virginia was holding an innocent man in prison, it took the lawyer more than three weeks to let the parents know. Since late February, a request for clemency has been sitting on Gov. Wilder's desk; he's waiting, the governor now says, for independent verification of the test results.

Independent verification is appropriate. But two months to get it done? Why not, say, two days? This is a question of an innocent person's being held in prison.

Meantime, if Snyder didn't rape the woman, someone else did. All this time he has been enjoying his freedom, perhaps to rape other women.

In Snyder's case, the exonerating evidence is unusual in its evident conclusiveness. But it echoes other recent examples of blind spots in Virginia's system of criminal justice, usually revealed in death-penalty cases where the stakes are highest and defense resources usually brought most strongly to bear.

In separate, earlier cases, Wilder commuted to life imprisonment the death sentences of Joseph Giarratano and Herbert R. Bassette - on the grounds that additional evidence cast doubt on their guilt. So why do they remain in prison?

Why, for that matter, must such things be left to the governor? Reluctance by Virginia courts to entertain claims of new evidence would be understandable: Often, the evidence isn't really new, or it doesn't cast reasonable doubt on a guilty verdict.

But why elevate mere reluctance to an ironclad principle of law? Roger Coleman was executed last year for the 1981 murder of his sister-in-law; for many people, including ourselves, any doubts about his guilt were assuaged when new evidence turned up by his defense team was examined by a federal judge and found to be inconsequential. Far less comforting is the principle of Virginia law that had earlier kept state courts from even looking at the alleged new evidence.

The irony is that non-evidentiary factors - procedural challenges, technical prosecutorial missteps, crowded court dockets, full jails - often operate to delay or prevent the imprisonment of people whose guilt is clear from the evidence.

"People think you can snap your fingers and change the court verdict," Walter A. McFarlane, the governor's counsel, said in defense of slow paperwork pace in the Snyder case. "If that were so, people would lose faith in the courts." He has a point. But watching the system move as slowly to free the innocent as it does to punish the guilty is no confidence-builder, either.

by CNB