Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 9, 1993 TAG: 9309090331
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CRAIGSVILLE LENGTH: Long
Then there are nights when he dreams about having his head shaved for the electric chair, and he wakes up screaming.
Life goes on like that for Giarratano, which is more than some thought he deserved two years ago when Gov. Douglas Wilder commuted his death sentence to life in prison.
Giarratano had become the most famous death row inmate in America, with celebrities and activists all over the world fighting to save The Man Who Might Be Innocent.
Once his battle was won, the crusade moved on to other inmates - most recently, Gary Graham in Texas. Giarratano should have faded into grateful obscurity.
Instead, something strange has happened. The letters of support still arrive, 20 or 30 a week. The celebrities who once thought of him as a cause now call him a friend, and write faithfully or even visit. Giarratano still does legal work for other inmates, writes essays, holds seminars and does interviews on issues of law.
And he has created a new identity for himself: Joe Giarratano, teacher of nonviolence.
"Joe is, I think it's safe to say, a cult figure in the prison," said Colman McCarthy, a syndicated columnist and longtime Giarratano supporter.
The faith of McCarthy and others, it turns out, goes beyond the suspicion that Giarratano might be innocent. Even a law-and-order type like former Maryland Attorney General Stephen Sachs, who favors the death penalty, speaks of Giarratano with something approaching reverence.
"By some unknowable process and for some imponderable reason, in the course of a decade on death row a different human being has emerged from the hell that was his life before," Sachs once wrote. "In short, Joe Giarratano is a good man."
"Bull crap. He should be in his grave right now," responds Ralph Mears, a now-retired Norfolk police officer who arrested Giarratano in 1979. Any mention of the convict puts the bile in Mears' mouth.
" `Aw, he's good,' and everybody swallowed it," he said. "You want my opinion, he's a killer. He's a rapist and a killer."
That's certainly what a judge believed, convicting Giarratano of raping and strangling a 15-year-old girl and stabbing her mother to death. Giarratano believed it, too; he confessed five times.
The confessions were contradictory, though. And some of the evidence left room for doubt: Bloody footprints were not Giarratano's, someone else's driver's license was found in the dead women's apartment, most of the hairs and fingerprints at the scene were not his, and so on.
Some who dealt with Giarratano on death row came to believe that he wanted to be guilty because he considered himself garbage.
His childhood, according to court records, was wretched. His father died when Giarratano was 2. A stepfather allegedly molested both Giarratano and his sister until dying slowly of cancer when the boy was 15. Friends of Giarratano's parents would taunt and batter him for sport.
He escaped into drugs at age 11. He was in and out of detention homes and reform schools throughout his home state of Florida. By 1979, when Giarratano was working on a Norfolk scallop boat, he was obese and so lost to drugs and alcohol that he suffered periodic blackouts. It was during one of those blackouts that Giarratano is said to have murdered Barbara and Michelle Kline, his former roommates.
He asked for the death penalty, and twice tried to kill himself.
As it turned out, "winding up on death row saved my life," Giarratano says now.
Once the prison quit giving him tranquilizers around 1983, a new person began to emerge. Giarratano discovered that he liked to read about law, philosophy and the Constitution.
"I had a knack for the legal stuff. I just stuck with it, and I kept getting better at it," he said. He flexed his newfound abilities by filing court briefs on behalf of other death-row inmates.
Giarratano's efforts won access to reporters and telephones for the condemned. His argument that the state should appoint attorneys for death penalty appeals became the first such inmate-filed legal brief to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Giarratano lost the case but won a reputation.
"He has a pretty good understanding of the law," said gruff, conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick, probably Giarratano's most unlikely sympathizer. "He has evolved into a pretty savvy person."
Kilpatrick and Giarratano share a passion for constitutional law, though they often disagree on particulars. "I like to kick around ideas with him," Giarratano said.
He was one of the first two jail-house lawyers to have an essay published in the Yale Law Journal; it was on "Fallibility vs. Finality in Capital Punishment." He has had a piece published in the Los Angeles Times. Last December, "The Talk of the Nation" on National Public Radio did a program on court-appointed attorneys with a panel of four experts: a Harvard law professor; someone from the National Center for State Courts; a legal author; and Giarratano.
No new trial
His only real failure has been in getting himself a new trial. He's willing to take a chance on the death penalty again, he said, because he now believes he's innocent. But Attorney General Stephen Rosenthal is standing by the view of former boss Mary Sue Terry: Giarratano is lucky he got what he did, and will not get a new trial.
Last month, two members of the European Parliament came to Virginia with a celebrity-studded petition asking for a new trial (names like playwright Harold Pinter, actor Stephen Rea, etc.). Politician Tom Megahy of England made the trip the centerpiece of his summer vacation; after years of assembling international support for Giarratano, he wanted to meet the man.
Another who travels far to meet with Giarratano is Mike Farrell, the actor who played B.J. Honeycutt on the "M*A*S*H" television series and who has become a human-rights activist. The two men write regularly, and Farrell has driven the lonely mountain road to the Augusta County prison twice in the past year.
Of all the death-row inmates Farrell has supported, Giarratano is the only one he considers a personal friend. "Joe is not Superman, and he's not Einstein, nor is he Gandhi," Farrell said. "But he is an exceptional human being."
He looks like an average inmate, walking down the flower-lined Boulevard (central sidewalk) at the Augusta Correctional Center in a valley southwest of Staunton. He wears a ponytail, a faded orange Reebok cap, torn gray T-shirt, baggy jeans and a moustache and stubbly beard.
As he passes through a doorway, several guards filing out for shift-change tap Giarratano on the shoulder. "Hey, bub, what's going on?" says one. "Not much. You?" Giarratano says, patting him on the back. You won't see many inmates touching guards.
His hair, when he takes off the cap, is immaculately combed. He is trimmer than in old news photographs. With his pointed eyebrows and sly grin, Giarratano resembles counterculture folk musician John Prine.
As a matter of fact, he just got a tape of John Prine, sent by Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskel Wexler. Folk singer Joan Baez is another regular correspondent, along with guitarist The Edge of the rock band U2 (Giarratano begins his letters, "Dear Edge . . . ").
Rock star Peter Gabriel, actor Jack Lemmon, disc jockey Casey Kasem - they keep in touch, too. But none is as close a friend as Farrell, who helped Giarratano through the darkest hours. "When you're down in the death house and dealing with matters of life and death, you start thinking about spiritual stuff. What is life all about, what is death all about - we just shared a lot of our thoughts that way," Giarratano says.
They also shared a taste in literature, which, these days, is everything to Giarratano. He credits three diverse readings with helping set him on his current course: The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Marbury vs. Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall claimed authority to interpret the Constitution; the works of Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and, especially, lawyer Clarence Darrow's inspirational speech to the Cook County inmates.
"It wasn't everything [Darrow] said that grabbed me, because in a lot of ways, he was a socialist," Giarratano says. "But he believed in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He led me back to people like Jefferson, John Locke, Madison and that crowd. And even further back, to Plato and Aristotle."
It begins to dawn, as the conversation progresses from Casey Kasem to the roots of Western political thought, that this is what surprises and impresses people when they meet Giarratano. He crosses his legs, grabs his upraised knee and leans back as he talks, as warm and self-assured as a friendly attorney over lunch. Rape and butchery begin to waver and fade from the mind.
His biggest intellectual enemy, Giarratano is saying, is Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He has almost completed a law-review essay challenging Rehnquist on interpretations of the Ninth Amendment. "I also wrote a play, called `Somewhere in D.C.' It has Thomas Jefferson meeting William Rehnquist in a park. In the end, Jefferson winds up getting executed for signing the Declaration of Independence."
Giarratano is his own lawyer these days, but has focused most of his energy on aiding inmates who can't help themselves. His big cause for the past several years has been death-row prisoner Earl Washington, who is retarded and whom Giarratano thinks has been mistreated by the system.
Culture of violence
Always looking deeper, Giarratano has decided that the root of what is killing such people and almost killed him is a self-renewing culture of violence. The man who gave him a mechanism to address that is Colman McCarthy, the Washington Post columnist and founder of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C.
Drawing on curricula McCarthy uses for classes at Georgetown University, the University of Maryland and in D.C. high schools, Giarratano and his cellmate founded a program in the Augusta prison called Alternatives to Violence.
In it, inmates read and discuss essays by thinkers such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Einstein. Each prisoner must write at least two essays during the 12-week course, which has been broken into beginners' and advanced levels. About 150 prisoners are on the waiting list.
A national corrections trade magazine wrote about the program last month, prompting prisons around the country to phone Augusta for details. The Virginia Board of Corrections asked for a special briefing.
Giarratano now serves on the board of McCarthy's peace center, along with four congressmen and a Nobel laureate.
"I've taken my students to visit with him several times," McCarthy said; People Magazine covered one of the sessions.
Giarratano aspires to more. He wants a new trial, an acquittal, freedom. He wants to work for an advocacy group for death-row inmates. He might go to law school. He wants to set up some kind of foundation to help prisoners develop their talents and fit into society.
Fitting in has become important to Giarratano. He has on his right forearm a tattoo from his days on death row, a dagger with the words "contra mundum" - against the world. "When I got it tattooed on me, that's what I felt like, just me against the world," he says.
Now, he views it as having to do with independence and self-confidence. "I think that's a position we all have to come to at some point in our lives - stand on our own two feet and take responsibility for our actions. Once you get to that stage, and you don't lose that capacity, then you can interact with the world as an individual instead of having other people think for you."
To some, that change in views sounds like redemption. And that's why they care so much for Joe Giarratano, guilty or not.
"I think there's goodness in everybody who's in prison," McCarthy said. "In Joe's particular case, it's a little bit easier to find."
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