ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607080090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: Associated Press
Former death row inmate Joseph M. Giarratano Jr. has been transferred to another prison after being stabbed at Buckingham Correctional Center, prison officials said.
Giarratano was treated at Southside Community Hospital in Farmville after the Thursday stabbing, said David Botkins, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections. He would not say where Giarratano was transferred.
Botkins said the wound was ``not serious at all.''
He said the stabbing occurred about 4:30 p.m., but he had no information about the circumstances or the motive.
Gerald Zerkin, the Richmond lawyer who helped win a conditional pardon for Giarratano in 1991, said he understood that the wounds were not life-threatening.
Giarratano, 38, was sentenced to die for the rape and strangulation of 15-year-old Michelle Kline in Norfolk in 1979. He also was convicted of murder in the stabbing death of the teen-ager's mother, Barbara Kline, 44.
He came within three days of being executed in February 1991 before Gov. Douglas Wilder granted him a conditional pardon, commuted his death sentence and suggested a new trial.
However, then-Attorney General Mary Sue Terry concluded that a new trial was not in order.
Amnesty International and other groups flooded Wilder's office with almost 6,000 telephone calls and letters urging the governor to stop the execution.
Zerkin contended that Giarratano's conviction was based in large part on contradictory confessions that were the result of drug and alcohol abuse rather than guilt.
He said those confessions were at odds with physical evidence at the crime scene, which included fingerprints and pubic hairs from someone other than Giarratano.
Zerkin also said the physical evidence suggested that someone who is right-handed stabbed Barbara Kline. Giarratano is left-handed.
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Giarratanoby CNB