Cons teach cons peace.

• Author: McCarthy, Colman
• Position: Inmate Joseph Giarratano, a nonviolence advocate

Before dawn one morning in early September 1996, guards at the Augusta Correctional Center in Craigsville, Virginia, went to the cell of Joseph Giarratano and roused him from sleep. Within minutes, the prisoner, who had done hard time in the Virginia penal system since 1979, was handcuffed, shackled, and escorted out of the maximum-security pen. He had not been told of his destination.

It was a state prison in Draper, Utah. The guards secretly moved Giarratano cross-country in a state-owned plane often used to fly Virginia Governor George Allen on political jaunts. Upon arrival, Giarratano was caged in the supermax control unit--a prison within a prison, where inmates leave their cells for fewer than three hours a week.

Giarratano's trip to Utah was part of a prisoner swap. On September 9, 1996, the Deseret News quoted a Utah prison official: "[Virginia] called us and said, `We've got this politically hot inmate. We would like to get rid of him.'" The two prisons worked out an exchange.

I can't verify the precise temperature of the "political heat." But I can offer a few facts and recollections about Joseph Giarratano, the human being. These impressions differ from the court judgment that placed him on Virginia's death row from 1979 to 1991. They also differ from the beliefs that prompted the state's attorney general to refuse to grant a new trial after the governor granted a last-minute stay of execution based on evidence that raised serious doubt about Giarratano's guilt.

I met Giarratano in 1988 when interviewing him for a column in The Washington Post. It was the first of eight visits I would make in the following years. Except for the initial interview, I took along between sixty and 100 of my law-school, college, and high-school students on every trip. In seminars and sometimes over shared meals, Giarratano was a masterful teacher on the intricacies of criminal justice. In 1995, he became the first person on death row ever to write a brief--on behalf of an illiterate fellow inmate who had no post-conviction lawyer--that was argued before the Supreme Court. In lower courts, he had won several victories on behalf of prisoners. A self-educated writer, his articles on death-penalty law appeared in such journals as the Yale Law Review.

From transcripts and other information provided by Marie Deans of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons, and Gerald Zerkin, a Richmond attorney specializing in civil liberties who was Giarratano's attorney for much of the appeals process, I learned that the state's case against Giarratano was glaringly weak. He was convicted in early 1979 after giving five confessions to the murders of Toni Kline and her teenage daughter Michele in a Norfolk rooming house. The trial lasted four hours. Evidence did not corroborate the confessions. According to the state's psychiatrist, the confessions were inconsistent and given to police during a drug-induced psychotic episode.

Giarratano, an eighth-grade dropout, a scallop fisherman, and a habitual drug abuser then in his early twenties, had no history of violence. When he learned of the deaths of his housemates and could not remember where he'd been on the night of February 3, 1979, he feared he had killed them. At a bus station in Florida, he saw a cop and turned himself in, saying he had just killed two people, was guilty, and wanted to be punished. The state of Virginia...