Chain-smoking Marlboros and pacing in his 10-foot-square cell last week, Joseph M. Giarratano was too anxious to eat the death-house lunch. His mind was on the electric chair in the room next door - and his appointment with it 82 hours hence. With court appeals exhausted, only Gov. L. Douglas Wilder could stop his execution. Giarratano remained hopeful despite the odds. He joked with Marie Deans, a paralegal/activist and his closest supporter for the last eight years. “If I win,” he said, “I’m going to kiss the biggest, ugliest guard I can find.”
Twenty minutes later the phone down the hallway rang. Deans picked it up. Wilder had just commuted the death sentence to life with a chance at parole in 2004. Deans beamed. Giarratano was stunned. “Did I hear you right?” he asked. “You did it!” The short, pudgy 33-year-old inmate leaped and almost hit the roof of his cage. He beckoned to one of his jailers, whom he indeed tried to kiss. Then he sat down to enjoy the “first meal” of his new life: reheated lake trout and some coffee.
For some, the story of Joe Giarratano is one of rehabilitation, salvation and the kindness of strangers. But it also may be a cynical reminder that capital punishment in the United States remains a system of chance - driven by politics, celebrity and luck. Giarratano may deserve to live, but did his fate turn on his actions or the prominence of the people who took up his cause?
An eighth-grade dropout and Chesapeake Bay deckhand, Giarratano was convicted and condemned for the savage 1979 murders of a 15-year-old Norfolk girl and her mother, who had been living with him. After he awoke from a drug-induced blackout, he found his roommates beaten and dead. Assuming his own guilt, Giarratano fled to Florida. He eventually turned himself in and gave the first of five separate (though inconsistent) confessions that made the prosecution’s case, he even asked for the death penalty. Today, he says he remembers nothing about the night of the killings.
In 1981 Giarratano almost went to the chair, but a judge found him mentally incompetent. Then, in a remarkable twist, he found the will to live and a life to lead, albeit on death row. He became a jailhouse lawyer for his own cause and those of other inmates. Meantime, his lawyers uncovered new evidence suggesting his innocence. Footprints and pubic hairs found at the scene did not match Giarratano’s. Experts believe the mother was stabbed by a right-handed assailant, Giarratano is left-handed. However, his claims over the years just weren’t strong enough to overturn his conviction. The only appeal left for Giarratano and his supporters was to the governor and his clemency power. But Wilder was not a sympathetic audience. He is a latter-day convert to the virtues of capital punishment; he didn’t block the three prior executions during his tenure and he’s a man with national political ambitions who can’t afford to be Willie Hortonized. “The governor is so busy,” recalled Deans, who runs a Richmond organization opposed to the death penalty. “I had to find a way to highlight this.”
She did. How Giarratano won his life is as much a lesson in public relations as criminal procedure. In 1989 Deans contacted James J. Kilpatrick, a widely syndicated conservative columnist who supports capital punishment. After looking at court papers, Kilpatrick says he was “satisfied there was reasonable doubt” about guilt. Over 21 months, he wrote four articles pleading for Giarratano. Meanwhile, Deans lobbied her friend Mike Farrell, star of television’s “MAS*H” and supporter of various liberal causes. He met with Giarratano for four hours, saying he was “tremendously impressed with him as a person.” Along with Deans, the ideologically polar Farrell and Kilpatrick founded GRACE - the Giarratano Review Action Committee.
Support came in, from tories like direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie and leftists like folk singer Joan Baez. Radio and television commercials aired across Virginia, asking “Is Joe innocent?” In Washington, more than a dozen congressmen contacted Wilder. Overseas, the European Parliament passed a resolution supporting Giarratano. By last week Wilder’s office had received more than 7,000 calls and letters favoring clemency, with only 102 opposed. “Without question,” Viguerie says, “this coalition saved his life.”
In announcing his decision, Wilder denied he was swayed. In a six-page statement that granted clemency but not a new trial, he insisted that his powers “cannot be implemented based upon popular appeal.” His policy chief, Walter MacFarlane, says the decision was “strictly on the merits” - although the statement never does explain the reasons for clemency. Some Wilder observers accuse him of political gamesmanship in a case where mercy meant little risk. Larry Sabato, who teaches political science at the University of Virginia, says he needed to solidify support in the Hollywood community, which is a source of financing for prominent Democrats. Wilder also had to be wary of seeming soft on the death penalty. Here, Giarratano’s timing proved politically fortuitous for both of them. Because two other, less controversial, death sentences were carried out in late 1990, Wilder is insulated from charges that he is lenient on crime.
At the very least, the Giarratano case proves that it helps to have friends in the right places. By contrast, consider the case last year of convicted murderer Wilbert Lee Evans. He was credited with saving the lives of guards during a prison riot in 1984. He had no famous defenders, no national press stories (until after his death), no political allies. Wilbert Lee Evans was executed in Richmond last October.
