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DNA testing frees Virginia death row inmate

CASE FILE Death Penalty and DNA

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RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Largely illiterate with an IQ of 69, Earl Washington Jr. confessed to a murder even though no fingerprints or biological evidence ever tied him to the crime.

On Monday, Washington is set to be released because DNA tests showed he was wrongly convicted in the 1982 rape and slaying of Rebecca Lynn Williams.

Washington, 40, spent 91/2 years on death row, knowing that he could die for a crime he didn't commit. "I thought about it," the soft-spoken Washington said. "It made me upset."

The DNA testing that spared Washington and several death row residents nationally has prompted Virginia legislators to relax their historic resistance to any softening of the state's death penalty and galvanized the religious community to seek the end of executions in Virginia.

Washington came within nine days of execution in 1985 but was granted a stay as he awaited death only a few feet from Virginia's electric chair. Virginia has executed 81 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, second only to Texas's 243 executions.

A 1993 DNA test cast doubt on Washington's guilt and prompted then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, a Democrat, to commute Washington's sentence to life. Last fall, more precise DNA tests found genetic material belonging to two other men, leading Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore to pardon Washington.

"It made me happy," Washington said Friday in an interview at the Greensville Correctional Center. "He (Gilmore) did a good job by my book."

On February 5 the Virginia Senate unanimously backed legislation that would wipe out the 21-day limit the state now places on condemned inmates to present new evidence of their innocence. The three-week deadline after sentencing is the nation's most restrictive.

The measure now goes to the House of Delegates.

A Senate committee, however, rejected a measure that would have suspended executions in Virginia while the legislature's investigative arm studies how the state imposes its ultimate punishment.

Six states -- Illinois, Nebraska, Arizona, North Carolina, Maryland and Indiana -- have launched capital punishment studies looking at issues ranging from the quality of defense lawyers to the overall functioning of the death penalty, said Paula Bernstein of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Most of the studies were prompted by the growing numbers of wrongfully convicted inmates who have been freed because of DNA testing.

In Illinois, Republican Gov. George Ryan last year imposed an indefinite moratorium on executions after several men were released from death row because they had been wrongly convicted or received unfair trials.

Last month 33 Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim leaders in Virginia called on the General Assembly to abolish the death penalty.

"We may be finding the courage we didn't have before, given the climate," said the Rev. Joe Vought, a Lutheran minister who has been chaplain to seven executed inmates.

Bishop Walter F. Sullivan of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond said he has noticed a shift in public opinion about capital punishment in recent years.

"Where before 80 percent of Catholics favored the death penalty, I think there's a growing awareness that we shouldn't be doing this," said Sullivan, who has been speaking out against the death penalty since it was reinstated in 1976.

The sponsor of the bill that would do away with the 21-day limit, Republican Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, said the legislation would afford more protections to inmates such as Washington.

"Just because Earl Washington worked his way through the system, that doesn't mean that the system always works for somebody like Earl Washington," Stolle said.

Stolle's bill provides for the storage of biological evidence used at a trial that could later clear a convict as scientific advances yield better DNA testing methods. It also gives courts the power to order material retested, now exclusively the governor's prerogative. Inmates with claims of new evidence would have the right to take it directly to the state Supreme Court.

"It is important that the system take into account the new technology of DNA," said David Botkins, spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley. But Botkins said capital punishment in Virginia already is administered fairly.

"The system grants numerous avenues of appeal for defendants, with the ultimate safeguard of gubernatorial clemency built in," he said.

Washington will leave prison for an apartment house in Virginia Beach run by a support center for mentally disabled people.

Corrections officials were criticized for prohibiting Washington from traveling to the Capitol and meeting with congressmen and the national media on Monday.

Washington's supporters said Virginia officials are hoping to limit public attention to the case and are embarrassed that the state came within days of electrocuting an innocent man.

Corrections officials said Washington cannot leave the state because he still has six months of parole to serve on an unrelated assault conviction.

Washington said he is not angry about his wrongful conviction. The only thing he wants, he said, is an apology.

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