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Joe Giarratano, from a 1989 photo.
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Cons teach cons peace - inmate Joseph Giarratano, a nonviolence advocate
The Progressive, July, 1997 by Colman McCarthy
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 obliged.
That might have been the end of the story, except for Marie Deans. After her mother-in-law was slain in 1972 by an escaped prisoner, Deans founded Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, a national group that has since grown to several thousand members.
Since 1983, as director of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons, she has also worked with hundreds of prisoners: recruiting pro-bono lawyers for the unrepresented, raking through trial records for procedural errors or suppressed evidence, accompanying men to their executions, and--perhaps the most grueling labor of all--waking the comatose mainstream media to the abuses within the American injustice system. Unlike Sister Helen Prejean, who offers spiritual solace to the condemned, Deans goes further by doing the tedious and unglamorous legal research for prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted.
She did that for Giarratano. First, she had to persuade him that he might not have killed the Klines. Then she spent several years marshaling facts that convinced her--and eventually the governor--that the state had condemned the wrong man. Bloody footprints found in the apartment did not match Giarratano's. The stabbing and strangulation were done by a right-handed person. Giarratano is left-handed and has a neurologically impaired right arm. Hairs found on the raped teenager did not match Giarratano's. Nor did the sperm. The confessions, with cops creating scenarios and feeding Giarratano answers, did not square with each other and were not consistent with the physical evidence.
Between 1988 and early 1991, the Giarratano case received massive media attention. What Deans had discovered, and Zerkin was delivering to the courts, was too compelling to ignore. ABC News, 20/20, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post ran long and detailed accounts. More than twenty dailies in Virginia--the nation's leading executioner since colonial times--editorialized that Giarratano's guilt was dubious and that he deserved a new trial. Amnesty International, which is chary about risking its credibility, erected billboards in Virginia asking if an innocent man was about to be killed. James J. Kilpatrick, a conservative and long-time cheerleader for capital punishment, wrote columns asking the same question.
Confronted with all this, Governor L. Douglas Wilder yielded. He commuted the death sentence to life, with a chance for parole in 2004.
Why not a full pardon and freedom, which forty-eight innocent men got when they were released from death rows between 1972 and 1993, according to the House Judicial Committee? Rule 1.1 of the Supreme Court of Virginia states that death-row inmates must present evidence of their innocence within twenty-one days of conviction. After that, no pardon.
On visits, I came to know Giarratano as a serious reader with a strong bent for the literature of nonviolence. I began sending him books by Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, and others. In one conversation, I suggested that if he were ever released from death row, he should consider becoming a teacher, perhaps a teacher of nonviolence. Not a bad idea, he said.
A workable idea, it turned out. After being transferred to the state prison in Craigsville, he approached an assistant warden about the possibility of starting a twelve-week academic course called Alternatives to Violence. It would be inmaterun, but sponsored and monitored by prison officials. It would not count for parole points.
Because of his influence among fellow prisoners--having legally fought for them in courts and having triumphed over death row himself--Giarratano was able to recruit the toughest cons to take his course. He wanted to send a message throughout the prison, he told me: The mean guys, the former monsters, are now studying Gandhi, Merton, Tolstoy, and the others. Nonviolence, he said, is for tough people, the genuinely tough who are brave enough to settle things without using fists or guns.
By this time, I had invited Giarratano to be on the advisory board of the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit I began in 1985 that helps high schools, churches, civic groups, and prisons run courses in peace studies and nonviolent conflict resolution. Initially, my center supplied texts for the student-prisoners at Craigsville, the same books on nonviolence that I use for my courses at Georgetown Law and the University of Maryland honors program. With prison officials overseeing the twice-weekly classes, Giarratano began leading the course in the summer of 1992.
In early January of the following year, the first graduation ceremony took place. Prison officials attended. So did some of the prisoners' family members. I brought a group of students. Marie Deans was the commencement speaker. Graduates received peace diplomas and a chance to say something to the audience about the course. One by one, they came forward to say, in one way or another: "If I had known about nonviolence when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't be in this place today."
Word spread about the program. In August 1993, Corrections Today, the monthly magazine that covers the prison industry, ran a story titled Inmates Learn Practical Ideas From Lofty Ideals. Requests for information about the courses poured in from more than a dozen states and Australia. After a second graduation in September, my center awarded a $500 grant to expand Giarratano's program to include videos, a correspondence course and outreach to other prisons. With the warden's approval, Giarratano applied to the IRS for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for the program now formally called Peace Studies-Alternatives to Violence. The application was approved.
In 1994, some 300 inmates were on the waiting list to take the course. My center awarded a $5,000 grant. At one of the graduation ceremonies, Marie Deans, whose Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation co-sponsored the program, told the audience of 150: "The success of the program is evaluated by tracking the disciplinary records. Most of the graduates had a long history of disciplinary charges for assault or fighting right up to the time they entered the program. In the almost two years the program has been running, not one graduate has been charged." And, she added, "Non-program prisoners have begun coming to graduates of the program to mediate disputes between individuals and groups of prisoners."
When taking student groups to the graduations, the only request I made was that they not ask prisoners why they had gone to prison. Crime was a part of their past, not necessarily their present or future. We don't meet people on the outside and ask right off how they messed up their lives. Men who had killed, raped, stolen, or destroyed had a few moments at the ceremonies to be accepted as citizens capable of comebacks, of asking forgiveness and receiving mercy.
After one of the trips, a senior in my high-school class at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School wrote to the men: "I am grateful to have had the chance to meet all of you. Congratulations on graduating from the course on nonviolence. Before I visited, I was ignorant to the kind of life all of you have to lead, separated from society I believe that many of us, including myself, take our lives for granted. I also think that the prison system in this country needs drastic reform. Prisons should not be places of violence but of teaching and learning.... I hope all of you will continue to study the theories of nonviolence. I know I will."
At one of the graduations in late 1994, a prisoner warned that the program's visibility might be its undoing. Governor Allen had installed a new director of prisons, a minion hell-bent on carrying out his master's policies of infrequent parole, longer sentences, gutted counseling and education programs, and severe punishment. Nationally, this was three-strikes-you're-out time, with such politicians as Senator Phil Gramm calling America's prisons "Holiday Inns."
The visibility had indeed increased. NBC Nightly News aired a favorable story. Bob Abernethy did a report from the prison in which he interviewed Giarratano and others in the course. More funds came in, including a $3,000 grant from the Campaign for Human Development sponsored by the U.S. Catholic Conference.
In the summer of 1995, the Peace Studies program was terminated, with Giarratano sent to another prison in the state system. He returned to Craigsville in July 1996 only to be shipped out under the cover of darkness to Utah two months later.
"The program was a front for criminal activity which was masterminded by Giarratano," says David Botkins, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Funds were "used fraudulently for inmates"' gains. The department's internal investigation also charged that inmates in the program were using drugs. The prison closed the peace-studies course "to cut off the head of a snake."
When I asked if Giarratano was prosecuted on the charges, Botkins said "no." Did he get to answer the charges? "No." May I see the department's report of the investigation? "No, those are closed files."
I reminded Botkins that I was a funder of the program and that my involvement went a bit beyond offering good wishes. Why didn't the Department of Corrections ever notify me that it was terminating the program or give me its reasons for doing so? "I apologize on behalf of the department," Botkins answered.
On the question of why Giarratano was abruptly dispatched to the hole in Utah, the spokesman explained: "He's a high-profile inmate." Meaning? "A lot of other inmates resent him. He was in danger. For his safety, we felt it best to put him in a state where he had no enemies."
For Marie Deans and Gerald Zerkin, this is low-grade hokum. Deans believes that Virginia officials, resentful of Giarratano's legal skills and his successful educational work at Craigsville, "are trying to break him--destroy his spirit because he's effective. They know how to deal with violent prisoners but not with one who is nonviolent and who stands up for prisoners' rights. In the peace-studies course, Joe had the audacity to teach prisoners that they could change their behavior and have some control over their environment, even in the Virginia system run by a zealot for control and punishment."
For Zerkin, the roughing-up of Giarratano continues the pattern: "We've never seen any documentation from the Department of Corrections for the allegations of fraud or drug use. They never charged Joe, either criminally or institutionally. It appears to me that politics, rather than any misbehavior, was the basis for transferring him out of Virginia."
In the first week of April, Giarratano was moved again--from Utah to an Illinois state prison in Joliet. Botkins said that he had become "problematic" for Utah. He declined to define the term.
I have an idea what kind of problems Giarratano was creating in the Utah pen. In February, one of its inmates wrote to me: "Dear Colman: I have been talking with Joe Giarratano since he came here to Utah. One of the main topics has been bettering the situation for teaching prisoners to promote positive growth within themselves. Of course he has told me about the program Peace Studies-Alternatives to Violence he had going in Virginia and I am very interested in starting the same program here.
"I have written to you with his encouragement to ask for any assistance you might be able to offer me in this endeavor. Like any materials to better prepare myself to bring a comprehensive proposal to the administrators here. There are a few caring individuals I have worked with in the past eleven years of my incarceration here in Utah. And I am quite sure it can all come together.
"I have this year to really prepare this all, because I get out of this Control Unit then and will have direct access to all the facilities here. However, I will do all I can to get the ball rolling from here.
"The violence level in this system has been rising fast in the past three to four years. This is due to the increase of the younger gang offenders. This has also caused an epidemic of racial separation and tensions. Something that wasn't really an issue here in past years. And the system here is responding by building more and more control units and twisting the thumb screws!
"I personally use my time here to work on self-realization. And as a natural result, the more I realize self, the more I sympathize with the problems and hardships of those around me. So I feel a personal responsibility to do all I can."
For now, the problematic Joe Giarratano is stashed in Joliet. It's likely he will continue to displease prison officials. The trouble is, he sees himself and other prisoners as human beings.
COPYRIGHT 1997 The Progressive, Inc.
Available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_n7_v61/ai_19554149