The Death Penalty Representation Project is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Joesph Giarratano on October 6, 2024. Mr. Giarratano was sentenced to death in Virginia in 1979 and spent almost 40 years behind bars before being released on parole in late 2017. In 2018, less than one year later, Mr. Giarratano graciously made keynote remarks at the Project's Volunteer Recognition & Awards program. The biography that follows was prepared for that occasion, and we republish it again today in honor of his remarkable life and accomplishments.
October 07, 2024
In Memoriam: Joe Giarratano
By: Emily Olson-Gault, Project Director
Joseph Giarratano was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1979 and spent nearly 40 years behind bars before being granted parole in 2017. During his four decades in prison, Mr. Giarratano’s individual case received widespread attention in the media and among political and religious figures, while he served as a powerful advocate for the right to counsel on behalf of others on death row.
In 1979, Mr. Giarratano was charged with two murders that occurred while he was in a drug-induced haze. Although Mr. Giarratano had no recollection of committing the crimes, he feared he was guilty and turned himself in. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to death based on unreliable evidence after a bench trial that lasted only four hours, during which he was represented by counsel with minimal experience who earned a total of $625 for the representation. In 1991, after years of advocacy by pro bono attorneys for Mr. Giarratano, former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder commuted Mr. Giarratano’s sentence to life with the possibility of parole, based on a clemency petition that raised issues of actual innocence. Governor Wilder also recommended that Mr. Giarratano receive a new trial, but the state attorney general refused. Although Mr. Giarratano was denied parole nine times after he first became eligible, he was finally granted his freedom in November of 2017.
That decision [in Murray v. Giarratano], which still stands today, served as a rallying cry for the pro bono community to highlight the need for volunteer assistance in capital cases, and it has likewise shaped the Project’s mission for almost 30 years.
The facts of Mr. Giarratano’s individual case and possible wrongful conviction are certainly extraordinary on their own, but possibly even more remarkable is his impact on the cases of fellow prisoners and on the law regarding access to counsel. In the mid-1980s, while still on death row, Mr. Giarratano filed a pro se Section 1983 civil rights class action on behalf of death-sentenced prisoners in Virginia who did not have representation for their state post-conviction proceedings, arguing that meaningful access to the court requires the appointment of counsel. Of urgent importance at the time was the approaching execution of Earl Washington, an intellectually disabled man with no lawyer to advocate on his behalf. Mr. Giarratano’s petition attracted the attention of pro bono counsel from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who took over representation in the §1983 action and obtained a stay for Mr. Washington, nine days before his scheduled execution. Nearly a decade later, DNA testing would show that Mr. Washington was innocent of the crime for which he would have been executed, but for the efforts of Mr. Giarratano and the pro bono attorneys he found to assist.
In Mr. Giarratano’s 1990 clemency petition to Governor Wilder, one of those Paul Weiss lawyers wrote of Mr. Giarratano’s extraordinary actions:
On July 3, 1985, the Circuit Court of Culpeper County set an execution date of September 5, 1985 for Earl Washington and denied a motion for appointment of counsel for habeas corpus proceedings. . . . Faced with this emergency, Joe did what no lawyer had been willing to do: he drafted a § 1983 class action complaint and on August 6, 1985, filed it, hoping to obtain a lawyer for Earl through this lawsuit.. . . This lawsuit was entirely a selfless act. Joe didn't need attorneys; he had them. He filed the lawsuit literally to save other people's lives and to vindicate a fundamental principle: what Virginia had been doing — trying to execute people without lawyers — was not right.
Mr. Giarratano’s §1983 action saved the life of an innocent man, and it also shaped the very law concerning access to representation in post-conviction proceedings. After winning in the federal district court, his case made its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a three-justice plurality ultimately held that there is no constitutional right to the assistance of counsel in post-conviction proceedings. That decision, which still stands today, served as a rallying cry for the pro bono community to highlight the need for volunteer assistance in capital cases, and it has likewise shaped the Project’s mission for almost 30 years.
Since being released on parole, Mr. Giarratano has settled in Charlottesville, Virginia and has begun working with the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project, where he researches and evaluates other cases in need of help, continuing his extraordinary commitment to helping those in need. We are deeply grateful for his decades of selfless advocacy for the right to counsel, and for his steadfast dedication to helping ensure fairness and due process for the most marginalized members of our society.