Joseph Giarratano

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Joseph M. Giarratano (born 1958) is a former police officer who is a prisoner serving a life sentence in Virginia State Prisons. Convicted of murdering his girlfriend in 1979, he was sentenced to death. While an inmate on Virginia'a death row, he filed habeas corpus petitions for himself and several other prisoners. He won two major cases in the United States Supreme Court, including Murray vs. Giarratano, 492 US 1 (1989). He was involved in the great escape from Mecklenburg in 1984. His own sentence was reduced to life in 1991 and he succeeded in getting several of his fellow death row inmates released altogether.

His most famous case was that of Earl Washington Jr.. Through the courts, Giarratano got the courts to order a DNA test, the first time ever that such a test had been ordered. The results of the test proved that Washington could not possibly have committed the crime for which he had been sentenced to death. Upon learning that Washington could not possibly be guilty, Governor Douglas Wilder committed Washington's sentence from death to life imprisonment.

In spite of his success at getting other prisoners out of jail, Giarratano has never been able to get himself out of jail. He continues to proclaim his innocence.