Joseph Giarratano

Joseph M. Giarratano (August 26, 1957 – October 6, 2024) was an American murderer and prisoner who served in Deerfield Correctional Center in Southampton County, Virginia, and was on death row until having his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. On November 21, 2017, he was granted parole. He was convicted, based on circumstantial evidence and his own confessions, of murdering Toni Kline and raping and strangling her 15-year-old daughter Michelle on February 4, 1979, in Norfolk, Virginia. He had said that he was an addict for years and had blacked out on alcohol and drugs, waking to find the bodies. He was sentenced to death, and incarcerated on death row for 12 years at the former Virginia State Penitentiary.

Giarratano is notable for having become a serious legal scholar, helping mount litigation to explore constitutional rights of prisoners. Defense attorneys had mounted appeals to re-open his case in the late 1980s, based on what they said was new information, e.g. head and pubic hairs, sperm, finger prints, and bloody boot prints did not match Giarratano's. He lost state and federal appeals due to procedural rules that barred review of errors that were not objected to at the time of trial. The case attracted international attention as his execution date was scheduled for February 1991. Three days before the execution date, Governor Douglas Wilder commuted Giarratano's death sentence, with a pardon sentencing him to life imprisonment with a recommendation for new trial, and possibility of parole after 25 years imprisonment (after 13 years with allowance for time served). Mary Sue Terry, the state Attorney General, refused to seek a retrial, stating that she was confident that Giarratano was guilty of killing Kline and her daughter.

After his pardon, Giarratano was transferred among different prisons, first in Virginia. After being stabbed at one, he was transferred to prison in Utah and then to Illinois, under a state compact. He was returned to Virginia in March 1997. His counsel was seeking to locate physical evidence from the crime scene in 2004 in order to conduct DNA testing prior to his appeal to gain parole that year, the first time he would be eligible. Norfolk and state authorities have said they believe all the biological evidence in the Kline case was destroyed.

Giarratano died on October 6, 2024, at the age of 67. Provided by Wikipedia