DNA Clears Death Row Inmate

A DNA test has cleared a convicted rapist and murderer who once came within nine days of being executed by the state of Virginia.

But 40-year-old Earl Washington Jr. is not scheduled for release from jail.

He continues to serve a 30-year sentence for breaking into a 73-year-old woman's home, hitting her with a chair, stealing her gun and using the gun to shoot his brother.

Washington, who is mildly retarded, was in custody for the first crime when police say he confessed to the unrelated and more serious charges – charges he later denied.

Eric Freedman, a Hofstra University law school professor who has handled Washington's case for 15 years, is blasting Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore's decision not to free Washington immediately.

Freedman says a person serving time for an assault conviction such as Washington's would normally have been released on parole at least six years ago.

The New York attorney calls the governor's decision not to order Washington's immediate release "bureaucratic buck-passing and governmental cowardice."

He adds that "to keep Earl Washington in jail one day longer is a desperate attempt to defend the indefensible."

The Death Penalty Information Center says Washington is the ninth death row inmate so far to be cleared as a result of DNA tests.

The announcement on the Washington case came Monday in a statement from the governor, who has ordered that the investigation of the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams be re-opened.

Gilmore revealed Monday that DNA tests on semen taken from the victim exonerate Washington.

"In my judgment, a jury afforded the benefit of the DNA evidence and analysis available to me today would have reached a different conclusion regarding the guilt of Earl Washington," said Gilmore.

Gilmore said furthermore that a separate test on a blanket found at the crime scene matches that of a convicted rapist.

That rapist's name has not been released.

Williams was raped and then stabbed 38 times in her apartment in Culpepper, Virginia.

An execution scheduled for September 1985 was stayed after a fellow death row inmate, Joseph Giarratano -- whose own death sentence was later commuted -- told a federal judge that Washington was incapable of filing an appeal for himself and did not have a lawyer.

In 1993, Washington received another stay of execution and his sentence was commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole after DNA tests ordered by then-Governor Douglas Wilder on semen from the victim's body were inconclusive.

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