A prosecution in Virginia

Monday, August 28, 2006 Washington Post: Virginia prosecutors this week brought belated charges against a man named Kenneth Maurice Tinsley in the 1982 rape and murder of a Culpeper woman named Rebecca Williams. Tinsley, a serial rapist already serving life in prison, was connected to the Williams killing by DNA testing. And his prosecution would be simply a happy resolution of a long-cold case, except for one thing: A man named Earl Washington Jr. served more than 17 years in prison and came within nine days of being executed for this crime. Washington's case is a tragedy in a criminal justice system that at every stage refused to admit the magnitude of its error. Mildly retarded, Washington was convicted almost entirely on the basis of a disturbingly weak confession — one that a civil jury later found had been fed to him by investigators. He sat on death row until DNA tests in 1993 cast serious doubt on his conviction by showing that someone other than he or the victim's husband had had intercourse with Williams before she was killed. Then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder responded by commuting his sentence to life in prison, but did not pardon him. Only in 2000, after a second round of DNA testing, did then-Gov. James Gilmore finally pardon him. Lab error What's more, while some of the state crime lab's tests that year identified DNA from Tinsley on the victim's blanket, the lab erroneously excluded him as a DNA contributor in the samples taken from her body. New tests in connection with Washington's civil lawsuit showed Tinsley's DNA found samples taken from the victim's body. The lessons of the Washington case will be familiar to anyone who has watched the flood of wrongful convictions come to light in recent years. Not all confessions are real; DNA testing should be liberally and swiftly available whenever doubts arise. Most important, there is no place for arrogance in a state's criminal justice system.