CONS TEACH CONS PEACE

...The trouble is, he sees himself and other prisoners as human beings...

...Men who had killed, raped, stolen, or destroyed had a few moments at the ceremonies to be accepted as citizens capable of comebacks, of asking forgiveness and receiving mercy...

...I began sending him books by Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, and others...

...When he learned of the deaths of his housemates and could not remember where he'd been on the night of February 3,1979, he feared he had killed them...

...The trial lasted four hours...

...The program was a front for criminal activity which was masterminded by Giarratano," says David Botkins, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Corrections...

...The visibility had indeed increased...

...The stabbing and strangulation were done by a right-handed person...

...Within minutes, the prisoner, who had done hard time in the Virginia penal system since 1979, was handcuffed, shackled, and escorted out of the maximum-security pen...

...Except fc the initial interview, I took along be-fceen sixty and 100 of my law-school, college, and high-school students on every l|ip...

...On September 9, 1996, the Deseret News quoted a Utah prison official: "[Virginia] called us and said, 'We've got this politically hot inmate...

...At one of the graduation ceremonies, Marie Deans, whose Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation co-sponsored the program, told the audience of 150: "The success of the program is evaluated by tracking the disciplinary records...

...Bob Abernethy did a report from the prison in which he interviewed Giarratano and others in the course...

...For Marie Deans and Gerald Zerkin, this is low-grade hokum...

...The application was approved...

...In one conversation, I suggested that if he were ever released from death row, he should consider becoming a teacher, perhaps a teacher of nonviolence...

...After one of the trips, a senior in my high-school class at Belhesda-Chevy Chase High School wrote to the men: "I am grateful to have had the chance to meet all of you...

...NBC Nightly News aired a favorable story...

...The guards secretly moved Giarratano cross-country in a state-owned plane often used to fly Virginia Governor George Allen on political jaunts...

...One of the main topics has been bettering the situation for teaching prisoners to promote positive growth within themselves...

...Between 1988 and early 1991, the Giarratano case received massive media attention...

...Hairs found on the raped teenager did not match Giarratano's...

...He was in danger...

...When taking student groups to the graduations, the only request I made was that they not ask prisoners why they had gone to prison...

...In 1995, he became the first person on death row ever to write a brief—on behalf of an illiterate fellow inmate who had no post-conviction lawyer—that was argued before the Supreme Court...

...From transcripts and other information provided by Marie Deans of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons, and Gerald Zerkin, a Richmond attorney specializing in civil liberties who was Giarratano's attorney for much of the appeals process, I learned that the state's case against Giarratano was glaringly weak...

...It was the first of eight visits I iRfflld make in the following years...

...May I see the department's report of the investigation...

...In 1994, some 300 inmates were on the waiting list to take the course...

...Cons Teach Cons PEACE BY COLMAN McCARTHY Before dawn one morning in early September 1996, guards at the Augusta Correctional Center in Craigsville, Virginia, went to the cell of Joseph Giarratano and roused him from sleep...

...Funds were "used fraudulently for inmates'" gains...

...These impressions differ from the court judgment that placed him on Virginia's death row from 1979 to 1991...

...I brought a group of students...

...The department's internal investigation also charged that inmates in the program were using drugs...

...It appears to me that politics, rather than any misbehavior, was the basis for transferring him out of Virginia...

...Catholic Conference...

...In seminars and sometimes over jnred meals, Giarratano was a masterful ¦tino/i McCarthy is a member of The Progres-Brfr Editorial Advisory Boardteacher on the intricacies of criminal justice...

...And as a natural result, the more I realize self, the more I sympathize with the problems and hardships of those around me...

...He declined to define the term...

...Like any materials to better prepare myself to bring a comprehensive proposal to the administrators here...

...In the first week of April, Giarratano was moved again—from Utah to an Illinois state prison in Joliet...

...Ihave an idea what kind of problems Giarratano was creating in the Utah pen...

...Upon arrival, Giarratano was caged in the supermax control unit—a prison within a prison, where inmates leave their cells for fewer than three hours a week...

...Because of his influence among fellow prisoners—having legally fought for them in courts and having triumphed over death row himself—Giarratano was able to recruit the toughest cons to take his course...

...With the warden's approval, Giarratano applied to the IRS for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for the program now formally called Peace Studies-Alternatives to Violence...

...Rule 1.1 of the Supreme Court of Virginia states that death-row inmates must present evidence of their innocence within twenty-one days of conviction...

...The prison closed the peace-studies course "to cut off the head of a snake...

...A workable idea, it turned out...

...I believe that many of us, including myself, take our lives for granted...

...With prison officials overseeing the twice-weekly classes, Giarratano began leading the course in the summer of 1992...

...When I asked if Giarratano was prosecuted on the charges, Botkins said "no...

...For Zerkin, the roughing-up of Giarratano continues the pattern: "We've never seen any documentation from the Department of Corrections for the allegations of fraud or drug use...

...More than twenty dailies in Virginia—the nation's leading executioner since colonial times— editorialized that Giarratano's guilt was dubious and that he deserved a new trial...

...Meaning...

...Of course he has told me about the program Peace Studies-Alternatives to Violence he had going in Virginia and I am very interested in starting the same program here...

...Something that wasn't really an issue here in past years...

...They also differ from the beliefs that prompted the state's attorney general to refuse to grant a new trial after the governor granted a last-minute stay of execution based on evidence that raised Krious doubt about Giarratano's guilt...

...The confessions, with cops creating scenarios and feeding Giarratano answers, did not square with each other and were not consistent with the physical evidence...

...Deans believes that Virginia officials, resentful of Giarratano's legal skills and his successful educational work at Craigsville, "are trying to break him—destroy his spirit because he's effective...

...Initially, my center supplied texts for the student-prisoners at Craigsville, the same books on nonviolence that I use for my courses at Georgetown Law and the University of Maryland honors program...

...Prison officials attended...

...Bloody footprints found in the apartment did not match Giarratano's...

...No, those are closed files...

...The violence level in this system has been rising fast in the past three to four years...

...Why didn't the Department of Corrections ever notify me that it was terminating the program or give me its reasons for doing so...

...In the almost two years the program has been running, not one graduate has been charged...

...Giarratano is left-handed and has a neurologically impaired right arm...

...It's likely he will continue to displease prison officials...

...Requests for information about the courses poured in from more than a dozen states and Australia...

...A self-educated writer, his articles on death-penalty law appeared in such journals as the Yale Law Review...

...The two prisons worked out an exchange...

...After being transferred to the state prison in Craigsville, he approached an assistant warden about the possibility of starting a twelve-week academic course called Alternatives to Violence...

...It would be inmate-run, but sponsored and monitored by prison officials...

...I can't verify the precise temperature of the "political heat...

...Since 1983, as director of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons, she has also worked with hundreds of prisoners: recruiting pro-bono lawyers for the unrepresented, raking through trial records for procedural errors or suppressed evidence, accompanying men to their executions, and—perhaps the most grueling labor of all—waking the comatose mainstream media to the abuses within the American injustice system...

...More funds came in, including a $3,000 grant from the Campaign for Human Development sponsored by the U.S...

...Did he get to answer the charges...

...One by one, they came forward to say, in one way or another: "If I had known about nonviolence when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't be in this place today...

...And the system here is responding by building more and more control units and twisting the thumb screws...

...They know how to deal with'vioVirginia officials know how to deal with violent prisoners but not with one who is nonviolent and who stands up for prisoners' rights...

...A lot of other inmates resent him...

...Nationally, this was three-strikes-you're-out time, with such politicians as Senator Phil Gramm calling America's prisons "Holiday Inns...

...At one of the graduations in me 1994, a prisoner warned that the program's visibility might be its undoing...

...Congratulations on graduating from the course on nonviolence...

...He returned to Craigsville in July 1996 only to be shipped out under the cover of darkness to Utah two months later...

...However, I will do all I can to get the ball rolling from here...

...I met Giarratano in 1988 when interviewing him for a column in The Washington Post...

...What Deans had discovered, and Zerkin was delivering to the courts, was too compelling to ignore...

...In early January of the following year...

...This has also caused an epidemic of racial separation and tensions...

...Prisons shoultajt be places of violence but of teachmjJfc learning____I hope all of you will conjfflpe to study the theories of nonviolejjjjn know I will...

...Nonviolence, he said, is for tough people, the genuinely tough who are brave enough to settle things without using fists or guns...

...According to the state's psychiatrist, the confessions were inconsistent and given to police during a drug-induced psychotic episode...

...So did some of the prisoners' family members...

...On the question of why Giarratano was abruptly dispatched to the hole in Utah, the spokesman explained: "He's a high-profile inmate...

...Graduates received peace diplomas and a chance to say something to the audience about the course...

...I reminded Botkins that I was a tunder of the program and that my involvement went a bit beyond offering good wishes...

...lent prisoners but not with one who is nonviolent and who stands up for prisoners' rights...

...I also think that the prison system in this country needs drastic reform...

...I personally use my time here to work on self-realization...

...Botkins said that he had become "problematic" for Utah...

...After that, no pardon...

...This is due to the increase of the younger gang offenders...

...Evidence did not corroborate the confessions...

...Amnesty International, which is chary about risking its credibility, erected billboards in Virginia asking if an innocent man was about to be killed...

...We would like to get rid of him...

...We don't meet people on the outside and ask right off how they messed up their lives...

...In the summer of 1995, the Peace Studies program was terminated, with Giarratano sent to another prison in the state system...

...On visits, I came to know Giar-ratano as a serious reader with a strong bent for the literature of nonviolence...

...After her mother-in-law was slain in 1972 by an escaped prisoner, Deans founded Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, a national group that has since grown to several thousand members...

...I apologize on behalf of the department," Botkins answered...

...Marie Deans was the commencement speaker...

...At a bus station in Florida, he saw a cop and turned himself in, saying he had just killed two people, was guilty, and wanted to be punished...

...Crime was a part of their past, not necessarily their present or future...

...the first graduation ceremony took place...

...He wanted to send a message throughout the prison, he told me: The mean guys, the former monsters, are now studying Gandhi, Merton, Tolstoy, and the others...

...After a second graduation in September, my center awarded a $500 grant to expand Giarratano's program to include videos, a correspondence course, and outreach to other prisons...

...She did that for Giarratano...

...By this time, I had invited Giarratano to be on the advisory board of the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit I began in 1985 that helps high schools, churches, civic groups, and prisons run courses in peace studies and nonviolent conflict resolution...

...Giarratano, an eighth-grade dropout, a scallop fisherman, and a habitual drug abuser then in his early twenties, had no history of violence...

...Governor Allen had installed a new director of prisons, a minion hell-bent on carrying out his master's policies of infrequent parole, longer sentences, gutted counseling and education programs, and severe punishment...

...In lower courts, he had won several victories on behalf of prisoners...

...Not a bad idea, he said...

...In the peace-studies course, Joe had the audacity to teach prisoners that they could change their behavior and have some control over their environment, even in the Virginia system run by a zealot for control and punishment...

...First, she had to persuade him that he might not have killed the Klines...

...Then she spent several years marshaling facts that convinced her—and eventually the governor—that the state had condemned the wrong man...

...In August 1993, Corrections Today, the monthly magazine that covers the prison industry, ran a story titled Inmates Learn Practical Ideas From Lofty Ideals...

...Word spread about the program...

...And I am quite sure it can all come together...

...He had not been told of his destination...

...For his safety, we felt it best to put him in a state where he had no enemies...

...James J. Kil-patrick, a conservative and longtime cheerleader for capital punishment, wrote columns asking the same question...

...I have written to you with his encouragement to ask for any assistance you might be able to offer me in this endeavor...

...And, she added, "Non-program prisoners have begun coming to graduates of the program to mediate disputes between individuals and groups of prisoners...

...It would not count for parole points...

...Giarratano's trip to Utah was part of a prisoner swap...

...They never charged Joe, either criminally or institutionally...

...My center awarded a $5,000 grant...

...He commuted the death sentence to life, with a chance for parole in 2004...

...So 1 feel a personal responsibility to do all I can...

...That might have been the end of the story, except for Marie Deans...

...But I can offer a few facts and recollections about Joseph Giarratano, the human being...

...There are a few caring individuals I have worked with in the past eleven years of my incarceration here in Utah...

...Unlike Sister Helen Pre-jean, who offers spiritual solace to the condemned, Deans goes further by doing the tedious and unglamorous legal research for prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted...

...Confronted with all this, Governor L. Douglas Wilder yielded...

...For now, the problematic Joe Giarratano is stashed in Joliet...

...ABC News, 20/20, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post ran long and detailed accounts...

...Why not a full pardon and freedom, which forty-eight innocent men got when they were released from death rows between 1972 and 1993, according to the House Judicial Committee...

...The state of Virginia obliged...

...Before I visited, I was ignorant to the kind of life all of you have to lead, separated from society...

...Nor did the sperm...

...He was convicted in early 1979 after giving five confessions to the murders of Toni Kline and her teenage daughter Michele in a Norfolk rooming house...

...Most of the graduates had a long history of disciplinary charges for assault or fighting right up to the time they entered the program...

...I have this year to really prepare this all, because I get out of this Control Unit then and will have direct access to all the facilities here...

...In February, one of its inmates wrote to me: "Dear Colman: 1 have been talking with Joe Giarratano since he came here to Utah...

...It was a state prison in Draper, Utah...