Washington Post One Fatal Mistake Not Made By Richard Cohen If you read about Earl Washington Jr., the Virginia man freed this week
after serving 17 years in prison, much of it on death row, for a rape and
murder he did not commit, you will come across some version of the phrase
"exonerated by DNA testing." This is not the full story. What's missing is
the phrase "almost murdered by the police." The cops in the Washington case got him to confess to the 1982 rape and
murder of Rebecca Williams, a 19-year-old mother of three. With virtually
her last breaths, Williams said her attacker was a black man. Washington
fit that description -- but so, it should be added, do several million
other men. Still, he confessed. He got some details wrong, of course, like the
race of his victim. He said he killed a black woman. Williams was white.
He said he knifed her two or three times. Actually, Williams had been
stabbed 38 times. He said no one else was in the room at the time. In
fact, two of Williams's children were present. Initially, Washington could not identify the apartment complex where
Williams had lived. He took the cops to one then another until, finally, a
kindly police officer pointed out where the murder had taken place. Oh
yeah, Washington must have said. He had a tendency to agree with police
officers. It's not that the cops had just selected Washington at random. Nosiree.
He had been arrested for a break-in and assault. He confessed to that and
to the rape and murder. One he did; the other he didn't. But he was likely
to say almost anything. He had an IQ of 69. His petition for pardon says
he "functions at about the level of a 10-year-old child." He was convicted
and sentenced to death anyway. In the end, DNA testing proved that Washington was not the man who
raped Williams. Someone else did. All this time, some beast -- some man
who would rape and murder a mother in front of her children -- has been on
the loose. In all this time, Virginia put its efforts to keeping Earl
Washington in jail. This was not just stupid, it was downright
criminal. Probably there will be no investigation of the police, the prosecutors
or Washington's lawyers. In a way, that's good. Their culpability, while
real, sends the wrong message. It suggests that something extraordinary
happened, that something bad was done by bad people. The reality, though,
is that this sort of thing happens more than you might think. Sometimes
good people get overwhelmed, overworked, tired, lazy, beat, burned out.
They've heard it all before -- all this talk about innocence. What they
forget is that sometimes it's true. You can tinker all you want with the death penalty, but two things will
never change: Mistakes will happen and it's irrevocable. Put the two
together and you have the dead certainty of a miscarriage of justice, of a
state-sanctioned murder, of an innocent life taken -- and for what? We are
no safer. No one is deterred. We merely stoop to the level of your
ordinary killer. Earl Washington is not the first innocent man to walk out of death row
and, later, prison itself. He is not even the first to have confessed. His
investigators and prosecutors are hardly the first to casually dismiss
exculpatory evidence or to be so convinced of their man's guilt that they
ignored facts that did not conform to their beliefs. This happens all the
time. This will continue to happen all the time. Timothy McVeigh is set to die May 16 for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
-- 168 dead, more than 500 injured. He has not only waived all appeals but
has asked to have his execution televised. The government will not comply,
although a closed-circuit hookup to accommodate survivors and the
relatives of victims remains a possibility. It's impossible to argue on McVeigh's behalf. But it is worth noting
his mentality: He hated the government so he killed government workers.
Now the government will kill him in response. This is justice, of course,
but it is also senseless. McVeigh's true punishment would be the refusal
of the government to play by his rules. He's dirt. He kills. We don't. Earl Washington Jr., now 40 and now free, proves to some that the
system works. If that's true, it's only because he lived to be exonerated.
Had he been executed, no one would have pressed his case, no DNA would
have been tested and no one would know that an innocent man died for a
crime committed by another. Dead men tell no tales -- but the authorities,
as we now can see, sometimes do. Copyright © 2001. Washington Post Company. All rights reserved. saved from url: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7101-2001Feb14.html
February 15, 2001
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