Prisoner Freed After DNA Test Clears Him of Murder

 VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Earl Washington Jr., who came within nine days of execution in 1985, was freed from prison on Monday after a DNA test cleared him of a brutal rape and murder for which he spent 10 years on death row.Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore granted an absolute pardon to Washington in October 2000. However he was still serving a 30-year sentence for unrelated burglary and assault charges and was not paroled until Monday.Mildly retarded, Washington was driven from the Greensville Correctional Center to Virginia Beach, where he will be living in a special group home with 24-hour support staff.Washington, 40, was sentenced to die for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams, 19. Williams was raped and stabbed to death in her Culpeper apartment. Before she died she said she had been attacked by a single black man.The slaying went unsolved until 1983 when Washington, a farm hand who lived in Fauquier County, was arrested for breaking into an elderly neighbor's home, stealing a gun from her and hitting her in the head with a chair.Washington, who was drunk, shot his brother in the foot. When he was arrested he was questioned about those and other crimes including Williams' murder. He confessed to them all, though his confession contained errors.His lawyers later argued that during his questioning, the police fed him details of the crime through leading questions.In 1985 he came within days of being executed when a lawyer, Eric M. Freedman, agreed to take his case and the execution was stayed. In 1993 Gov. L. Douglas Wilder approved DNA testing in the case, technology that was not available at the time of his trial.The DNA tests virtually excluded Washington as the man whose sperm was found at the crime scene, but investigators said it was still possible Washington committed the crime, if the dead woman had had sex with another man other than her husband before she was raped.In 1994, Wilder commuted Washington's sentence to life in prison. Then in 2000 Washington's lawyers asked Gov. Jim Gilmore for more DNA testing, saying a new type of DNA test might be able to definitively confirm Washington's guilt or exonerate him.In October, Gilmore announced the testing found no trace of Washington at the crime scene and that DNA tests done on sperm found on a blue blanket at the scene implicated a convicted rapist already in prison.Nationally, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 95 men and women on death rows in the United States have later been found through various evidence to have been wrongfully convicted. Washington was the first, however, from Virginia