I’m floored. While most politicians across the country are falling over themselves trying to outdo each other on the “tough on crime” scale, one lone maverick is bucking the trend by calling into question the integrity of the system itself. Governor Mark Warner of Virginia made headlines recently when he commuted the death sentence of Robin Lovitt (read about it here) based on the failure of the state to preserve DNA evidence for testing against Lovitt’s DNA, thereby averting the nation’s 1000th execution since re-instituting the death penalty in 1976. Rumored to be a future Presidential candidate, Democrat Warner put his career at risk with the move. But he’s not done.

The Governor has been doing a number of other wacky things, like ordering audits of the state’s crime labs and asking for standards to be put into place for handling evidence. He not only bucks the national trend, he rocks the boat that put Virginia second only to Texas in the number of death-row prisoners executed since 1976. Yesterday he ordered the state to go through 660 boxes of evidence involving thousands of cases from 1973 to 1988, in the search for justice. He even released two men who were proven via DNA testing to be 100% factually innocent, without their having requested the testing! Why is he doing these things?

“I believe a look back at these retained case files is the only morally acceptable course, and what truth they can bring only bolsters confidence in our system,” Warner said in a statement.

Whew. Take a clue, Arnie: this is a Governor to believe when he says “I’ll be back”. Read more about the Governor here.

RP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 11:19 pm and is filed under News, DNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.