UVA Law – A Murder is Solved and a Man Avoids Death, Thanks to Unusual Deal Brokered by Clinic Professors
From left, Carolyn Nguyen, Matthew Engle and Brett Blobaum. Engle helped broker a deal that allows Joshua Andrews to avoid the death penalty. Nguyen and Blobaum, who both graduated this month from the Law School, also worked on Andrews’ case.
A 30-year-old man who was previously sentenced to die for the 2002 killing of two Prince William County residents will now avoid the death penalty under an unusual deal brokered by his lawyers, University of Virginia law professor Matthew Engle and Washington and Lee law professor David Bruck.
As part of the deal — which was approved today in Prince William County Circuit Court — Joshua Andrews pleaded guilty to the murders of Romanno Avellino Head and Robert Irvin Morrison during a January 2002 robbery, as well as the December 2001 killing of Clayton Kendall Breeding in the parking lot of Rippon Middle School in Woodbridge, Va.
Truthout – Lethal Injection the Latest Chapter in America’s History of Botched Executions
Sunday, 27 May 2012 08:00 By Robert Wilbur, Truthout | News Analysis
The American correctional system has repeatedly sought to deploy our native ingenuity to devise the ultimate corrective: an engine of death that will dispose of our villains in a civilized manner. The quest, which goes on to this day as states refine the technique of lethal injections, has been fraught with disappointments.
Va. Supreme Court clears Bennett Barbour of 1978 rape
Credit: JOE MAHONEY/TIMES-DISPATCH
DNA testing in 2010 failed to identify Bennett S. Barbour’s DNA in evidence left at the crime scene.
Published: May 25, 2012
RICHMOND, Va. —
The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the name of a Charles City County man wrongly convicted of a 1978 rape in Williamsburg.
The justices granted a writ of actual innocence to Bennett S. Barbour, 56, convicted of the Feb. 7, 1978, rape of a 19-year-old College of William and Mary student who mistakenly identified him as her attacker.
DNA testing in 2010 failed to identify Barbour’s DNA in semen left at the scene of the attack in an off-campus apartment but implicated James Moses Glass Jr., a convicted rapist who will be tried in August for the 34-year-old crime.
Barbour’s lawyers, Matthew Engle and Deirdre Enright of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law, along with the Virginia Attorney General’s Office, asked the court to grant the writ based on the new DNA evidence.