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The Case of Joe Giarratano
📻 Episode #466
🎙️ Hosted by Lauren Bright Pacheco
📅 Jul 22, 2024
About This Episode
One morning in February 1979, 21-year-old Joe Giarratano woke up to a horrific scene. Two of his housemates had been brutally murdered. Joe had a drop of blood on his shoe and no memory of the previous night due to alcohol and drug use. He was terrified that he had been the one that killed…
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The Case
One morning in February 1979, 21-year-old Joe Giarratano woke up to a horrific scene. Two of his housemates had been brutally murdered. Joe had a drop of blood on his shoe and no memory of the previous night due to alcohol and drug use. He was terrified that he had been the one that killed the two women. Overcome with grief and guilt, he turned himself into the police. Despite his descriptions of the crime never matching the crime scene, and a long list of errors in the investigation, Joe was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death in Virginia.
That put him in the path of our second guest, anti-death penalty activist and minister Joe Ingle. Together with Marie Deans, they were in the trenches of the fight against the death penalty. Joe Giarratano eventually became an expert in the law, fighting not only his own conviction, but that of other prisoners — arguing one all the way to the Supreme Court.
Too Close to the Flame by Joseph B. Ingle https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Too-Close-to-the-Flame/Joseph-B-Ingle/9781637632918
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In Their Own Words — transcript excerpts
Short excerpts from the episode's official published transcript, with timestamps — listen from these moments, or read the full transcript via the podcast's own platforms.
00:06:52“Speaker 1: school altogether. Speaker 3: No, I dropped out of school, and does you're really Speaker 3: set the course After that was released from Doser, the Speaker 3: only place they would allow me to go was back Speaker 3: to my mother, back into criminal activity. And then in”
00:26:44“Speaker 2: One of the classmates had made a little paper electric Speaker 2: chair and put it on his son's chair, and when Speaker 2: Frank found out about that, he realized the cruelty his Speaker 2: family was being submitted to. I think that was one Speaker 2: of the key reasons. I just can't keep going like this.”
00:45:37“Speaker 3: laying around for doctors came in and looked at me Speaker 3: and said, just leave me. A psychiatrist came through. A Speaker 3: visiting psychiatrist came through, saw me laying on the floor, Speaker 3: came in and took one look at me and said, Speaker 3: you need to get this man to the hospital now.”
Listen to the Episode
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