In June of 1982, Rebecca Lynn Williams, 19 and white, was raped and murdered in Culpeper. Eleven months later, a 23-year-old black mentally retarded man from Bealeton, Va., Earl Washington Jr., was arrested for the crime. He was tried for capital murder in Culpeper Circuit Court, found guilty by a jury Jan. 20, 1984, and sentenced to death.

More than a decade later, after numerous appeals in the case were denied, Gov. Douglas Wilder, on his last day in office, commuted the sentence from death read more

June 8: Overview
June 15: Chronology
June 22: The original trial
June 29: People involved looking back
By DAVID SWANSON Staff Writer

June 8: Overview

Gov. James Gilmore last week ordered new DNA testing on evidence from a 1984 Culpeper case, testing defense lawyers predict will exonerate a local man who has been behind bars for 17 years, 10 of them on death row.

Gilmore on June 1 ordered additional testing in the case of Earl Washington, a mentally retarded man from Bealeton convicted at age read more

1) No more corporate welfare or giveaways of any kind to corporations with more than 5,000 workers. Invest the money in aid to small businesses and small farms.

2) No more monopolies or mergers that do not benefit competition.

3) Slash two thirds of the military budget and give the money to the poorest Americans. Slash three-fourths of the prison budget, decriminalize addiction, and put the money into a job program to clean up the environment.

4) Eliminate the free garbage removal service from read more

I see the gap between the Right and Left in American politics as in many ways unbridgeable, requiring a leap from religion to secularism or vice versa. But I also see it as in many ways bridgeable, requiring only a willingness to recognize common goals.

The Right talks a lot about Family Values, and the Left talks a lot about a Living Wage. With some modifications in vocabulary, this could be a single successful discussion. Parents could spend time with kids if a single salary could support read more

Cavalier Daily
Last week this paper printed two articles, six editorials, and four letters on the repercussions of an assault, as well as an ongoing count of days the assailants have remained on Grounds.

(As I understand it, one student did the assaulting while two others watched along with a fourth student who has since graduated.)

In its crusade to have three students expelled, the CD has boldly taken on authorities, campaigning against cowardice, injustice, and dishonesty for the sake of read more

To Stanley Fish
cc: Columbia Law Review

12 May 1999

Dear Mr. Fish,

Thank you very much for your Columbia Law Review article “Mission Impossible…”. I enjoyed it immensely, as I do most of your work. (I have read many articles, including those in “Is There a Text in This Class?,” “Doing What Comes Naturally,” and most of those in “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech,” which I am currently reading.) I am not sure, however, whether read more

Report to the Labor Action Group at UVA:
WHAT I LEARNED AT THE ACORN LIVING-WAGE CONFERENCE
Nov. 10-12, 2000, in Baltimore

cc: V.O.P., ACORN, ULR, Greens

I have a huge pile of very useful handouts that I can photocopy. In the meantime I’ll tell you the notes I took and the highlights. I’ll be in C’ville Monday afternoon and can drop off a stack of photocopies if someone can pay a Kinko’s bill or let me use a copier. Let me know Monday morning please.

This fact may read more

A group of University of Virginia students, faculty, and staff is expected to
demonstrate Friday, March 26th, at 1:00 p.m. on behalf of a living wage
for all UVa employees. The demonstration will take place outside the Rotunda
at the center of campus where the Board of Visitors, which sets the
university’s budget, will be meeting.

Demonstrators are planning to form a picket line on the Lawn in front of the
Rotunda and to deliver to the Board a petition signed by over 900 members read more

February, 1999
In April of 1995 I wrote a paper for a graduate philosophy class at the U of Virginia with professor John Simmons. We were reading Rawls, and the paper was called “Reason and Religion in Rawls.” It’s 17 pages long but makes a simple point that is not specific to Rawls. Recently I found the same point made – the only other time I’ve seen it – in a paper by Stanley Fish in “The Revival of Pragmatism,” edited by Morris Dickstein. read more

12 January, 1999
I have sympathy for people who do cruel, selfish and destructive things – in many cases these correspond to committing crimes – because I think these people would be happier if they did not do these things, and this quite apart from the punishment often inflicted on them by their societies. I do not sympathize with the sick culture of much American music, film, and television that romanticizes crime. I do not fail to sympathize with the victims of crimes, read more