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A Stain on Maryland
Walter Arvinger spent 36 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
By Lee Hockstader
Tuesday, November 30, 2004; Page A19
CUMBERLAND, Md. -- Walter Arvinger walked out of prison yesterday, a
free man for the first time in 36 years. Locked up in 1968 for a murder
he didn't commit, he was released by order of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich
Jr., who commuted his sentence last Friday. His decision, Ehrlich said,
is a reflection of "my view that Maryland's criminal justice system
must be tough but fair." Hurray to the governor for doing the right
thing. But a more honest epilogue to Arvinger's case would be: "His
conviction was a travesty of justice, and his incarceration for more
than three decades was a scandal. His case represents a stain on
Maryland's criminal justice system."
Arvinger is 55, a taciturn father and grandfather whose neatly trimmed
beard has gone to salt-and-pepper. When I met him a couple of weeks
ago, an ebony rash had spread the length of his arms, legs and torso,
and he was more preoccupied with his health than with any immediate
possibility of release, which seemed remote. He hoped one day to live
at home again with his grandmother, who is 105, and his mother, who is
76. But if anyone had reason to squelch the faintest glimmer of
optimism, it was Walter Arvinger.
At the time of his arrest, Arvinger was 19 years old, employed and
church-going. He'd been a slow learner at school but had a clean
record, with no hint of drugs or violence. His chief mistake was one of
timing: On a rainy night in October 1968, he was in a house in
Baltimore with four other teenagers who talked about mugging someone --
"yoking" a man, they called it. A few minutes later, they did just
that, and one of the youths beat 52-year-old James R. Brown to death
with a baseball bat.
Arvinger played no more than a cameo role in the murder. The state's
chief witness, a 14-year-old boy named Paul Gillis, testified that
Arvinger had walked out of the house before or just after the talk
about "yoking" began, and took no part in the conversation. Arvinger
went up the street to a store and bought some cake. A few minutes
later, when the other youths raced out of the house and attacked Brown,
Arvinger spotted them and ran after them. Afterward, when the boys
divvied up the man's pocket change, Arvinger may have received a few
cents, although he denied it.
The justice system started failing Walter Arvinger from the get-go. His
trial lasted half a day. His lawyer, retained for a few hundred dollars
in the days before Maryland had a public defender's office, was a
colorful, careless character named Morris Lee Kaplan, who boasted that
he carried no more documentation to court than he could fit in his coat
pocket. Kaplan also had a conflict of interest: Although he had managed
to win an acquittal on murder charges for one of Arvinger's
co-defendants in a separate trial, he did not permit him to testify on
Arvinger's behalf -- possibly for fear that the other boy could expose
himself to robbery charges.
Inexplicably, the judge found Arvinger guilty of first-degree murder,
inferring that he may have stood ready to help in the crime, or acted
as a lookout. He reached his verdict despite the absence of testimony
that Arvinger helped in any way or was a lookout, and despite the fact
that Arvinger had at first walked away from the scene of the crime,
which Kaplan failed to point out at the trial. The judge was "pained,"
he said, to sentence Arvinger to prison "for the balance of your
natural life."
Although he was the least culpable of the five youths present at the
crime, Arvinger was the most harshly treated. Two others served no
prison time and one was out in six or seven years. The only other
defendant to receive a life sentence was the one who wielded the
baseball bat; his term was shortened in 1973 by the governor, Marvin
Mandel, and he was released in the early 1990s.
Only Arvinger languished behind bars, decade after decade. His lawyer
dropped his case without pursuing it through the appeals process. But
if the courts had deemed Arvinger unfit for society, the Maryland
corrections system knew better. In prison he had a spotless record,
earned a high school diploma and taught welding to other inmates. For
four years starting in 1989, he was allowed out on work release, living
in a minimum-security dormitory in Baltimore, reporting to a
construction site at the Inner Harbor and compiling an exemplary
employment record. One weekend a month, he was allowed to visit his
elderly grandmother and mother.
In 1993 even that measure of compassion was yanked away when another
Maryland lifer on work release, Rodney Stokes, shot his ex-girlfriend
and then himself. In a dyspeptic response, Gov. Parris N. Glendening
ordered all 134 lifers on work release, including Arvinger, rounded up
and returned to prison. And two years later Glendening declared that as
far as he was concerned, everyone serving a life sentence in the Free
State could rot behind bars. "If you want to term this more as
retribution . . . it's exactly that," the governor said. When the state
parole commission voted unanimously in 1998 to release Arvinger,
Glendening ignored the recommendation. For the past several years,
Arvinger has spent 14 hours a day locked up in a small, two-man cell in
Western Maryland.
It was just last year that Arvinger got the first break of his life. He
sent a brief, handwritten letter to Michael Millemann, a professor at
the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, and Millemann
became interested. "I've seen hundreds of claims of innocence, most of
them without merit," Millemann said. "This one had merit."
Ehrlich, who has made good on pledges to revive the governor's powers
of clemency in a number of cases, has righted a profound wrong. He
cannot repay Arvinger for his lost years, but he has restored some
measure of dignity.
Yesterday afternoon, I called Arvinger as he rode home to Baltimore. He
chuckled when I asked him about his plans. "It feels like I got brand
new shoes on my feet," he said. "I'm ready to do a little walking,
man."
The writer is a member of the editorial page staff. His e-mail address
is hockstaderl@washpost.com.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company