An Innocent Man on Death Row?
Owen Barber pulled the trigger ten times and told a Northern Virginia jury that his friend Justin Wolfe had hired him to do it. Barber cut a deal with prosecutors and got 28 years. Wolfe got the death penalty. Did Barber tell the truth—or is an innocent man awaiting execution?
By
Drew Lindsay
Published Sunday, March 01, 2009
Photographs by Matthew Worden.
Read an update to this story here. Justin Wolfe is brought in shackles to a visitation room at Virginia’s Sussex state prison, about 20 miles southeast of Petersburg. Glass scratched with tic-tac-toe games separates inmates from visitors. “I’m a dangerous guy, you know,” he says with a smile. In January 2002, nearly two months before his 21st birthday, Justin Wolfe was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He arrived at Sussex as the state’s youngest death-row inmate. His face, as round and smooth as it was in his Chantilly High School graduation photos, still might get him carded at a bar. The murder victim was 21-year-old Daniel Petrole Jr., a 1998 graduate of Centreville High, a student at Northern Virginia Community College, and a delivery man for a Herndon florist. On the night of March 15, 2001, Petrole was gunned down in his car on a cul-de-sac near Manassas, where he had just bought a three-story brick townhouse. In Petrole’s car and house after his death, police found $140,000 in cash and 46 pounds of marijuana worth some $200,000 on the street. Petrole, authorities soon learned, was the kingpin in one of Northern Virginia’s biggest drug rings, moving half a million dollars’ worth of dope every month. The son of a retired Secret Service agent who had guarded Presidents Carter and Reagan, Petrole was clearing more than $100,000 a month, yet he led a double life so convincing that his parents had put up $10,000 to help him buy the townhouse. Prince William County commonwealth’s attorney Paul Ebert, who has sent more people to death row than any other prosecutor in Virginia, handled the murder. At trial, Ebert and his team claimed that Justin Wolfe was a lieutenant in Petrole’s drug operation who, owing Petrole more than $80,000, had hired a friend to kill him. Wolfe, they told jurors, was a violent drug lord who had ordered the hit as if Petrole were “a bug on a windshield,” then celebrated at a Dom Pérignon–fueled bash at a DC nightclub. Drugs lead to greed, they said, and greed leads to murder. The jury returned a guilty verdict in less than two hours, then handed down a death sentence in just five.
Seven years later, Justin Wolfe hopes to do what is rarely done in Virginia: win a death-penalty appeal. Courts in Virginia are the least likely in the country to reverse a capital conviction or sentence. Barring DNA proof, a governor’s clemency, or a legal miracle, a death sentence in Virginia is final. There’s no DNA evidence in Wolfe’s case, but he and his lawyers argue that a miracle, or at least Governor Tim Kaine’s intervention, is warranted. Not long after Wolfe’s conviction, the law license of his trial attorney, John Partridge, was revoked. Hired on the recommendation of a stripper, Partridge had never handled a capital-murder trial. Jurors called him Mr. Potato Head. In the sentencing phase, he turned the case over to an associate who’d had her law license for one year. It was her first time in front of a jury. New facts also have surfaced contradicting key testimony. Most compelling are revelations from Owen Barber, the 21-year-old gunman who confessed to killing Petrole. Barber was the prosecution’s star witness—the only witness to tie Justin Wolfe directly to a murder-for-hire scheme. Without Barber’s testimony, Ebert told reporters at the time, “Justin Wolfe never would have been prosecuted.” But in a sworn affidavit filed nearly four years after the trial, Barber said Wolfe was not involved in the murder. There was no arrangement to kill Petrole, he said; Wolfe knew nothing and paid him nothing. Barber said he had fingered Wolfe chiefly to avoid the death penalty himself. “Justin had nothing to do with the killing,” he said in the affidavit. Barber has since disavowed his recantation. And coming from a confessed killer and now a confessed liar, it might be easy to dismiss. But the affidavit, with other facts uncovered after the trial, seem to raise enough doubt to warrant a second look at Wolfe’s conviction. Several jurors now say they suspected during the trial that the full story of the murder wasn’t being told.
The courts, however, can consider only the story told at trial. Procedural rules in Virginia set high hurdles for introducing new evidence or fresh claims of innocence—rules that help make the state the fastest in the country to move death-row offenders from sentencing to execution. To win a new trial or even a hearing to consider the new evidence, it’s not enough for Wolfe to raise doubts about his conviction. For all intents and purposes, the courts must be persuaded that he is innocent. So far, they haven’t been. Twice judges have dismissed Barber’s recantation on procedural grounds, ruling that it was too little, too late. Wolfe, whose legal appeals are nearly exhausted, could be executed by summer. As he talks about the twists in his case, Wolfe’s words spill out in a rush. “It’s crazy,” he says. “It’s just crazy.”
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Comments
Okay maybe he is Guilty but i don’t think that he deserves the death penalty. Life with out the parole is fair. I watched the 48 hour hard evidence show about this case is his mother is so devastated. I felt so sorry for her i cried when seen how hurt she was. I would just say for there is no need for two people to loose their lives in this situation. I am sorry for Danny family but her is no need for all the killing.
Posted by: Laquasia, Sep 25, 2009 06:08:45 AM
this kid is guilty as hell and he took another young mans life he needs to pay for that , i watched the program and there isstill much that needs explaining in particular the phone calls
if hes not guilty then godwill take care of it
Posted by: maggy hayes, Aug 11, 2009 01:04:33 PM
The law is sickening me. Did you see what Justin wrote? "I have not kill anybody". Sounds like Barber is the key. He has been lying all through the time. He changed the stories. He is trying to fabricated and get away with it. Justin is not going to Death Penalty not until Barber gets the story straight. It might will take forever if he tell the whole story or spitting out one word at a time.
That is Unforgivenable.
Posted by: Jennifer Fraser-Taylor, May 30, 2009 12:38:01 PM
A new round of white denial: Drugs, Race and Reality in the ’burbs
By Tim Wise
In a time of multiple school and workplace shootings, middle-aged mass murderers, drug-saturated rave parties, and moms who drown their kids in tubs, lakes, or dump them in garbage cans, one question comes to mind. How long will suburban white America get away with expressing shock at the criminal proclivities of its progeny, without media exposing their presumption of incorruptibility as fallacious and patently racist? Especially when government statistics indicate deviance and dysfunction are quite commonplace with such folks and in such places.
On Sunday, August 12, the front page of the Washington Post brought us yet another story about white suburban youth, who, to the amazement of their parents, friends, and the media, turn out to be stone cold criminals. This time the headlines emanate from "nice neighborhoods," in Northern Virginia: places where sinister crimes aren’t supposed to happen.
As authorities have discovered, one of the most significant drug operations in the region’s history was being run from this "nice, safe" place. And not by dark-skinned street-hustlers preying on vulnerable teens and getting them hooked; but rather, by the former soccer-playing little leaguers who this nation grooms to run major corporations, hold political office, or merely typifies as normal, all-American boys.
In this particular drama, one of the principal players, named (I kid you not) Owen Merton Barber IV, stands accused of murdering Daniel Petrole Jr., one of his drug-dealing colleagues at the behest of yet another fellow-dealer, Justin Michael Wolfe. Seem implausible? Surreal even? Thanks to well-worn stereotypes about drug users, dealers, and criminals in general, we’ve come to expect the bad guys to look like them - black and brown people, not those who are white like us. When we have to protect ourselves from folks with names like Owen Merton Barber the Fourth, well, what is the world coming to?
Actually, although underreported, drug data has long confirmed that the stereotypes of users and dealers (poor, black or Latino, and urban-dwelling) are not only racist, but also wrong.
According to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Health and Human Services, whites are equally or more likely to use drugs than their African American counterparts, despite common misperceptions to the contrary.
Although blacks and Hispanics tend to try drugs for the first time at a slightly younger age than whites, by the end of high school, whites have caught up and surpassed them in every drug category. White seniors are a third more likely to have smoked pot in the past year, seven times more likely to have used cocaine, three times more likely to have used heroin, and nine times more likely to have used LSD. And it’s not just that there are more white users, as this would reflect mere population percentages, but rather, that the white rate of use is that much higher than the rate for blacks.
It’s the same story for young adults. Whites are 66% of 18-25 year olds, but 70% of drug users that age. Blacks are 13.5% of persons in that age cohort, but only 13% of young adult users, while Hispanics are nearly 15% of that age group, but only 12% of drug users 18-25.
When it comes to drug dealing, the picture changes only slightly. According to the Justice Department, drug users tend to buy from same-race dealers. So the nearly three-quarters of users who are white, mainly rely on white dope peddlers, not the Jamaicans or Dominicans of popular imagery. When it comes to drugs like ecstasy-a hot product for the Virginia cartel-the dealers and users have long been known to be mostly white, middle class males between 14 and 32.
One would know none of these things from reading the Post story on the recently uncovered suburban Drug Empire, or drug related articles in any other nationally prominent paper. Instead, white suburban dealers and users are presented as exceptions to an otherwise law-abiding rule.
In the instant case, the accused, from the Prince William County hamlets of Chantilly and Centreville are youths that reporter Josh White describes as "good kids," who "went bad." When was the last time a black or Latino drug dealer or gang-banger was described this way? To those who study media, implicit in most news coverage when they do it is the suggestion that it’s because they were congenital criminals; it was their IQ or pathological underclass families. They don’t "go" bad; they just are bad.
However, when stories are written about pale-faced killers or dealers, or in this case both, sympathetic adjectives fill the pages. Crime becomes human interest-a cautionary tale. We are encouraged to identify with the instigators of the mayhem in ways we never would be were they dark or poor.
For example, Kip Kinkel, 1998’s poster boy for school shootings, was likened in the major media to MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman: freckle-faced, and the "boy next door." Similar descriptions were offered for the school shooters in Arkansas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. Even Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, described by classmates as "dark and brooding," were still referred to by many as "basically normal," and gave off no warning signs in the eyes of Littleton families, teachers, or law enforcement. Andrea Yates, the Houston suburban mom who killed her five kids in their bathtub was described by one major newsmagazine as having "loved her children too much," and having been "overwhelmed" by the responsibilities of keeping hearth and home together.
Listen to those quoted in White’s story. First there is Prince William Detective Greg Pass who explains, "None of this happened in bad neighborhoods. It bothers everyone involved that in many ways these kids are mirror images of the detectives working the case, except they have chosen to go the wrong way." Sympathy, recognition, identification, and all of it, by the officer’s admission, due to the fact that these kids are "mirror images" of the detectives themselves. What does one see in the mirror after all? One’s face: one’s white, middle class suburban face, to be precise.
Throughout the Post piece the ringleaders of this marijuana and ecstasy empire are described as kids who "went to church," "sold Christmas trees at the mall parking lot," were "polite, shy, friendly, non-threatening," "clean cut," "cautiously pensive," "kind and gentle," "fun-loving," "the class clown." The kind of boys "you’d want your daughter to date," and who have been known to nurse sick birds back to health, "romp down the soccer field," and whose hooliganism was limited to writing their names in wet cement.
The alleged shooter "relished fishing with his father along the Virginia coast, where the two would exchange high fives when reeling in a catch." Barber’s father-that’s Owen Merton the third for those keeping count-insists the family was solid and led a "normal life." Forced to contemplate what went wrong with his fishing buddy, he speculates that perhaps watching his mother die of cancer convinced his son "life wasn’t important anymore." Again, sympathy conjured up for the wayward white youth in ways that would be highly unlikely for an inner-city kid: even one who had watched his mom die of cancer, as many have, or perhaps had friends who had been killed or jailed.
The young man accused of ordering the hit on Petrole is described as a "role model for his brother and sister," a "religious Catholic" who is intensely "spiritual." For his part, Justin Wolfe is presented as a helpful son, who assisted his single mom in caring for his younger siblings. When was the last time the child of a black, inner-city single mom was applauded for helping out around the house?
Throughout the story we learn that the parents of these budding gangsters never suspected anything, even as their early-20’s offspring jet-setted to Hawaii or Atlantic City, and bought $200,000 townhouses with their own money. As an additional sign of the times and the stupendous denial that afflicts so many white upper-middle class families, Petrole’s father actually believed that his son was able to buy his own home because he had been lucky dabbling in the stock market. After all, said Petrole Sr., his boy always wanted to be an entrepreneur. As indeed he was. So should we now expect national condemnation of the culture of affluence and the capitalist emphasis on moneymaking as being implicated in these crimes? Don’t count on it. That kind of analysis we reserve for the "underclass" values of ghetto-dwellers.
As evidence of how strong the stereotypes are, consider that Justin Wolfe, at the height of his criminal activity, dated the daughter of the director for the DC regional office of the Drug Enforcement Administration and aroused no suspicions whatsoever. The agent, having no doubt memorized the darker profile of a drug dealer used by law enforcement, naturally had no clue. Wolfe, according to DEA agent Frank Chellino seemed "well-mannered" and "stable."
Perhaps white folks in the ’burbs need to stop listening to the voices of officialdom or the media, and start listening to the only folks who seem to know the score: the dealers themselves. As one associate of the accused explained: "American society doesn’t want to face the fact that white kids deal and use drugs. They simply can’t look in my face and see that a nice-looking white kid is selling drugs to their kids, because that would mean that their kids could do this too. The fact is, we do sell drugs to their kids, in their rich neighborhoods and in their rich schools."
Just as the media generally "deracializes" incidents of white deviance, portraying them as the aberrant, inexplicable acts of aberrant, inexplicable individuals, (unlike the same from the dark and poor which are often portrayed as group tendencies), so too did Josh White in his Post piece on Wolfe, Barber and Petrole. Instead of pointing out the fallacies of white suburban denial and the blindness that besets so many of the residents in these "nice" places, White and the Post offered up a quixotic melodrama: good kids gone wrong; sympathetic, misguided youths posing as hardened criminals and coming to a tragic end.
Powerful to be sure, but far too narrow a truth, lacking as it did the contextual information necessary to understand the common phenomenon of white substance abuse. Unfortunately, facts unspoken or unreported tend to remain hidden. The debilitating stereotypes they might unravel remain firmly in place. Those who have convinced themselves that it couldn’t happen here remain in danger.
Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer, lecturer and antiracism activist. He can be reached at tjwise@mindspring.com. Footnotes for this article can be obtained from that same email address.
Posted by: I LOVE THIS!, May 26, 2009 11:01:29 AM
interesting how no one here seems to care about the life that was lost. justin is not a victim here, remember the phone calls?
the attitudes of you brats is proof positive of why he’s on death row, he felt he could do what he wanted to do without consequence.
Posted by: moral majority, May 26, 2009 08:45:19 AM
all of you seem to know justin but did you know danny? he’s the one who was hurt in all of this and his dear family/friends. it’s sad that you all can just assume that justin is the same kid you knew in grade school. The fact is even if he didn’t kill danny nor order the hit, he is now a man who is associated with this crime for the rest of his life.
Posted by: cville, va, May 19, 2009 06:12:20 AM
The evidence of Justin’s innocence is overwhelming and needs to be examined fully, he is clearly innocent of this crime.
Posted by: Jo, May 12, 2009 01:04:50 PM
Keyword there is DRUG DEALER. I dont think anybody is saying that justin wasnt a drug dealer, what am saying is hes not a killer. He did wrong and i think he would be the first to say that...But this young man is on death row mainly because of the testimony of owen barber, that is just plain sick. Read the story, and tell me there isnt reasonable doubt...Give the kid a new trial and he would be found not guilty in a matter of hours.
Posted by: Bubba, May 11, 2009 12:47:27 PM
I guess he should have thought about the possible outcomes of his life when he became a drug dealer. Where is that lesson being said here?
Posted by: Nestor, May 06, 2009 02:24:29 PM
I grew up in Franlin Farms right next to Chantilly and went to middle school with Justin and played back yard football with him often! This kid Owen Barber is a huge liar! when I found out that Justin was on death row and after I read and talked to mutual friends that know Justin as well my heart sank and I felt almost sick to my stomach. Northern Virginia is la la land compared to Manhattan where I live now and drug rings were a rarity! The need to either commute his sentence or grant him a re-trial, I still cant beleive he is there!
Posted by: Matt , Mar 28, 2009 09:07:20 PM
This case is unbelievable and the persons involved in the technical BS. are unforgiveable. If an inteligent person reads this story and has their doubts then the courts and yes Gov. Tim Kaine should make sure that everything possible has been and will be done to get to the truth. If an innocent young man is put to death then our justice system is nothing more then a scam and is a very real threat to all of our freedom. We should all be worried and should all seek justice for Justin.
Posted by: David F. Springfield, VA., Mar 24, 2009 02:42:21 PM
This is just one crazy case, HOw the hell justin is still sitting on death row is just mind blowing.....I have followed this case for years and i feel he is 100 percent an innocent man. You gonna kill a man, going off the words of owen barber?? I mean really??
Posted by: Bubba, Mar 23, 2009 12:08:09 PM
I’m praying for Justin and for Governor Kaine, that he will either stay the execution or order a new trial. It seems so unfair that one doing the killing can get off without death penalty by simply sayng someone hired him.
Posted by: Sherry Pruett, Mar 19, 2009 09:58:49 AM
It’s tragic and ironic that a man can be sentenced to death based on only the words of another, but DNA is required to overturn it... Then, he can change his story over and over. That alone is reason to take this man off death row. Shouldn’t concrete DNA evidence be required to give someone the death penalty to start with??? I fault the system. It seems so backwards... I’ll be praying for you guys!
Posted by: Brandi, Mar 18, 2009 07:45:17 AM
I think the should let him go, I dont think that they should convict a man on what a person said
Free Justin
West Love you Bro
Posted by: reddick, Mar 18, 2009 06:16:09 AM
This whole thing makes me so sad. I have known Justin and his family since I was six years old. I grew up with this family and Justin doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He is innocent! Unfortuantly all teens come across drugs, most of them try them, and alot keep doing them. Some grow up and stop and others go down the darker path, just like many others Justin got stuck in the drug world, but I know he wasn’t involved in a murder! Please stop all of this and don’t like an innocent man die on death row!!
Posted by: Jenna , Mar 17, 2009 06:35:48 AM
The Courts, The Governor of the State of Virginia need to look into Justin’s case. This is a case of a innocent man if I ever saw one. The People of the State of Virginia need to contact Gov. Kaine and let him know that you want something done for Justin Wolfe!! If not, you could have the blood of a innocent man on your hands! This could be your child.
Posted by: Tracy Spirko, Mar 16, 2009 08:36:11 PM
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