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Book Review: An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington Jr

Document Cited authorities 3 Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorJ.C. Oleson
Published date01 August 2006
Date01 August 2006
DOI10.1177/1362480606063150
Subject MatterArticles

B O O K R E V I E W S
Theoretical Criminology
© 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 10(3): 387–411; 1362–4806
Margaret Edds
An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington Jr
New York: New York University Press, 2003. xiii + 243 pp. $30.00
(hbk).
ISBN 0814722229.
• Reviewed by J.C. Oleson, Adminstrative Office of United States Courts
DOI: 10.1177/1362480606063150
Perhaps it was inevitable that I would read Margaret Edds’ An Expendable
Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington Jr. My PhD dissertation
examined the relationship between IQ and crime, I had worked on a death
penalty appeal while in law school and Earl Washington’s release from prison
was making headlines throughout Virginia just as I began teaching at Old
Dominion University in Norfolk. It was obvious that I would be interested in
the story of how a young man with mental retardation came to spend 18 years
in prison—more than half of them on Virginia’s death row—only to be
exonerated by DNA evidence and later released into my community. But one
need not be a criminologist (or even a Virginian) to find significance in An
Expendable Man. As death penalty abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean suggests,
Margaret Edds’ book should be read by anyone interested in understanding
how the death penalty operates in the USA.
In 15 tightly written chapters, Edds tells the story of Earl Washington’s
arrest, confession, trial, incarceration, commutation and release. After the
acknowledgments and a handy timeline, the book begins with a chapter
entitled, ‘Countdown’. This chapter describes the intense frustration that Marie
Deans, a prisoner advocate, endured while she struggled to find legal repre-
sentation for inmate Earl Washington. It describes her stress, her migraines and
her frantic desperation to find Washington a lawyer, just three weeks before he
was scheduled to die. ‘Countdown’ is a fitting opening to the book, because
although An Expendable Man covers a great deal of material, the...

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