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Weil sie nichts anderes lesen und hören WOLLEN, als Dinge wie diesen neuesten Artikel vom 12.1.20
Parole brings closure to infamous case
January, 12, 2020
By Bill Sizemore for The Virginian Pilot
After nearly 34 years behind bars, my friend and co-author Jens Soering has finally won some measure of justice. The Virginia Parole Board has paroled him and ordered him deported to his native Germany.
His co-defendant and ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, has also been paroled and is being sent back to Canada, where she is a citizen.
Thus ends the amazing true-crime saga that I covered for The Virginian-Pilot and that Soering and I told in a co-written 2017 book.
Soering and Haysom were honor students at the University of Virginia in 1985 when Elizabeth’s parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom, were found brutally murdered in their Bedford County home outside Lynchburg. Both initially confessed to the crime, but at trial Soering recanted, saying he confessed falsely to save his girlfriend from the electric chair.
He has been working to demonstrate his innocence ever since, and in the book we show how evidence has continued to pile up over the years pointing to a tragic miscarriage of justice. A host of supporters — ranging from the original lead investigator in the case to celebrities such as Martin Sheen and John Grisham — came to the same conclusion.
Some of the most compelling evidence of Soering’s innocence has emerged only recently. DNA science was in its infancy in the 1980s and played no role in the trials. There was no credible physical evidence placing Soering at the murder scene, but the prosecutor leaned heavily on a few bloodstains that matched Soering’s blood type. Here’s the problem: After those blood samples were DNA-tested in 2009, Soering was definitively excluded as their source. Not only that: The blood evidence now points to two other, unidentified males leaving blood at the crime scene.
But the Virginia authorities never admitted their mistake — not even in granting Soering his freedom. He had petitioned Gov. Ralph Northam for a pardon, but the governor turned him down, saying he wasn’t convinced of his innocence. Instead, the parole board said the pair were being released based on their youth at the time of the crime, their long incarceration and the fact that they were model prisoners.
It’s not the moral victory Soering would have preferred. But at least, at age 53, he will now have the chance to live something approaching a normal life.
And to give credit where it’s due, this decision reflects a welcome shift from vengeance to mercy by the parole board appointees of Northam and his predecessor Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Soering and Haysom are lucky in one respect: They were convicted before Virginia abolished parole in 1995. If the new Democratic majority in the General Assembly is serious about criminal justice reform, reinstatement of parole ought to be high on the list of priorities. There are plenty of people locked up in Virginia’s gulag of prisons who could be freed with little to no risk to the public and great savings for the taxpayers. Nationwide, the average annual cost of incarceration is more than $30,000 per inmate. For geriatric inmates — a growing proportion of Virginia’s prison population, thanks to the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality that took hold in the 1990s — the annual price tag exceeds $70,000 per inmate.
In Soering’s case, the risk to Virginians from his release is zero. One of the conditions of his parole is that he can never return to the United States. And he’s OK with that. In my last prison visit with him before he boarded his flight to Germany, he admitted to being “somewhat bitter” about the three-plus decades of his life that he has lost. How could he not be?
Nevertheless, his focus now is on the future. Not only does he pose no risk to the public; he now has the opportunity to make a positive contribution to society. This is, after all, a man of prodigious intellectual gifts who wrote eight critically acclaimed books in prison.
His adjustment to the free world after such a long incarceration will no doubt be challenging. But he is nothing if not resilient. The front page of his website features a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
It’s a fitting aphorism for Virginia Prisoner 179212 as he embarks on his new life.
Bill Sizemore, a retired Virginian-Pilot staff writer, is co-author with Jens Soering of “A Far, Far Better Thing: Did a Fatal Attraction Lead to a Wrongful Conviction?”
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