INMATE SEEKING NEW TRIAL HAD SUPPORTERS AT COURTHOUSE

Innocence Project, others support Hash effort to get murder conviction vacated

Date published: 10/18/2007

By PAMELA GOULD

Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, was among about two dozen supporters in Culpeper Circuit Court this week as Michael Wayne Hash sought to get his murder conviction vacated.

The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project is financing the private investigators trying to help establish Hash's innocence of the July 1996 murder of 74-year-old Thelma Scroggins inside her Lignum home.

As part of that effort, Armbrust also appeared before the Forensic Science Board in Richmond yesterday morning to seek support for a change to the state law governing post-conviction forensic testing. The goal is to amend the law to allow for testing at another lab if the state's crime labs don't offer a particular forensic test.

In Hash's case, his attorney and the Innocence Project want additional DNA testing.

The Virginia lab conducted what's known as STR testing on scrapings from Scroggins' fingernails in 2000, defense attorney David Hargett said. Those tests produced no results.

Hargett and Armbrust hope to get a suspect profile if the evidence is analyzed using a procedure called Y-STR. Virginia's crime labs don't do Y-STR testing, which is used to detect male, nuclear DNA.

In addition to Hash's family and friends, courtroom supporters included a woman who believes her ex-husband was also wrongly convicted of murder, members of a group known as Virginia CURE, and a Virginia woman who spent seven years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing her longtime companion.

Virginia CURE is a volunteer organization focused on improving conditions for prisoners and interested in innocence issues, said secretary and treasurer Carla Peterson.

Beverly Monroe, who now lives in the Tidewater area, spoke to Hash during a break in yesterday's hearing. She offered him encouragement and advice--something she was equipped to do from her unique perspective.

Monroe, now 69, was convicted of first-degree murder in Powhatan County in 1992. After waging a battle that cost her roughly $2 million in legal costs and lost wages to get her case vacated, she now supports others in similar circumstances.

"It's no longer about what happened to me," she said. "It's about a pattern and why it's possible."

Yesterday, she said she told Hash that despite his circumstance, he needs to "live" and "carry himself" as an innocent person.

"By living that way, it will sustain you as well as the people around you," she said.

She said she understands how tough a spot he's in. "It nearly destroyed my life."

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Date published: 10/18/2007