Book festival to incorporate new features
Next month's ninth annual Virginia Festival of the Book will have some new features this year, including a larger focus on crime and science fiction novels, according to event organizers.
Among other changes, publishing day will be free of charge and open to the public, and aspiring authors will have a chance to enter unpublished manuscripts in the Great American Novel Contest.
Crime novelist John Grisham, an Albemarle County resident, and author Earl Hamner Jr., a Nelson County native, are scheduled to appear alongside keynote speaker and author Lee Smith.
Other authors scheduled to speak include poets Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove.
DNA frees man after 20-year imprisonment
A DNA test exculpated a Suffolk man who had served more than 20 years of five life sentences for the rape and sodomy of a Norfolk woman.
Julius E. Ruffin, 49, left the Southampton Correctional Center in Capron after the DNA test, obtained under a new state law, implicated someone else in the assault.
The rape victim identified Ruffin as her attacker, according to Gordon Zedd, Ruffin's lawyer.
Ruffin's first two trials ended in hung juries but after his third trial he was convicted and given five life sentences.
After several unsuccessful attempts to gain DNA testing, a state law passed in 2001 allowed Ruffin to win testing, Zedd said.
Ruffin's case demonstrates the flaws of eyewitness identification, the primary cause of wrongful convictions.
Ruffin is the seventh Virginian cleared by DNA testing and the 124th in the country.
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