Pardon Frees Va. Inmate Serving 70 Years for Robberies

Ollin Crawford, left, and siblings James Crawford and Robin Haynes meet at the prison visiting room. Ollin Crawford has served 23 years for robbing four banks. (Family Photo - Family Photo)

It has been a terribly long wait. Six years ago, Kaine, then the lieutenant governor, told Gov. Mark Warner that Crawford's case merited "special attention." But governors tend to be wary of using their power to commute sentences; the political consequences if the freed prisoner goes bad can be devastating.

"You're basically trying to make a judgment that they're going to live an exemplary life," Kaine told me yesterday. In Crawford's case, people from a range of backgrounds have concluded that she is a person of character who managed to grow, even in the dead soil of the prison campus.

Some mentioned the time she found the keys to a state vehicle lying on the prison grounds and turned them in to authorities. Others said they were impressed that she spent years training fellow inmates in the skills they would need upon being released -- only to watch as they left and she stayed behind.

A Democratic legislator from Norfolk, Del. Algie Howell, took a special interest in Crawford after reading about her in December. He visited her, spoke with her attorney, former Del. Dick Black, a tough-as-nails Loudoun Republican, and rallied his colleagues in Richmond to her cause.

What finally won Crawford her freedom? Her family members say they think it was the combination of the coverage in this column, the advocacy by Howell and Black, and the intercession of the Lord.

But I think it was Crawford's impossible optimism, her calm and her core. In a place where people are mean to one another for sport and self-defense, Crawford was beloved. The guards, the administrators and the warden became part of her lobbying campaign. So did her fellow inmates.

She's moving in with her daughter. On Sunday, she will worship with friends and family at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Southeast Washington, where she lived before she went away.

But first, there will be hugs and tears, and a visit to the grave of her mother, who died while Crawford was in prison, and dinner with her father. It was to be a meal she requested long ago: fried chicken and champagne.

And then Crawford intends to make a whale of a cake for the son she never really knew, a birthday cake to make up for all the cakes she never tasted.

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