But before there was a movie – or for that matter, an opera, a play, and an album – there was the book that inspired them. DEAD MAN WALKING: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in America by Sister Helen Prejean is twenty years old. A book that is at heart a great story, not a polemic or a piece of propaganda, but a story that lets people see what the death penalty is, what it does, and, for many readers, why it must be ended.
By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 12:05pm
Memorial Day is over, with its picnics, parades, and poignant remembrances of the veterans who gave their lives in America's wars. But there is one group of vets few want to remember: the ones who went to war, came back tragically changed, committed a crime and were executed.
Vets like Wayne Felde, who arrived in Vietnam on his 19th birthday by choice, not by the draft; who saw heavy action and was wounded; who came back to the U.S. hounded by his memories of death and crippled by what those memories did to him. Drunk, unable to hold down a job or a marriage, in trouble with the law, he was probably trying to kill himself when his gun went off while he was in the back of a police car. The bullet ricocheted and killed an officer. He was sent to death row, and in March of 1988, executed by the state of Louisiana.
By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 11:44am
After fifteen years on Louisiana's death row, Damon Thibodeaux was exonerated, the courts finally recognizing his innocence. He has moved to Minneapolis and is getting on with his life.
Damon's birthday and mine are two days apart, and for many years we would "celebrate" together while he was on death row. When I visit him this summer in Minneapolis to carry on our tradition, I expect we will have a MUCH better party.
By Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 11:38am
Hooray for Maryland! Expressing concerns about the risk of deadly error, the exorbitant and ever-increasing cost, racial bias and the unending torment of murder victims' family members, today Maryland Governor, Martin O'Malley, signed into law repeal of that state's death penalty. We applaud the legislature and the Governor on their decision to end state-sponsored homicide in Maryland. We are a better nation for it.
Part of a noticeable trend – as Dr. King might say, the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice -- Maryland is the sixth state in six years to repeal the death penalty, joining New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Illinois and Connecticut.
