Hi Heather,

This is a wonderful story, and I admire your compassion for those who face the death penalty. I agree with all you’ve said here, although I have found myself on several occasions — or, more accurately, with certain defendants — feeling that the death penalty might be appropriate: Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer (who wound up being killed in prison anyway), Timothy McVeigh (who was sentenced to die, and was executed), to name three.

I too was a journalist who covered death-penalty trials, and living in Texas, the death penalty and execution capital of the world, you’d think I would have been involved in covering numerous cases in which the defendant was sentenced to die. Only once.

I was surprised by the number of times the victim’s family forgave the killer. One case involved a high school cheerleader and three male classmates who raped and murdered the girl for, really, no reason that I could fathom. They were drunk and high, but I’ve never understood how that could lead someone to murder. It was the creepiest case I ever was involved in covering, and those teenage boys seemed pure evil to me. And yet, during the trial, after they had been convicted, the girl’s mother was allowed to give a victim’s statement during the sentencing phase of the trial, and she told them all, through a torrent of tears and keening that almost made my heart burst, that she forgave them and hoped that God would make them whole again. The boys were crying, too, by the time she was finished. It was among the most amazing things I have ever witnessed.

I share your questions about the soundness of seating only jurors who are not opposed to the death penalty. I suppose that you’d never get a sentence of death otherwise, but it always seemed to me that the people who had no qualms about the death penalty were also willing to give the prosecutor the benefit of the doubt, and that’s a bad bargain. Some jurors’ attitude seemed to be: The police arrested him, so he must have done something wrong.

A civil rights attorney I befriended in Amarillo, Jeff Blackburn, headed up an effort in Texas called the Innocence Project. This group of attorneys, with the help of college law schools, searched for prisoners, some of whom were on death row, who had been convicted on shaky evidence or had received poor representation. Using the newly minted technology of DNA testing, these attorneys systematically got the sentences overturned for dozens and dozens of inmates, including some who’d been sentenced to die.

The Innocence Project is now a nationwide effort that has freed 333 prisoners who were wrongly convicted, including 20 who were on death row. Most of these men had spent more than a decade behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. I shudder to think how many innocent men have been executed in Texas. The Innocence Project has given me all the proof I need that humans should not have the power to sentence their fellow men to die. The Innocence Project saved 20 men from being murdered by the state for crimes they didn’t commit. How many were they too late to save?