Download or read book One hundred letters from Death Row written by Marit Lund Bødtker and published by Yuniku forlag. This book was released on 2023-06-07 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Ivan Ray Murphy Jr who, at the age of 28, was condemned to death for the murder of a defenceless old woman. In his youth Murphy had regularly mowed the lawn of the victim, his grandmother’s friend and neighbour. Over a period of ten years and through the medium of more than a hundred letters, Murphy, who was known as PeeWee, shared his innermost thoughts with his twenty years older Norwegian pen friend, the author of this book, Marit Lund Bødtker, and in so doing afforded her an insight into a hitherto completely unknown world. The author twice travelled to the prison in Huntsville, Texas, where Murphy was held and from where he worked tirelessly to regain his freedom. In the course of their long friendship, at the condemned man’s urging Marit Lund Bødtker agreed to write a book about his life. This is that book. ‘Whether he is innocent, as he claims to be, or guilty, Murphy is first and foremost a human being, a man with his own personal strengths and weaknesses, dreams and aspirations. In all probability readers will sometimes find themselves agreeing with him, at other times totally at variance with his conduct and opinions, just as they do with other people they meet or read about.’ John Peder Egenæs, Secretary General, Amnesty International Norway Marit Lund Bødtker (b. 1941), a librarian and journalist by profession, is the author of a wide range of books, both fiction and non-fiction, for children and adults. This is her eighth book. Basil Cowlishaw has been resident in Norway since 1949 and has translated numerous articles, tourist brochures, scientific treatises, plays and books, among them Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and the official account of the XVII Olympic Winter Games. The writer is using a pen name M.L. Cooper for Singapore Sling. She is an established Norwegian writer, a former journalist and librarian as well. Altogether this writer has published ten books in different genres. She was born in 1941. Marit Lund Bødtker is an established Norwegian writer and journalist who has published a long number of books in different genres.
Download or read book Welcome To Hell written by Jan Arriens and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2005 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in a new edition, condemned men and women speak for themselves about the reality behind bars on death row.
Download or read book Crimson Letters Voices from Death Row written by Tessie Castillo and published by Black Rose Writing. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through thirty compelling essays written in the prisoners’ own words, Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row offers stories of brutal beatings inside juvenile hall, botched suicide attempts, the terror of the first night on Death Row, the pain of goodbye as a friend is led to execution, and the small acts of humanity that keep hope alive for men living in the shadow of death. Each carefully crafted personal essay illuminates the complex stew of choice and circumstance that brought four men to Death Row and the cycle of dehumanization and brutality that continues inside prison. At times the men write with humor, at times with despair, at times with deep sensitivity, but always with keen insight and understanding of the common human experience that binds us.
Download or read book Death Row Letters written by Charles M. Leslie and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prisoner on death row in Indiana, Donald Ray Wallace, Jr undergoes a spiritual journey from crime to redemption. But Wallace is slated for death. Whether Wallace had an unidentified accomplice in the murders that condemned him remains an unsolved question. In any case, four people died as a result of the robbery Wallace was attempting to commit.
Download or read book Condemned written by Seán Ó Riain and published by Liberties Press. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Condemned:Letters from Death Rowby "Ray" and Seán Ó Riain is a collection of letters between a former Cork teacher and a death row inmate that develops into a unique friendship-one thatis in itself a subtle, rallying cry against an American system that still honours the 3,000 year old adage "an eye for eye", serving as a reminder that, as Gandhi observed, "An eye for an eye makes everyone blind".Ray has been convicted of killing a man, a crime he committed as a young man and that he admits and regrets. For his crime, Ray's sentence is death but what he seeks is not a pardon, or pity, or freedom. Simply, he hopes that his sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment without parole. For most of us to hope for a future so bleak seems unimaginable, but for Ray this is the focus of his appeals- a chance to live. Seán Ó Riain has been writing to Ray for several years and, while Seán's careful letters are included, it is Ray's heartfelt depiction of death row life that form the heart and soul of the book. Ray's letters are powerful in their understated descriptions of his difficult life circumstances- from juvenile offender with addict parents and dependent siblings to his current situation. The denied dreams, the unfulfilled desires, the loneliness, and the fear are all brought to devastating reality in his simple words. The men's letters are framed by commentaries, facts, and case-studies from the American death penalty system, clarifying the process of state sanctioned revenge in 36 of the US states: a process directly in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A process currently viewed by 88% of American Criminologists and by most American police chiefs as the least effective deterrent to violent crime- one that costs $114 million more annually than life imprisonment in one state alone. Since the year 2000, almost 700 people have been executed in the 36 states that still enforcethe death penalty in the US. InCondemned, after several years of writing to Ray, Ó Riain makes us question the prevalence of the death sentence in the American legal system and asks- should any state punishthe death of a citizen with more death?
Download or read book The Sun Does Shine written by Anthony Ray Hinton and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--
Download or read book Karla Faye Tucker Set Free written by Linda Strom and published by Shaw Books. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This gripping story about the first woman executed in Texas in over one hundred years draws on accounts from family, prisoners, government officials, and friends to show how God used a remarkable woman to reach countless lives with a message of redemption and joy. Linda Strom, Tucker's spiritual advisor and close friend for eleven years, includes photographs as well as excerpts from Tucker's letters and interviews.
Download or read book Death Row Letters written by Charles Leslie and published by . This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the year 2000 the author, a professor of anthropology, struck up an acquaintance with a prisoner on death row in Indiana. The inmate, Donald Ray Wallace, Jr., bears a vital resemblance to Dostoyevsky's fictional protagonist in Crime and Punishment. Like Rashkolnikov, Wallace undergoes a spiritual journey from crime to redemption. But Wallace, unlike Rashkolnikov, is slated for death. Whether Wallace had an unidentified accomplice in the murders that condemned him remains an unsolved question. In any case, four people died as the result of the robbery Wallace was attempting to commit. These letters provide access to the reflections of a brilliant mind grappling with existence on death row, dramatizing the spiritual and social void created in our prisons. They demonstrate the way that our justice system may incarcerate a confused twenty-year-old and, some twenty years later, execute a very different man.
Download or read book Let the Lord Sort Them written by Maurice Chammah and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.
Download or read book Writing for Their Lives written by Marie Mulvey Roberts and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful anthology documenting the thoughts and experiences of those waiting to die
Download or read book From Your Friend Carey Dean written by Lisa Knopp and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Lisa Knopp visited Nebraska’s death row with other death penalty abolitionists in 1995, she couldn’t have imagined that one of the inmates she met that day would become a dear friend. For the next twenty-three years, through visits, phone calls, and letters, a remarkable, platonic friendship flourished between Knopp, an English professor, and Carey Dean Moore, who’d murdered two Omaha cab drivers in 1979 and for which he was executed by lethal injection in 2018. From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska’s Death Row, tells two other stories, as well. One is that of a broken correctional system (Nebraska’s prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, and excessive in their use of solitary confinement), and what it’s like to be incarcerated there, which Moore frequently spoke and wrote about. The other is the story of how a double murderer was transformed and nourished by his faith in God’s promises. Though Moore and Knopp were different types of Christians (he was a Biblical literalist and an evangelical; she is a Biblical contextualist with progressive leanings), they shared faith in God’s love, grace, mercy, and abiding companionship.
Download or read book Dead Man Walking written by Helen Prejean and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment and an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty • "Stunning moral clarity.” —The Washington Post Book World • Basis for the award-winning major motion picture starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn "Sister Prejean is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental. . . . She almost palpably extends a hand to her readers.” —The New York Times Book Review In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. She also came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute—men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing. Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Here Sister Helen confronts both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the fears of a society shattered by violence and the Christian imperative of love. On its original publication in 1993, Dead Man Walking emerged as an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty. Now, some two decades later, this story—which has inspired a film, a stage play, an opera and a musical album—is more gut-wrenching than ever, stirring deep and life-changing reflection in all who encounter it.
Download or read book Welcome to Hell written by Jan Arriens and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rap and Redemption on Death Row written by Alim Braxton and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imprisoned since age nineteen, Alim Braxton has spent more than a quarter century on North Carolina's death row. During that time, he converted to Islam and dedicated his life to redemption. Braxton, a rapper since the age of thirteen, uses his rhymes as a form of therapy and to advocate for prison reform, particularly by calling attention to the plight of the wrongfully incarcerated. This book, a hip-hop-rich prison memoir, chronicles Braxton's struggles and triumphs as he attempts to record an album while on death row, something no one has done before. Braxton's world is complex: full of reflections on guilt, condemnation, incarceration, religious awakening, and the redemptive power of art. Ultimately, Braxton shows us that even amid the brutality of our prison system there are moments of joy, and on death row joy may be the most powerful form of resistance.
Download or read book From Your Friend Carey Dean written by Lisa Knopp and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Lisa Knopp visited Nebraska's death row with other death penalty abolitionists in 1995, she couldn't have imagined that one of the inmates she met that day would become a dear friend. For the next twenty-three years, through visits, phone calls, and letters, a remarkable, platonic friendship flourished between Knopp, an English professor, and Carey Dean Moore, who'd murdered two Omaha cab drivers in 1979 and for which he was executed by lethal injection in 2018. From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska's Death Row, tells two other stories, as well. One is that of a broken correctional system (Nebraska's prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, and excessive in their use of solitary confinement), and what it's like to be incarcerated there, which Moore frequently spoke and wrote about. The other is the story of how a double murderer was transformed and nourished by his faith in God's promises. Though Moore and Knopp were different types of Christians (he was a Biblical literalist and an evangelical; she is a Biblical contextualist with progressive leanings), they shared faith in God's love, grace, mercy, and abiding companionship.
Download or read book Executing Grace written by Shane Claiborne and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this reasoned exploration of justice, retribution, and redemption, the champion of the new monastic movement, popular speaker, and author of the bestselling The Irresistible Revolution offers a powerful and persuasive appeal for the abolition of the death penalty. The Bible says an eye for an eye. But is the state’s taking of a life true—or even practical—punishment for convicted prisoners? In this thought-provoking work, Shane Claiborne explores the issue of the death penalty and the contrast between punitive justice and restorative justice, questioning our notions of fairness, revenge, and absolution. Using an historical lens to frame his argument, Claiborne draws on testimonials and examples from Scripture to show how the death penalty is not the ideal of justice that many believe. Not only is a life lost, so too, is the possibility of mercy and grace. In Executing Grace, he reminds us of the divine power of forgiveness, and evokes the fundamental truth of the Gospel—that no one, even a criminal, is beyond redemption.
Download or read book The Deathday Letter written by Shaun David Hutchinson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oliver lives in a world where at some point in their lives, everyone receives a Deathday Letter, a letter that kindly lets you know you have twenty-four hours left to live. Abraham Lincoln received one, Heath Ledger received one, and on an otherwise typical Thursday morning, fifteen-year-old Oliver Travers receives one. Bummer. With his best friend by his side, Ollie has one day left to live life to the fullest, go on every adventure possible…and set things right with the girl of his dreams.
