BOOKS

...Not all of them have, of course...

...The voters might balk at killing a grandmother (even one convicted of murder), but who would object to executing a cop killer...

...Prisons—an affiliation of prison activists across the region—elected him its new coordinator and decided to focus on working with prisoners on Death Row, Ingle has been directly involved in the fight to abolish the death penalty...

...He knew as well as I did that he could intervene and that he had authority to do so...

...All of these headlines appeared in the month of May: Capital Punishment Gaining Favor as Public Seeks Retribution— The Washington Post...

...By almost any count, a growing majority, an overwhelming majority, of Americans tell pollsters they support the death penalty...

...But he decided to make it his business to find out...

...And day in, day out, there is the joy of helping the helpless, comforting distraught families waiting for someone to die and being with them through that death...

...I have known Joe Ingle and many of his Coalition colleagues, and admired their work, since 1979 when they invited me to speak at their annual meeting in Nashville, and I have always wondered how they kept their spirits up, where they got their energy, how they avoided burnout in the face of so many depressing defeats, so many depressing deaths...

...Governor Jim Hunt [of North Carolina], who was in a bitterly fought race for the U.S...

...When it came to the point, Hunt didn't balk at killing the grandmother either...

...Time and again, in these cases, Ingle encounters a governor who takes the coward's way out when faced with a political decision to save a condemned man or woman's life...

...No court, no governor would listen...

...Senate with incumbent Jesse Helms, would be asked to decide clemency on James Hutchins, who had been convicted of killing three police officers...

...What is going on...

...But almost all Death Row prisoners then were in Southern prisons, and Coalition members feared the U.S...

...In theory...

...This book is his story of that mission...

...they think the celebrated cases of innocent people wrongly convicted are in the past or in the movies or, like Randall Dale Adams in Texas last year, waiting on Death Row for someone to come, to their rescue...

...about 75 per cent say they're in favor...

...As much spiritual autobiography as death-penalty chronicle, it tells a gripping story of Ingle's involvement in the lives of Death Row prisoners, and theirs in his...

...Four of Joe Ingle's dead friends were almost certainly innocent of the murders they died for, and a fifth, who did pull the trigger, was almost certainly acting in self-defense...

...Donna and Jerry Gorman, Virginia abolitionists writing recently in the magazine of the War Resisters League, count more than two dozen innocent people condemned to death in the United States since 1972, whose sentences were later overturned by new evidence...

...Killing Hutchins first was a more pragmatic political decision...

...H The finality of this form of punishment in a fallible world is the one thing that seems to trouble many people otherwise untroubled by state-sanctioned murder...

...This would be more politically palatable to Hunt than ordering the death of the condemned prisoner who had been scheduled to die next: Velma Barfield, a grandmother...

...That is one aspect of daily life for people such as Joe Ingle...

...focus that spring despite the fact that no executions had been held for years...

...As I traveled back to Nashville after visiting prisoners on North Carolina's Death Row," he writes, "I thought about what it meant to be a Christian in a country determined to legally kill people...

...and closed with what was becoming a routine and nauseating exercise of Southern governors: invoking the will of God to support such action...

...Support for Death Penalty on the Wane—Pacific News Service...

...Thirteen of them are dead, lost to the executioner...

...In truth," he wrote in The Times, "the public's desire for capital punishment is far weaker than opinion polls suggest...

...Some examples: "I had no illusions for Robert Wayne Williams through clemency, since the incumbent Republican governor, David Treen [of Louisiana], was running for reelection...

...That was March 1984...

...The callers are viciously denouncing the stay...

...Ingle describes the day he helped secure a stay of execution for an innocent man later killed by the state of Louisiana...

...Like so many Southern social-justice activists, Ingle came to his politics via the church...

...I have on my desk a stack of recent clippings...

...The reason lives become political pawns is, of course, the politicians' perception that they are facing a bloodthirsty electorate that will send them packing if they don't sign those death warrants...

...But these people also seem to have an unjustified faith in the criminal-justice system...

...Hunt lost to Helms anyway...

...But such polls don't tell the whole story...

...Devising intricate legal challenges, writing articles, making speeches, holding press conferences, organizing demonstrations, and personally ministering to prisoners are all part of his fight...

...They were right...

...After ordination in 1973, he headed back to the South and soon was Tennessee director of the Southern Prison Ministry...

...There is home and family, too, and they are in this book...

...he had found his life's work...

...This has been Ingle's mission in life...

...Many have dropped out along the way, or turned to different battles...

...But it is almost never police, prosecutors, or judges who go after such evidence, and it's not the system that is working if justice is finally done...

...more than any other aspect of his work, the clemency question brings out what little cynicism there is in his bones...

...Two-thirds of his book is devoted to their stories, arranged in chronological order of their deaths...

...Ingle and the lawyers for these five tried repeatedly to introduce strong evidence in these cases...

...The Death Penalty's Shaky Support—The New York Times...

...He desperately wants to stop the killing— the official killing done in his name and ours by those who switch on the power to our electric chairs, drop the poison pellets in our gas chambers, plunge our needles filled with lethal chemicals, pull the triggers of our firing-squad rifles...

...In July 1976, the Court upheld the new laws in Texas, Georgia, and Florida...

...No, the system does not work for the wrongfully accused...

...And the closing remarks about 'The Invisible One' who would judge us all sent me over the boiling point in anger...

...A minister of the United Church of Christ who lives in Nashville, he has been tireless in pursuing it...

...Adams, in fact, is not alone...

...When offered specific alternatives to the death penalty, majorities as large as 70 per cent opt for life...

...Supreme Court was about to uphold the new death-penalty statutes passed since old ones had been thrown out as unconstitutional...

...But Ingle carries on, and now I almost understand how...

...They should have strapped him into Baldwin's lap and pulled the switch on both of them...

...The trouble with executive clemency is politics...

...The following year, the Southern Coalition was formed...

...Approaching the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain on the way from Angola prison to New Orleans, he listens to a radio call-in show...

...Since the spring of 1976 when the Southern Coalition on Jails and...

...He stated he would not intervene...

...Also like so many others, he had to leave the South to straighten things out for himself, and he headed for the place where many others had gone before— Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a life working and living with the poor in East Harlem...

...If an appellate court won't act, the system still offers executive clemency...

...And that was it...

...William J. Bowers, a researcher at Northeastern University' with much experience in the field, says pollsters don't ask the right questions...

...There are precious moments of recognition, though—such as the occasion a few years ago when the five political parties represented in the Swedish Parliament, from far left to far right, joined in a resolution nominating Joe Ingle for the Nobel Peace Prize...

...It was only a matter of time before executions were resumed with a vengeance across the United States...

...It is outsiders like Ingle, and volunteer lawyers, journalists, friends, and family...

...More important to him, certainly, is the community working with him to make people understand that killing a man or woman convicted of murder in order to demonstrate reverence for life makes no sense at all...

...Their perception comes from polls...

...Joe Ingle befriended dozens of condemned men and women...

...Not only Baldwin, but this [Southern Coalition] guy also...

...Saving the lives of Death Row prisoners is not a popular cause, regardless of such hopeful signs as these polls, and the abolitionists endure much abuse...

...He knew nothing about prisons, had never been near one...

...The thoughtful among them do seem to want the state to be sure it is killing "the right person...

...The Coalition adopted its Death Row Linda Rocawich is the managing editor of The Progressive...

...The wretched displays of venom by gubernatorial candidates in this spring's primaries—especially in Texas and California-are only the latest examples...

...His thirteen cases humanize the arguments about the death penalty...

...She died by lethal injection the weekend before the election...

...And I felt better about life, if more angry about senseless state-sponsored death, when I closed this book...

...Ingle was on the road when he got the news...

...When people are asked simply, "Do you favor or oppose the death penalty...

...For his seminary project that year, he began regular visits to the Bronx House of Detention...

...It is not a way everyone can take, this road mapped by an abiding faith in a Christian God and bolstered by ready and frequent turns to prayer, but everyone can use a bit of uplift now and then...

...Sometimes, Ingle will tell how he is mowing the lawn when the telephone rings with a court decision, and we are reminded that he doesn't spend all his time rushing from one Death Row to another...

...In the fall of 1971, at the beginning of his second year there, Ingle was sick at heart as the tragedy at Attica unfolded, as cops and guards finally stormed the prison and killed thirty-nine people...

...The governor's statement infuriated me...

...The host interrupts with his own sentiments, that "they should have put Tim Baldwin in the electric chair and fried him...

...Ingle is not surprised...