What does a caring community do when one of its members is badly hurt?
 

A month ago, Albany and Schenectady experienced an epidemic of violence – a series of shootings  and stabbings that sent three people (including an 11 year-old boy) to the hospital with serious injuries, and two others to the morgue.
 

The Death Penalty Fizzles Again

June 30, 2010 at 10:02 pm by David Kaczynski
 

David Kaczynski
Executive Director

There’s an annual conference of death penalty abolitionists organized by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (www.ncadp.org). For years there were two elderly women who attended faithfully. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t remember their names. But I can see their faces quite clearly in my mind’s eye. Both were from South Carolina. One white, one Hispanic. “Death row mothers” we call them. They came to the conference seeking community, chasing hope.

 by David Kaczynski
Technically, we’re not brothers, but Bill Babbitt calls my mom “Momma” and she in turns calls him her “forth son” – after Ted and me and my other honorary brother, Gary Wright, who survived one of Ted’s bombs in 1987.
 

New York’s record on wrongful convictions is beyond embarrassing. A couple of days ago Frank Sterling, a 46-year-old former truck driver, was exonerated and released from prison after serving 19 years for a murder that he did not commit.
 
Add Mr. Sterling to a list that now numbers 27 people exonerated by DNA since January 1, 2000 after being wrongfully convicted of murder or rape in New York State. This list does not include the 11 people exonerated by means other than DNA over the past 10 years.
 

Over the past several weeks, I have received dozens of letters from inmates serving a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole (LWOP) in various states.
 

NYADP was one of the first state death penalty abolition programs to hire a full time staff person who represents and reaches out to victims of crime or their survivors as important participants in the criminal justice policy arena.  Marie Verzulli, Victim/Survivor Advocate for NYADP since April 2006, is herself a murder-victim family member and founded our Family and Friends of Homicide Victims (FFHV) group.  NYADP received funding for Marie’s staff work and for support of the FFHV group from State Senator Neil Breslin through a legislative grant awarded for the 2009-10 fis

The White Box Gallery, unassumingly tucked away on a cobblestone sidestreet in China Town, has for the past few weeks displayed a series of ink sketches and oil paintings called No Human Way to Kill by British artist Robert Priseman. On Wednesday, I arrived at the White Box to meet Robert and to view these.

This Thursday, 3/25 at 7 pm, David Chura will be at The Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza signing copies of his new book: I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine.