Casually I began to take my attention to the sentence of death issue by reading some letters of convicts; those letters where publicized on a famous Italian newspaper called �il manifesto�. I began to write to some of them, a few responded to my letters and so was started a wonderful experience. I believe that they are sensitive, sincere and delicate men, but I found also alone men, desperate, rejected by the world. Men who, for the majority, come from family situation that are very critical or even absent, tragic; they are often black man, Hispanic or facing part of another ethnic minority. Men who, most of the times, have learned to read and write during their stay in prison; men who need friendship, they don't want to feel alone; men who have an extraordinary goodwill, who want to struggle, who don't accept to wait their death without fighting.

But, also, I found true and profound friends capable of great sensitivity and tenderness, generous and altruistic. During these 10 past years I had long correspondents with Paul Rougeau and Clifton Russell, they were both killed some years ago with a fatal injection within the Huntsville prison in Texas although many and many people, in Italy and around the world, claimed for saving their life. And, I ensure you, was an enormous sorrow.

Actually I'm in correspondence with Eugene Broxton: one man extraordinary, kind, generous, sensitive: a true friend. I'm not a judge, or obviously God: I don't know if all these men are really innocent, but this is not my intentions. About Eugene, I'm totally sure that he is innocent: but I don't fight (we don't fight) against the sentence of death only because this so-called justice kills also the innocents. I fight, we fight, against the sentence of death because this is a real barbarity, a sentence terrible and cruel that authorizes one Court, one Jury, one State to kill as, the convict, has, reciprocally, killed.

The sentence of death is not even a valid deterrent against the criminality, as demonstrated by the fact that, especially the Nations that applies it, have the most high percentage of murders compared with the rest of the world. So, the sentence of death doesn't serve; the chain of the death grows in an unbearable way, this is not justice, by contrary it's a revenge given with coldness.

Have a look at the perfect example of O. J. Simpson, who was able not to be condemned thanks to America's most famous lawyers. Death penalty is terribly cruel. Those who die on the electrical chair suffer from frightful pains before dying; those who are killed by lethal injection experience tens of minutes agony. This is NOT worthy of a civil people!

Moreover, death penalty expects tribunals to be always right and to never make mistakes, but we do know this is not possible. From the moment when United Stated reintroduced capital penalty up to now, many cases have been discovered where innocent men had been executed; many years after their death, those men were discovered not to be guilty.

Of course I feel pity and pain for victims and their families, but death penalty does not pay the crime back; it only lengthen a never-ending pain chain by the terrible retaliation law eye per eye, tooth per tooth.

All men have the right to justice, but justice has to be equal and apply such penalties that have the right proportion with the crime; and justice must allow every man to have the possibility to redeem and to repent, and to be a human being again.
Capital penalty and its frightful non-reversibility destroy a life, and kill the man as well as hope: the hope everybody should have for a justice that does not cover its proper hands in blood.

At left, Captain Joe Byrd prison cemetery - Texas Department of Corrections. Here are buried all indigent killed inmates; on their tombs no name, only the number they had when they were incarcerated.

At left, a prison inmate sweeps the floor of the "Riding the Thunderbolt" exhibit at Huntsville's Texas Prison Museum, which opens recently. The centerpiece of the exhibit is the electric chair in which 361 inmates died. It "has some kind of nostalgic effect on people" says museum chief Weldon Svoboda.
(No comment!!!)