Jan. 2 TEXAS: Taylor sets sights on 284th District Court If he makes it through the 2006 Republican primary and general election and goes on to the 284th District Court, a Conroe attorney wants to focus on getting criminal defendants through the process as quickly as possible. Steven Taylor, 56, is 1 of 5 Republicans and one Democrat vying to win the judicial seat left open when Judge Olen Underwood retired in September. Taylor will face fellow Conroe attorneys Ruben Hope, Keith Valigura, Cara Wood and Gilbert Garcia in the March 7 Republican primary. Should he win that and any potential runoff, he would face Willis attorney Nancy McCoy, a Democrat, in the Nov. 7 general election. She is currently running unopposed in the Democratic primary. A criminal trial and appellate attorney, Taylor lived in Conroe from 1997-99, left the area and returned three years ago for a permanent stay. "I liked Conroe when I lived here earlier and decided I wanted to buy a house here," he said. "I like the people in Montgomery County and I like the area." One of only about 40 Texas lawyers with national trial appellate certification, Taylor has worked on 6 death penalty cases and 10 other capital murder cases; his experience gives him the desire to focus on the criminal aspect of the courtroom. "I want to get people incarcerated in jail through the process as quickly as possible," he said, "instead of sitting there for six months waiting for trial or resolution. They're sitting there at the expense of Montgomery County." Underwood, who retired from the 284th District Court in September, split his time between that court and his duties as presiding judge of the Second Administrative Judicial Region, which he was appointed to in 1996. Underwood is still the administrative region's judge. "Judge Underwood did an excellent job as 284th District Court judge, and as administrative judge he's done an excellent job," Taylor said. "But, the 284th itself seemed to suffer with all the work on the administrative side. We've got to be in court all day long to clear cases up." The race for the 284th court is a "wide-open race for all the candidates," said Taylor, a high school football referee for 35 years, noting that each candidate will have different ideas on how to run the court. "It has to do with all the candidates as to how they handle their dockets," he said. (source: The Concoe Courier) VIRGINIA: Warner Considers Ordering DNA Testing in Case of Executed Man With less than 2 weeks left of his term, time is running out for Gov. Mark R. Warner to decide whether to order DNA testing in a nearly quarter-century-old murder case _ a move that could determine if Virginia executed an innocent man in 1992. If the tests show Roger Keith Coleman did not rape and murder his sister-in-law in 1981, it would mark the first time in the United States an executed person is scientifically proven innocent, say death penalty opponents, who are keenly aware that such a result could sway public opinion their way. "I think it would be the final straw for a lot of people who are on the fence on the death penalty," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. An October Gallup poll shows 64 % of Americans still support the death penalty. But that's the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80 % in 1994. Warner - a rumored Democratic presidential contender for 2008 - hopes to finalize negotiations over how the test would be conducted before his term ends Jan. 14, said spokesman Kevin Hall. Coleman was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of 19-year-old Wanda McCoy, his wife's sister, who was found raped, stabbed and nearly beheaded in her home in the southwestern Virginia coal-mining town of Grundy. The case drew international attention as the well-spoken and media-savvy Coleman pleaded his case on talk shows, in magazines and newspapers. Time Magazine featured the coal miner on its cover. Pope John Paul II intervened to try and block the execution. Then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder's office was flooded with thousands of phone calls and letters of protest from around the world. Coleman's attorneys argued he didn't have time to commit the crime, that tests showed semen from two men was found inside McCoy and that another man bragged about murdering her. Despite the controversy, Coleman was executed on May 20, 1992, maintaining his innocence until the end. "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight," the 33-year-old said moments before he was electrocuted. "When my innocence is proven, I hope America will realize the injustice of the death penalty as all other civilized countries have." DNA tests in 1990 placed Coleman within 2 % of the population of those who could have produced the semen at the crime scene. Additional blood typing narrowed Coleman to within 0.2 % of possible perpetrators. His lawyers said the expert who conducted the test - whom they had hired - misinterpreted the results. 4 newspapers and Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey organization that investigated Coleman's case and became convinced of his innocence, sought a court order to have the evidence retested. After the Virginia Supreme Court declined to order the testing in 2002, Centurion Ministries asked Warner to intervene. Warner's decision has been held up in part because the sample is not in the state's possession, Hall said. The evidence is being stored in a Richmond, Calif., lab by the forensic scientist who conducted the initial DNA tests. Edward Blake, who has kept the sample frozen since 1990, has balked at returning the evidence to Virginia, arguing that testing should be conducted at his lab. He has said that Virginia has a vested interest in tests that would either confirm Coleman's guilt or be inconclusive, since a result showing Coleman was innocent could tarnish the state's criminal justice system. Blake has also argued that transporting the fragile evidence - about 1/5 of a drop of sperm - could destroy it. Warner, Blake and Centurion Ministries have been working on a negotiated process in which an independent lab would take possession of the sample and test it, Hall said. "This is an issue that a lot of people have spent a lot of time working on and it certainly is the governor's desire that an acceptable procedure be hammered out before we leave office," Hall said. If the parties can't come to an agreement before Warner leaves, the issue will fall to Democratic Gov.-elect Tim Kaine, who supports DNA retesting in the case, said Delacey Skinner, a Kaine spokeswoman. Tom Scott, a Grundy attorney who helped prosecute the case, said he has no objection to retesting the DNA, and is confident doing so would confirm Coleman's guilt - provided the sample has been properly preserved and not tampered with. "If the integrity of the sample has been violated in some way, we're gonna have an inconclusive result which isn't going to settle anything," he said. Scott said a mountain of evidence points to Coleman as the killer: There was no sign of forced entry at McCoy's house, leading investigators to believe she knew her attacker; Coleman was previously convicted of the attempted rape of a teacher and was charged with exposing himself to a librarian 2 months before the murder; a pubic hair found on McCoy's body was consistent with Coleman's hair; and the original DNA tests placed him within a tiny fraction of the population who could have left semen at the scene. Coleman also failed a lie detector test hours before his execution. "When you add all of this evidence together, it's a connect-the-dots case," he said. "In my mind, there just wasn't any question about it." The push to retest the evidence in Coleman's case is more about advancing an anti-death penalty agenda than trying to determine if an innocent man was executed, said Dianne Clements, president of the Houston-based victim advocacy group Justice for All. Further, she said, new testing is unnecessary and could open up the nation's justice system to a flood of requests by inmates seeking DNA retesting in their cases. "It's been tested before," Clements said. "At what point is it over?" On the Net: Death Penalty Information Center: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ Centurion Ministries: http://www.centurionministries.org/ Justice for All: http://www.jfa.net/ (source: Associated Press) USA: 'Eye for an eye' was counsel for restraint, not license to kill The death penalty discussion was quite interesting in this newspaper's Dec. 25 issue. Several of the writers appear to have made fairly obvious errors in reasoning. One observed, "A majority of the American people support the death penalty." I wish we could solve ethical problems by votes; several problems might become so much easier to deal with. But let's try to apply this procedure. Ninety percent of Austria voted in favor of being governed by Adolf Hitler. By the writer's reasoning, one might have several possible conclusions: - Hitler was a good person since an outstandingly great majority voted for him. - Hitler was a good person for that time and day in Austria because an Austrian majority of that day and age voted for him. - An Austrian majority of that day and age is obviously significantly dumber than a U.S.-American majority would have been of that day and age, and so Hitler was a despicable person nonetheless because a majority of Americans significantly outweighs any other majority in this world. I think that we would not intuit an agreement with the 1st conclusion, that we would find the second too relativistic since also the majority of U.S.-Americans may see matters differently very soon or since other majorities of this world might see things differently from the U.S.-American majority or since some sub-sets of U.S.-American majorities -- all U.S.-American Roman Catholics, for example -- may see things quite differently from the majority that the writer had in mind. Finally, I would sincerely hope that ethnocentric self-exaltation has not quite run so amok as to endorse the 3rd conclusion. The writer also charges Stanley Williams to have been fawning under pressure of the death sentence without any genuine conversion of his views. But Williams' reputation as a writer and his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize certainly speak against such a silly assumption. A second letter writer's self-indulgent sadism feels fundamentally wrong and reprehensible in the extreme. The FBI at www.fbi.gov reports for the year 2000 that violent crimes had a clearance of 47.5 %. The FBI defines "clearance" as someone having been apprehended and turned over to the courts. In other words, a murderer has about a 50/50 chance of being captured and sent to the courts. Take away from this number all violent crimes committed from passion and pure adrenaline, and the remaining coldly rational murderers have an even better chance of getting away with murder. Take away from this number the probably false arrests or the defendants cleared by judicial error or the ones who go to their graves protesting their innocence -- such as Stanley Williams -- perhaps even validly, and the number of murderers not touched by justice increases again. The result is a pitifully small group of people whose severity of punishment might do anything for anyone out there. So why would severity of treatment of the people in jail have any impact at all on the number of violent crimes committed? In fact, the crime statistics for the European Union, which has firmly established that the death penalty is a violation of basic human rights, show that that group of nations is doing better than the vengeful United States in keeping violent crimes low. And the "eye for an eye" justification! Will it ever die? Originally, this was a rule of restraint: Take only one eye for an eye -- don't overdo this. Didn't Christians just celebrate the birthday of one who counseled love of one's enemies? If you could ask him now, would he begin with "depends on how you define enemy" and then exclude criminals? But let's just consider the rule as it is and generalize it. If this kind of tit-for-tat rule were to be sound, then we would rape rapists, steal from thieves, embezzle from embezzlers, beat up spouse beaters, abuse child abusers and so on. Somewhere on that line of get-even acts, surely someone is likely to shut down the series. Such a string of acts would be raw revenge; it would not have anything to do with justice at all. Intuitively, I quite agree with John Paul II's statement that a society has a right to protect itself -- if need be, by killing; but that a society never has the right to exercise revenge. If a police officer shoots and kills a homicidal maniac in the process of the maniac committing homicide, then such killing is justified by general principles of self-defense or societal defense. But if a society kills a person already confined, then such killings can only be justified under some perverse sense of justice, the perversion being the thinly disguised yearning for retribution -- a troglodyte mentality, in other words. Certainly, such a step cannot possibly be justified as an enlightened society protecting itself. If we were a truly pragmatic lot, we should be looking at correctional systems that manage to rehabilitate, correctional systems that limit recidivism and a social structure that reduces the immense lag between wealth and poverty, the latter being the culprit that tends to lead to violent behavior at a scale that is offensive to us, particularly -- in all probability -- because the poor are offensive to us. Dow Chemical and Union Carbide's murder of 20,000 Indians cost these companies $470 million in fees. Let's see. That would be about $23,500 a person dead. Take away some of that for all the people injured and still today living with a polluted site, and we'd reduce that figure significantly for a person dead. Perhaps, we could get away with murder at, say, about $15,000 a pop, if we were to be judged by the same standards as the CEO of the chemical plant in India was judged. Or shall we think of the hundreds of thousands dead and dying in Iraq? Whom should we incarcerate and eventually execute in that connection, one wonders? (source: The Daytona Beach News-Journal - Reinhold Schlieper, Ph.D., a philosophy professor, lives in Palm Coast) **************** Blind vengeance----Death penalty counters church's teachings Last month while California's governor contemplated the fate of Stanley Tookie Williams, whom he later had executed, Gov. Jeb Bush signed 2 death warrants for two men on Florida's death row. Later this month, Clarence Hill, 47, and Arthur Rutherford, 56, also will be executed by lethal injection. Both men are guilty of shedding innocent blood. And both have been imprisoned for some years: their crimes were committed more than 20 years ago. Yet, is it any more necessary for the state of Florida to kill these men than it was for California to kill Williams? Does society really make a coherent statement against killing by killing? The argument has been made that the application of the death penalty represents the legitimate self defense of society from an unjust aggressor, i.e. the murderer. And, historically, the Roman Catholic Church has conceded the point that the state can rightly apply capital punishment when absolutely necessary, i.e. when otherwise impossible to defend society. There is, in church teaching, no moral equivalence between the execution of the guilty after due process of law and the willful destruction of innocent life that happens with abortion or euthanasia. However, Pope John Paul II pointed out in Evangelium Vitae (No. 56): given the organization of today's penal system and the option of imposing life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, such an "absolute necessity" is "practically non-existent." Also, it is difficult to defend the "necessity" of executing someone when often his accomplice, in exchange for information or testimony, is given through plea bargaining a lesser sentence. And while some loved ones seek "closure," it is hard to see how capital punishment as "social retribution" or "institutional vengeance" really serves the purpose of punishment which should be designed to redress the disorder caused by the offense. The death penalty cannot bring the victims back to life. Even from a purely pragmatic or utilitarian point of view, the death penalty cannot be defended. It is not an effective deterrent to crime. Texas has executed more criminals than any other state, yet, it still has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. And the death penalty is not cost effective. It costs the state less to imprison someone for the remainder of his natural life than to execute him. Given that it is irreversible, society has rightly provided that it be applied only after lengthy and expensive legal appeals. And, in spite of this, there are more than 400 documented cases of wrongly convicted persons executed in the U.S. during the last century. Willful murder is a heinous crime; it cries to God for justice. Yet, God did not require Cain's life for having spilt Abel's blood. While God certainly punished history's first murderer, he nevertheless put a mark on him to protect Cain from those wishing to kill him to avenge Abel's murder (cf. Genisis 4:15). Like Cain, the condemned prisoner on death row - for all the evil of his crimes - remains a person. Human dignity - that of the convicted as well as our own - is best served by not resorting to this extreme and unnecessary punishment. Modern society has the means to protect itself without the death penalty. The commutation to life imprisonment would serve the common good of all by helping break our society's spiral of violence for the "eye for an eye" mentality will just end up making us all blind. (source: Ocala Star-Banner - Bishop Thomas Wenski serves the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orlando, Florida) NORTH CAROLINA: Jacksonville pastor answers the call The Rev. James Brown says it is his duty as a Christian to speak-up against the death penalty. He believes it's what Jesus would do. "I can't see Jesus lethally injecting someone based on some evidence or what someone believes to be true," said Brown, the pastor of First Baptist Church on Broadhurst Road in Jacksonville. Brown is convinced that Jesus would be willing to let a guilty man go free if it meant saving the life of an innocent man wrongly accused. "State-sponsored murder is still murder," Brown said. "Even if the government authorizes it, that doesn't make it right. I think the Christian community has the responsibility of rising to the occasion, even when it may be against the will of the masses of people." He has also welcomed folks from the People of Faith Against the Death Penalty - a nonprofit, interfaith organization whose mission is to abolish the death penalty - to hold events at First Baptist Church. Brown has worked hard to try and convince state legislators to temporarily suspend executions. In December, the organization gave Brown the outstanding community service award, recognizing him for his leadership in educating and mobilizing faith communities to act to abolish the death penalty. "Rev. Brown has continued to answer the call," said Alyson Newman, president of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, in her presentation to Brown at the awards banquet in Raleigh. "He has opened the doors of First Baptist Church for events on the death penalty, and he has encouraged his flock and the greater Jacksonville community to seek alternative solutions to violent crime and the death penalty." It's an award that means a great deal to Brown, although it's not one he thinks he deserves alone. "I am honored, and I accept the award on behalf of all those who have worked diligently to rectify something that is clearly wrong," Brown said. Doesn't mince words While Brown can mesmerize listeners with his life experiences weaved into stories with memorable lessons, this gentle preacher doesn't mince words. He's given almost 40 years to the cloth and will celebrate his 24th year at First Baptist Church this June. His faith tells him that he can't accept ending another person's life because a prosecutor convinced a jury that someone was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It's just not enough. "We are told that we are not to play God," Brown said. "Since only God can give life, it is my position - and there are many Christians who share it - that only God should take life." Mistakes are made. DNA evidence has set several people free, including Leo Waters of New Bern. He was wrongfully convicted in Onslow County of armed robbery, kidnapping, 1st-degree rape and first-degree sexual offense in January 1982 and was released from prison in January 2003 after 2 DNA tests proved he couldn't have committed the crime. Gov. Mike Easley granted Waters a pardon of innocence in August. In 2001, Easley granted a full pardon of innocence to Lesly Jean, a former Camp Lejeune Marine who spent nine years in prison for a rape he didn't commit. "Even when we research an issue, we still have the capability of being wrong," Brown said. "Until we can know - not just as a lawyer says beyond a shadow of a doubt - but until we can know, we have no right to take a life." Evidence not enough As a black man, who grew up in Rocky Mount, Brown, 58, said he knows there was a time when evidence wasn't even necessary to sentence a man to death. "To execute didn't always mean to find the guilty," Brown said. "There was a time when all you had to do is say he was black, and he was guilty." An imperfect and at times tainted justice system concerns Brown when a sentence of death is an option. "It is statistically proven that the death penalty has been inflicted on a bias basis, whether it's racial, economics or education," Brown said. "The question remains for the sake of executing those whom you think may be guilty, how many innocent people would you execute?" In September 2001, Robert Bacon Jr. was scheduled to be executed. Bacon admitted to the 1987 murder of Marine Staff Sgt. Glennie Clark and was convicted of 1st-degree murder by an all-white, Onslow County jury. His co-defendant, Bonnie Sue Clark, who is white, was also convicted of 1st-degree murder. Bonnie Sue Clark was given a life sentence. Bacon was sentenced to death. Brown, members of the People of Faith Against the Death Penalty and other Onslow County residents refused to let Bacon die without a fight. They believed his death sentence was the result of racial bias. "Just two days after receiving the cold call for help, Rev. Brown had a crowd of 50 people at a press conference at his church at noon on a work day," Newman said. "Rev. Brown helped organize speakers, hosted the event and presented a moving poem about why, especially in the wake of Sept. 11, our government should not be bringing terror - in the form of the death penalty - upon its own citizens." After sitting on death row for 14 years and just two days before he was to die by lethal injection in early October 2001, Bacon's life was spared. Easley commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Brown doesn't propose that North Carolina should just let its criminals go free, but he thinks the money spent on death penalty cases could do more good if it was spent elsewhere. "We need to focus our energy and resources on trying to stop crime," Brown said. "I believe some of the money spent trying to punish the guilty would be better spent trying to regain America's innocence." "Unworthy" is how Brown describes himself when asked about the award he received. The recognition was not a sign to him that his work is done. "I plan to work to get this church and as many churches as I can to actively support the People of Faith with prayers and finances to keep this issue before the public," Brown said. (source: Jacksonville Daily News) ************** D.A. says low funding cause for delayed trials The court system in North Carolina, and the criminal justice system as a whole, is in "terrible shape" due to underfunding by government, including the lack of provided resources and offered incentives, said District Attorney Dewey Hudson, whose district covers Sampson County. In an interview with The Sampson Independent, the district attorney said that his office has been saddled with more responsibilities over the years, but that those extra duties have not come with increased compensation in the way of personnel to get the job done in a timely manner. And Hudson's office is not the only one, he said. "They're not giving us the resources," said Hudson. He said that there are 30 murder cases currently pending in the district, which also includes Jones, Onslow and Duplin counties. In Sampson County alone, there are 2 triple murder cases that have had to be put on hold due to the time it takes to get lab reports on evidence submitted to the State Bureau of Investigation. Hudson points to a murder more than a year and a half ago as a perfect example. Kenneth Hartley, 23, stands accused in the murder of three family members, including the stabbing deaths of his mother and 9-year-old stepbrother and strangling his 13-year-old stepsister to death after allegedly raping her. And the case is at a stand still. "I need to know the lab results before I can perform my constitutional duties and make a decision as to whether to seek the death penalty," said Hudson. "How can I do that when I don't know what all the evidence is? Incredibly, the defendant has been in jail since June 2004." The district attorney said that the first lab report was just received recently, and the office is still awaiting one more. He said that it is "absolutely absurd" to still be waiting for evidence a year and a half after a murder. "Unfortunately, this is becoming the norm in my district," the district attorney said. "It's so unfair to victims' families to endure this. I feel so sorry for the families of victims for having to wait so long seeking justice." Hudson said that he has hundreds of drug cases that have been pending for months upon months because prosecutors are awaiting lab reports from the SBI. "The earliest we get anything back (from the SBI lab) is 8 months," said Hudson. Drug analysis takes a year on average, and DNA analysis is "longer than that," he said. However, Hudson said that the blame does not fall with the SBI. That agency is struggling with a larger workload and limited personnel just as the D.A.'s office is, he said. "That just shows you, it's not the D.A.'s office," said Hudson. "It's the justice system." Hudson said that he currently has 14 permanent assistant district attorneys that are responsible for prosecuting everything from minor traffic violations, in the form of inspection violations, to capital murder cases. And that number has stayed stagnant for the last 10 years, even while more responsibilities have been put on those assistant district attorneys through laws such as the Crime Victims Rights Act, which states that victims have the right to be notified of the dates and times of court proceedings and the status of appeals. Victims wishing to be kept informed throughout the trial and appeals process can notify the prosecutor who is handling the case, the law stipulates. "But they gave us no personnel to implement that act," Hudson pointed out. He said that some assistance has been received. Hudson secured 2 additional prosecutors from a federal gun grant paid by the federal government and Duplin, Sampson and Onslow counties, but even those will be lost in a matter of months. "Even with those 2, we're swamped," said Hudson. "And I lose both of those in 2006." "It's not only about funding," said Hudson. "You have to have salaries there to." Additional prosecutors is a positive, but the district attorney said that he wants to be able to keep talented assistant district attorneys in the courtroom. As he has been told by an assistant district attorney of his own, "We don't just need another warm body," but someone who can get the job done. Hudson said that his assistant district attorneys start at an average annual salary of $38,000. The average salary of assistant district attorneys in Hudsons district is just over $60,000. Hudson said that they go to three more years of law school and most have tens of thousands of dollars of educational debt in the form of student loans. "I have to deal with defense lawyers who apparently have an unlimited budget and who earn more on one case than my assistant district attorneys make in a year," said Hudson. Those same incentives could also act to help the SBI, whose experienced lab workers often leave to other states for bigger pay, Hudson said. And while the D.A.'s Office maintains its numbers, the numbers concerning crime have only risen over the years. "Crime has certainly increased in my district, also what is required to prosecute these cases," said Hudson. The district attorney said that he has heard the stance against rising crime that the state should take is "not to build more prisons, but to build more schools." "That's all fine and dandy, but when a guy like Carl Stuffel (convicted murderer set to be released in 2006) is being released because we don't have enough prison beds, thats a problem," said Hudson. "The number one responsibility of federal, state and local government is the protection and safety of its citizens. And in North Carolina, were failing to do that." (source: The Sampson Independent) KENTUCKY: Book Review----Civil rights pioneers; Stanley, Breathitt risked much to advance justice in Kentucky 'A Distant Light" is a carefully researched and thoughtfully written reflection on racial justice in Kentucky. Racism and mob violence in post-Civil War Kentucky are the book's primary themes, but at its heart, this is the story of two great Kentucky governors, Augustus Owsley "A.O." Stanley and Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt Jr., both from western Kentucky, whose bravery and clarity of purpose helped bring to an end the last vestiges of government-sponsored racial injustice throughout the state. Author Bill Cunningham is a respected western Kentucky circuit court judge and the author of 6 books about his native region. "A Distant Light" is almost certainly his best work yet. Against the backdrop of vigilante justice that accounted for more than 350 unlawful executions or lynchings of mostly African Americans throughout Kentucky, Cunningham tells the spellbinding story of the 1917 trial of Lube Martin, a black man accused of killing a white man in Murray. Central to this book is the heroic effort of Gov. A.O. Stanley, a resident of Henderson, to assure Martin's safekeeping while in the state's custody awaiting trial. Stanley's actions are made all the more daring by Cunningham's accounts of angry lynch mobs whose appetite for vengeance -- often motivated as much by envy and greed as by retaliation -- took the lives and property of many former slaves throughout the region. One particularly horrific account involved a black man accused of raping a white woman near Mayfield in 1906. Spurred by a bloodthirsty crowd surrounding the courthouse, the Graves County court tried, convicted and hanged the accused in the Mayfield square all in less than one hour. One may say the modern judicial system allows death row inmates too many appeals, but the Mayfield example is a disturbing reminder that, without forceful judicial intervention, mob rule could be the norm. Cunningham is at his best as a historian when he recounts Lube Martin's saga. The story begins with a deadly altercation between Martin and a member of a prominent Murray family and Martin's subsequent arrest. The story then unfolds with a midnight train ride by Stanley from Louisville to Murray where Stanley averts the hanging of the Calloway County circuit judge and commonwealth's attorney by an angry gang of Murray farmers demanding that Martin be handed over for lynching. Stanley then delivers a rousing speech in the courthouse to a swarm of angry citizens -- mostly tobacco farmers who only months before helped vote Stanley into office by a wide margin, in large part due to Stanley's support of tobacco farmers while a member of Congress. With order restored, news of Stanley's dramatic rescue "reverberated throughout the nation," according to Cunningham, as papers across the land lauded Stanley for both his courage and his eloquence. Cunningham's analysis of the ensuing trial and appeal is as enlightening as it is gut-wrenching. In the book's second half, the reader is introduced to another western Kentuckian, Hopkinsville native Ned Breathitt. Breathitt is described as a New Deal Democrat, like so many other west Kentuckians, who had seen his impoverished and isolated region transformed by TVA electrification and other federal programs sponsored by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democratic administration. Cunningham explains how 38-year-old Breathitt defeated former Gov. A.B. "Happy" Chandler by a wide margin in the 1963 Democratic gubernatorial primary, only to falter in the lead-up to the general election when then-Gov. Bert Combs decided to issue an executive order ending segregation in all public accommodations statewide. Cunningham asserts that Breathitt's challenger, Louie Nunn, used Combs' action to arouse racial fear and resentment among Kentucky voters. The book makes a compelling case that in the fall of 1963, a major event in the civil rights struggle at the national level changed attitudes about civil rights in Kentucky, which helped Breathitt win the election by a razor thin margin. The book ends with interesting details regarding Breathitt's emergence as a national civil rights leader and his close friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. With this book, Cunningham gives to Kentuckians a well-documented perspective on our violent and not-too-distant past. This point-of-view is not something commonly taught in history courses; nonetheless, all Kentuckians should understand our ignoble past where race relations are concerned. Perhaps if we do, we will be better equipped to deal with the legacy of that sad history. Equally important, "A Distant Light" lends strong credence to the notion that important contributions of many different kinds come from across our state, including that sometimes forgotten region Cunningham calls west Kentucky. (source: Louisville Courier-Journal; A Mayfield native, Alex Waldrop is a partner in the Louisville law firm of Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs)
