Stories of the people who live and die on death row. By David Gardner.

I first learned about Reggie Lewis through community member Pat Heffron, who has been writing to Reggie for fifteen years now and has visited him on several occasions. Pat would often share some of Reggie's poems with us when he would lead our Friday morning prayer.

As some of you may already know, Reggie Lewis has been confined to Pennsylvania's death row for twenty years now. While imprisoned he has developed a true passion for writing and became a first class poet, essayist, and author of several books.

His latest book is a collection of essays which highlight the injustices of death row, the lives of inmates living there and the court system that sent them there. He makes a clear case to the reader how an innocent person could get caught in a web of racism, falsified evidence, jail-house informants and crooked detectives, and end up sitting on death row waiting to be executed.

Reggie's true talent as an essayist shines in the autobiographical details which makes his writing come to life. In the opening essay, Sweeter than Sugar, Reggie recounts his early childhood growing up in North Philadelphia. He was able to weave in the harsh realities of the urban poor, while at the same time use humor to entertain the audience as he recounts a tale of standing up to a neighborhood bully. Through his writing, I could really see the block he grew up on, and I could smell the scent of alcohol that wafted into his neighborhood storefront church on Sunday mornings from the speakeasy next door.

While the book certainly focuses on the death penalty, the reader is not overwhelmed by the topic. Rather, Reggie brings the issue to life by sharing the stories of the people who live and die on death row. We meet Fast Freddie, and endearing mentally ill character on death row who creates fantastical stories and the Bruderhof youth who organize a march on the State capital to free Reggie Lewis and end the death penalty.

Reggie not only makes a clear case for his own innocence, but also for others caught up in the court system, like Eddie Romero and Timothy Rice. Eddie Romero was from Puerto Rico, with little English skills or money, and ended up being framed for a crime. He was not only assigned and ineffective lawyer, who was disbarred soon after the case was over, but he was not provided with a court translator either.

Timothy Rice, and African-American resident of Philadelphia, was arrested for murder shortly after being awarded a settlement from a lawsuit against the police department. The fact that Timothy's clothes lacked any gun residue, and that he didn't match the eyewitness descriptions of the killer, did not deter the state of Pennsylvania from convicting him.

There are other such stories in the book, and these are only the stories of the people Reggie has personally met on one death row, in one state, out of the thirty-eight that continue to execute prisoners.

It would be naive of me to claim that, while reading this book, I could understand what it is like to live on death row, to know what it is like to count the days until my eventual scheduled execution. However, I truly beleive that this book does scratch the surface, and it paints a realistic picture of the nightmarish reality that many Americans are forced to live through, yet so few of us on the outside truly understand. It is this ability that makes Reggie stand out as an accomplished author.

Check out the book...