welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host today show is about an organization called witness to innocence or w t i it was founded in two thousand and three by sister helen prejean internationally renowned anti death penalty activist and ray crone the hundredth person exonerated from death row in the united states witness to innocence began as a project of the new orleans based moratori campaign education fund two years later they moved to philadelphia where it transformed itself into one of the most powerful and unique anti death penalty organizations in the united states examiner remembers have educated tens of thousands of americans through speaking events at colleges universities professional associations government officials and basically they have shifted public opinion on the death penalty playing an integral role in successful repeal campaigns in new mexico new jersey illinois maryland and nebraska so i have to guess today the first one i will be talking to is stephanie she is the director of communications for witness to innocence welcome stephanie thank you so you know i interviewed  exonerated spent twenty nine years in prison three or four of them on death row and exonerated and this is kind of one of the most compelling things about abolishing the death penalty once you put someone to death you can't say oh sorry so talk to me about your involvement and your personal mission here as well but i've been involved in abolition work in washington state where i  so it was through involvement on a local regional state level that i met then current executive director of witness innocence that's my cue that's  in the world to be involved with when i joined aniston at the time they did a weekend of faith in action to abolish the death penalty and i have and i found that really intriguing i like i've always been fascinated by places where the interesting intersections and so that was that was the goal by which i got involved with the death penalty and then once you start to a volunteer on it on an issue people start associating you with that issue and then you just get more and more  yeah so you know again i can't say it enough you know just in terms of the human race killing somebody doesn't resolve the problem but the possibility of killing an innocent human being makes the legal system murderers really and so one of the arguments is you know somebody kill somebody kills somebody you know it's justice so how do you counter that argument well basically i i think the death penalty would be defensible if it accomplished anything it not any any one thing but if you could say that it hot that it accomplished anything we could maybe have a conversation about how it's defensible but it there's a lot of research that shows it doesn't it doesn't cost last money it doesn't then it doesn't achieve anything that actually makes us safer as a society the cost argument i always found really interesting because it comes up initially as very cold and calculated but i actually find financial argument and we're all one because it  build infrastructure to support getting stanley members a lot of people in the aftermath that crime don't have a good support system and more resources available to them and so the financial argument that that initially re we are share that same hope and value we all want to live in a safe society and the death penalty does not do anything to guess they're right you know it's interesting a number of years ago i interviewed a corrections officer who worked in new jersey state new jersey state prison in trenton for fifty years thirty years as a corrections officer and twenty as a civilian and he brought with him an inmate who had been charged with murder he had been part of a robbery where someone got killed he had pulled the trigger he was sent to prison for eighteen years and eventually got out and they became good friends but  i asked him is at the time that you were involved in this you know he described as being a gangster being cool did you ever think of the consequences or did you ever intend any of this to happen and he said absolutely not you're not thinking i said did you ever think you were going to get caught and his reaction was what who me so it's in that sense the the whole thing is like saying smoking you know if you continue to smoke you will get lung cancer well i don't have it yet you know it's out there somewhere so i think part of the thing is it doesn't deter anybody nobody's thinking they're going to get caught they wouldn't be doing it if they thought they were going to get caught so in that sense it's not a deterrent and i think the the financial thing is significant because they could be using the resources differently so your organization is not an innocence project that doesn't go into prisons and represent people who say they're innocent your organization is working with first of all to abolish the death penalty and then working talking about this and sharing their life experiences and making a difference that way is there any transition that you participated in that has them transition more easily into civilian there's no federal standard for compensation some states do a good job with compensation some states have no no compensation plan and you might be released after being in prison for two decades with you know a jack in a bus ticket or something like that any say oh yes he's working we've been engaged with the department of justice and working towards a federal standard  and part of that is just helping helping people understand what xander is needed because it's not immediately apparent to people who haven't gone through that in a simple things like an identification card a social security exonerated you know yes you're still viewed as damaged goods somehow yeah yeah yeah so we have about another minute in our part of the conversation before we talk with leno what is your biggest challenge and your requests to the world that large so i mean there are number of challenges but i would say right now looking  d so many people who are doing good work struggle for funding so we have speakers that we can send out there a lot of people who would love to host speakers don't necessarily have funding set aside for something like that you know when when they're out is finding that it's nightly be great to send you know two or three people rather than one so i think just stunning in general and i think  you know for our has ation and other organizations doing good work findings are always a challenge and i think looking ahead to the political spectrum in the next four years i think we're all sort of nervous about the increasing needs  in a feel for funding and as far as the people can do i would say engage locally it's a little different in depending on where you are at it state by state so i would say to look for you know one or two great national organizations like my entry point within a city international and then your state abolition group if you're ill and you're in a state with the death penalty and you know many states still have the death penalty thirty one you have another work cut out for you stephanie thank you so much for joining us and now we're going to talk to leno thank you to help me welcome my next guest from witness to innocence he is magdalna rose obviously or more fondly known through the human rights community as a leno he is the executive director of witness to innocence leno has a long history of civil  human rights work which led him many years ago to become involved in the movement to abolish the death penalty in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight leno joined with sister helen prejean one of the founders of world witness to innocence  to develop and launch the moratorium initiative which became one of the most effective strategies to reach out to politicians and the public on the issue of abolition while working for amnesty international in atlanta he organized the largest meeting of national leaders in the african american community on the death penalty including carette a scott king reverend joe lowery the national black police association congressman john conyers and many others he also worked with cesar chavez and leaders of the historic united farm workers union welcome lana thank you and that's pretty impressive impressive clearly your mission in life is to make a difference well sometimes when i read mine about my own resumes sounds like just able to be able to think we're thankful that we can support them and help build the organization and get their voices out to the public so you know a lot of people have a very visceral reaction to the whole conversation of death penalty and abolishing it and people are very polarized very often what do you say about the death penalty that  people's minds to the possibility of abolishing it well i think that people everybody i think the first thing you have to do depending on the group is you have to listen to them what are their concerns and when you can meet in talking to them about what is just and then just people see that it's and we make mistakes so that how many shoe bombers to be had on an airplane before we change the policy just one night and we've had one hundred fifty six people exonerated from death row so should that give us an indication that something is wrong with the system this probably ten to fifteen others that were executed people believe could have been innocent and we were unable to prove the cases and didn't have the time and the resources so i think that one is there is a lot of fear in people's minds that people will get out and  commit the crime but right now we know that the couple of things that we have a way of keeping hardened criminals in prison without parole and people who really believe that then they should be ready to move for say they're tough on crime so when a district attorney takes a case of one death row case he basically says now to about twenty cases that need to be investigated now we say to him that everybody has the added loss in the line needs to have the case in this in in addition every one of our examinees the majority of the cases and once that find that they are innocent the district attorney doesn't go back and start the investigation because the real killer is out on the streets that's wrong that's like a double whammy yeah and the fact that prosecutors and police lying on the stand should tell they want they want what they call justice but it's really revenge but you can understand that and there's a growing number of murder victims families who years after the murder say you know it's wrong it's wrong to kill in this person even if they were guilty is not going to bring him back and most of the people there when they're in prison they're seventeen eighteen nineteen years of age you and i were both very different people and seventy needs and to me and i'm sort of rational now i was not the most rational mexican running around colorado yeah you know it's interesting because when i was doing research i saw a clip of some prosecutor who had put an innocent person in jail on death row and i don't know and i'm not even sure it was death row but he  went to see him after he had been released from prison after twenty one thirty years whatever and now the guy had lung cancer and had about ten months to live and this is mr ford so he went to him and he said you know i'm story i was trying to make a name for myself and you know i was you know there's all kinds of pressures at that age like you say you know at that age different things are important to you and the guy who was dying said you know i appreciate the fact that you came to say this but i can't say i forgive you you took away my life you know and the part that i don't understand is what is that strong motivation to to that peter was on sixty minutes and i met up with the prosecutor about six months ago a legal conference and he really is he really is suffering because  it's him made a bad mistake and i also ran into another district attorney from marin county in texas who also feels the same money he was too busy getting elected and his  staff pushed for the execution of a man who should not have been executed and in marin county texas that's basically to send in tony i think prosecutors a person and people don't know because they they want to be tough on grabbing a number prosecutors a number of people who are wardens and death row prisons who are saying what i did was wrong i want to ask for forgiveness i want to make sure that people don't do this you know we're a society that is so much social inequities to go on in their lives that are never corrected and some of them are men who issues but you know in the case of kwame and his brother and their best friend together the seven hundred years for something they did do and then we find this in all of our you know we have two women who are members of innocence and our innocence number who are accused of killing their own kids now how awful can that of our film so that you can see that but our examinees talk about when their mothers were dying they did not allow them to go to the funerals of to go see their parents when they were press one what kind of inhumane society are we that you can be in favor of the death penalty and they can next to extradite people to the united states to be executed why because they went through world war two in this out of that power should not be given to governments wow so you know stephanie mentioned that there are thirty one states that still have the death penalty so the question is can you make a difference there well we can and we're already making a difference with the international partners so the europeans have gotten their pharmaceutical companies to quit selling this deadly comp sales for executions so that's diminished so there's about two percent of all of the counties in the country that produce about fifty percent of the death penalty cases so we along with our partners highlighted a lot of those counties in out of the top twenty and we have five new prosecutors and we hope to reach out to them before they start doing that sentences we've had less death sentences in the last two years less executions people do not want we have a growing rate  this is not just a liberal cause of people of color because there's good folks in the in the app and jellicoe community that i've met with that are opposed to killing to be anything whether it's a child in the womb or somebody in prison and a lot of conservatives are looking at the budgets of this and why are we spending so much money on prisons and in particular the death penalty which is the most expensive part they said we've got to be smarter we don't have the money so in every state if you look at their budget one of the biggest items is corrections and they never correct anything they just warehousing people we have more people per capita than any country in the room and that's kind of a shame so we got to be smarter and i think that we appeal in and one of the things than that i'm running a personal campaign with some of the people in people's homes going to change i'm on i believe that everybody is is equal but i think women have a greater power in this issue and i think women's voices we are going to be working on campaigns to raise the voice in the stature of women because after all  man or a woman not to be able to go to their parents funeral even though they were in prison yet you know it's that it's a systemic kind of a disease you know it right from the beginning and it goes all the way through but i think it's really about raising people's consciousness and also tapping into the inner recognition that people already have but no one has kind of tapped into it and you're talking about reaching out to women because again there are so many things out there to be for or against but if you raise that awareness i think change is definitely possible revenge so if you're the victim you can squash the little person and it's not about that you know one of our members said that you can free an innocent man from prison but you cannot free yeah actually leno we can end on that line because west at the end of our time but that really is a powerful way to end i want to thank you so much for being on the show and mostly for what you do your you know and and we all start in different places but you made choices along the way that had you end up here so thank you but thank you because we