Cabana had gotten to know Evans, had even become his friend. Although Evans admitted to murder, he was deeply remorseful. Cabana saw Evans's change of heart as evidence of the worth of his soul and believed that he should be allowed to live, even if imprisoned for life. Cabana fought to secure a pardon for Evans, without success. Thereafter, Cabana decided he could not supervise another execution and left Parchman to teach criminal justice at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Cabana writes with compelling honesty and the skill and dramatic sense of a novelist.
As his narrative bounces back and forth between his early days in corrections to his later years as a warden, a dramatic tension builds that lends great emotional impact to the story's pivotal events. One need not read between the lines in either book to realize that all four men view or viewed capital punishment as an assault on the symptoms of society's ills rather than a search for cures.