Cabana argues ardently and rationally against the death penalty, not because of his sympathy for Evans, but because it's clear to Cabana that executing criminals does nothing to eliminate the roots of criminal behavior. A gentle and affecting addition to the Dead Man Walking canon. He carries no agenda except that of a confessor. Though the memoir gains greatly from Cabana's expertise in corrections and will no doubt provide ammunition for anti-death penalty factions, it is best read as the outpouring of one man who simply wants to tell us of the awfulness of putting someone to death, someone who is unmistakably human, someone like you and me. This book was a long time in the making, growing out of an exciting and challenging twenty-five years of service in corrections.
Capital punishment grips the imagination of contemporary America like no other issue.
In the abstract, the death penalty is quickly endorsed and facilely supported by an increasingly vocal populace. For those few, however, who are actually authorized by the state to kill another human being, the death penalty becomes a chilling expos of the darkest emotions of the citizenry. In doing so, however, we forget the numerous unseen forces at work that contribute to a man's final walk. I spent most of my career as a prison administrator convinced of the need for capital punishment. I had always been something of a bureaucratic utopian, fully committed to the notion that if the government deemed capital punishment necessary then it must be so.