If you’re keeping a list of the top reasons you don’t want George W. Bush elected to a second term, you might want to consider adding an item from Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, a Washington D.C.-based group that touts itself as “a pro-peace and citizen action organization.” Speaking Sunday night to a […]
Patrick O'Neill
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A sad life, and death
A couple of minutes before he was to speak about his friend and client, Eddie Hartman, defense attorney Edwin West’s cell phone went off. West left the Pullen Memorial Baptist Church prayer service to take the call. It was the call West had hoped would never come. On the other end of the line was […]
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Semi-public execution
On his drive to Raleigh, journalist Andy Matthews said he experienced “a lot of apprehension” and “a lot of anxiety” en route to an assignment unlike any other he had ever had in his 10-year career. Matthews, editor of The Yadkin Ripple (named for the ripples in the Yadkin River) in Yadkinville, had volunteered to […]
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Peace activist home from prison
Annals of crime On March 9, Lenore Yarger went to Sunday mass at Siler City’s St. Julia Catholic Church. It was an emotional time for Yarger. On March 7, her husband, Steve Woolford, had received a six-month prison sentence for splashing a small bottle of his blood on the Pentagon in an anti-war protest. Yarger, […]
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“It’s dark out tonight”
One by one they walked up to the microphone. Sisters, brothers, a daughter, a son, nieces, nephews, cousins and family friends. Most were holding hand-lettered placards, each one bearing a photocopied picture of Henry Lee Hunt. The crowd of more than 30 people had traveled to Raleigh from Robeson County on Sept. 9 to stand […]
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Going for homegrown at the pump
Jay Bibb of Apex pulled his 2001 black VW Beetle up to the diesel pump at Han-Dee Hugo’s BP station near the intersection of Highways 70 and 50 in Garner. His bumper sticker immediately caught the attention of a group of people who were at the station last week for an improbable press conference on […]
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Pace picks up for execution moratorium
Lao Rubert sat in the Whole Foods grocery in Raleigh last week poring over a sheet of names of North Carolina House members. When she recognized a retired FBI agent who’d walked in to buy lunch, Rubert saw a chance to get another person behind the effort to adopt a moratorium against executions. On the […]
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Lawyers Push Opposition to Death Penalty
When a Duke Medical Center physician mistakenly transplanted a mismatched liver into a teenager, the case became a national news story and the subject of a major investigation by the medical industry. Duke law professor James Coleman, speaking in Cary last month at the North Carolina Leadership Summit on the Death Penalty, raised some hypothetical […]
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“When War Breaks Out, It’s Other People’s Blood Being Spilled”
As a boy, Steve Woolford remembered a visit to his grandmother’s home in North Dakota. A distraught man who lived a few doors away rolled his wheelchair out into the yard and used a gun to shoot himself in the head. Woolford and others in the neighborhood heard the gun blast and came upon the […]
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What New York can learn from Raleigh
New York City blew it. More than 15 months after Sept. 11, city officials had a chance to show the world that the Big Apple was once again a place where diversity of opinion was welcome and the First Amendment was respected. Given the opportunity to host the city’s largest anti-war demonstration in years, Mayor […]