It’s been a busy month for multi-issue activist couple Scott Langley and Sheila Stumph, co-founders of the Raleigh Catholic Worker House. Both have been arrested recently for acts of civil disobedience; Scott at an anti-torture action at the Johnston County Airport on Nov. 18, and both of them on Dec. 1 outside Central Prison to […]
Patrick O'Neill
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N.C. execution is 1,000th in U.S.
Kenneth Lee Boyd didn’t want to be a statistic, and his lawyer tried to give him as dignified a death as possible–when death comes at the end of a needle in the middle of the night as journalists, cops and prosecutors get an up-close view as your client draws his last breath in Central Prison’s […]
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Third in North Carolina in less than a month
In 1977, Gary Gilmore’s execution by a Utah firing squad ended a 10-year death penalty moratorium and began what has been called the modern era of capital punishment in the United States. This week the 1,000th person will be executed since Gilmore dropped his appeals and uttered his stark last sentence–“Let’s do it”–and it will […]
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‘We punished four innocent children’
Following a week of high hopes, the terse press release came around 7:30 p.m. last Thursday: “After careful review of the facts and circumstances of this crime and conviction, I find no convincing reason to grant clemency,” Gov. Mike Easley wrote, giving the final go-ahead for the execution of Elias Syriani, a 67-year-old father of […]
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Gail Phares, leading N.C. activist, arrested at protest
Twenty-five years ago in El Salvador, Gail S. Phares’ former housemate, Maryknoll Sister Maura Clarke, and three other U.S. churchwomen were raped and murdered by a Salvadoran death squad. Three of the five soldiers eventually implicated in those murders were graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Ga., since […]
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Getting an education (and a mug shot) at the CIA’s Johnston County base
The drop-off was about 200 yards from the fence line. Just down the road, a U.S. flag hung above the sign for Aero Contractors, Ltd., the Johnston County-based company that provides pilots for and maintains two corporate jets the Central Intelligence Agency has used for “extraordinary rendition,” a term that essentially means torture by proxy. […]
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Death penalty attorney says she’s had enough
After almost a decade of visiting her friend and client Steve Van McHone on Central Prison’s death row, defense lawyer Cindy Adcock had to make a trip to the prison she never wanted to make. Last Friday, Adcock sat behind a large double-paned glass window and watched McHone, 35, die by lethal injection for the […]
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‘We are producing insurgents at home’
By the Rev. William C. Turner’s way of thinking, Americans are trapped in a culture that subsists on a lie. It’s a big lie, based on violence, domination and conquest. And one day that lie is going to be revealed in all of its ugliness, possibly to our children. “We better be careful, too,” said […]
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Last-minute appeals filed
At press time, death row inmate Steven Van McHone was scheduled to be executed Friday morning at 2 a.m. for the June 3, 1990 murders in Mount Airy of his mother, Mildred Adams, and his stepfather, Wesley Adams. In the usual frenzy by defense attorneys to save the life of their client, defense lawyers Cynthia […]
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Children plead for father’s life
Each day, Janet Syriani runs to her mailbox hoping to find a letter from her father, Elias Syriani. A missive from the father she has not touched since she was 8 years old always makes her day. What makes this story so remarkable is that Janet’s father is on Central Prison’s death row for the […]