A brief look into my day job…
Posted by Mark on October 23, 2009
I thought I’d take a break and let you give you an opportunity to learn more about what I do during the day when I’m not serving directly as a Chapel Hill Town Council Member or running as a candidate for Mayor.
As many know, my day job is being the Executive Director of a the Fair Trial Initiative. There I train young lawyers how to be effective representatives of indigent people facing the death penalty. At the core of my organization’s mission is that for as long as there is a death penalty in North Carolina, we must all work toward ensuring that everyone facing a possible execution receives the highest quality defense available. To that end, the young lawyers who work with me are charged with helping appointed counsel by providing additional resources aimed at improving the quality of defense.
The most frightening outcome of any trial, especially death penalty trials, is that an innocent person is convicted and made subject to the death penalty. Since the death penalty was reinstated in this country in the late 1970s, 138 people on death rows across the US have been exonerated, including eight in North Carolina. Number 129, Levon Jones was my client.
Next week a book about our efforts to free Mr. Jones, The Last Lawyer by John Temple, will appear in bookstores (it’s already available on Amazon, you can read about it on Amazon, but please wait and buy it somewhere locally). It’s a quick and exciting read, even for someone who lived through it.
For more information on how the capital punishment system is working (or not working), check out these links:
The North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium
Death Penalty Information Center