Death Becomes Him

Carey Dean Moore is a man of his convictions, literally. Convicted of murder in 1980, Moore has been on Nebraska's Death Row since then. He was supposed to die--again--on June 14 but his execution was stayed when questions arose about the supplier of Nebraska's latest batch of execution drugs.

I've never met Carey Dean Moore, but he and I wrote letters to each other for about a year and a half, following a request made to our congregation by our then-pastor, Otis Young.

I wanted nothing more than to ignore Otis' request. After all, two former students of mine had died violent deaths at the hands of convicted murderers. Who would think that, in the two short years I taught at Pius, Candy Harms and Teena Brandon would enter my life, only to leave it a few years later?

I am still haunted by the details of Candy's death that a State Patrol friend of mine gave me. And I will always remember the moment when a jury reached a decision in the trial of Roger Bjorklund, one of two men who took Candy's life. I was behind the wheel of my Fiat, almost at the intersection of 27th and Capitol Parkway when friend and former KFOR workmate Dale Johnson broke into morning programming to announce the verdict.

Guilty.

I was both paralyzed and shaken by that single, definitive word. A flood of emotions filled me as I tried to remember just how to drive a car. Or live a life.

Brandon's life and death were muddied by a sexual identity that many people could not understand. His suffering, I imagine, extended over years, rather than just the last minutes of his life.

I have always considered myself to be against the death penalty. That belief, however, was purely academic until Bjorklund and Scott Barney killed Candy. It is not hard to imagine the strain this belief has endured since then. And yet, it is, I believe, still there, this conviction that the state should not kill its citizens.

This does not mean that I rested easily when Bjorklund died of a medical event while sitting on Death Row. No, truth be told, I had wished something more painful and exacting for him.

So, why did I start writing to Carey Dean Moore? I guess I felt called to do it. It was a way to put a face on a criminal, a way to attempt to heal the wounds within, to face truths that were larger than myself.

Our letters were neither poignant nor particularly memorable. I wrote about my life, my work, my family. He wrote about his life and his faith--another of his convictions. For a year, I shared his letters with my Newspaper students, seeing it as an opportunity for us to hear from a person whose personal stories often go untold. Carey even had a one-time stint as a guest editorialist for the student newspaper.

Even though our letter writing waned in its second year, I can no longer read an article about Carey Dean Moore without seeing his face and knowing a bit of his story. It is, I believe, the price we pay for being consciously human--to bear witness to the lives behind the stories, as complicated as those lives and stories may be.