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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

From Death Row to Freedom: PA Man on Abolition Crusade to KY

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Monday, October 31, 2011   

LEXINGTON, Ky. - Ten years, three months and eight days: that was the amount of time a Pennsylvania man spent behind bars for a murder he didn't commit. Ray Krone spent nearly a third of that time on death row, convicted of the 1991 murder of a female bartender in Phoenix, until DNA tests proved his innocence.

Krone, a military veteran and former mailman with no criminal history, says he's made peace with his experience and has used it as a personal crusade to abolish the death penalty.

"And afterwards, I thought about it; maybe that's why it was me. Maybe that's why I went through this. Maybe there was something bigger that I had to do, was supposed to do, that I needed to go through that to do it. And, so, it's been almost ten years now I've been speaking and telling my story. "

Raised in a small, rural, conservative town in Pennsylvania, Krone once believed that capital punishment was a just penalty for the worst of criminals.

"But, of course, I found out that all the arguments of why we have capital punishment, why we have the death penalty, none of them hold true. It's not a deterrent; if that was the case then states like Texas that carry out the most executions wouldn't have any murders."

Krone maintains that exacting a death sentence is not the soothing salve for a victim's family, seldom providing them the closure that's expected. He believes the court of public opinion is shifting toward abolition and he expects policymakers to come around too.

"We used to support slavery and we don't have it no more. We look back now and think, 'What the heck were we thinking?' There used to be women's suffrage; there used to be segregation - all the things that we used to have and the people at the time supported it, believed it, and look back now and say, 'That's ridiculous.' "

Krone is part of a group of death row exonerees, called "Witness to Innocence," challenging the fairness and morality of capital punishment.

"When they execute someone they always say they're doing it in 'The name of the people, the good people of that state.' I don't want them to be killing anybody in my name."

The Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is hosting Krone's speaking tour at Thomas More College today, the Bluegrass Community and Technical College on Wednesday and the Newman Center at the University of Kentucky on Thursday. More information about Krone's lectures can be found at www.kcadp.org


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