Nancy Mairs, Tucson

George & Nancy Mairs

I have the distinction of corresponding with Leroy Nash, who is the oldest inmate on Death Row, not just in Arizona, not just in the United States, but in the world. Leroy is 86 now, and has spent most of his life in prison for one thing or another. He was serving time in Utah for murder. He escaped and came down to Phoenix and supposedly killed a jewelry store clerk.

It hadn't occurred to me -- I don't know why it hadn't -- that they would write back, but I started getting thank you letters from the prisoners, and I thought, well, here's a way to find out about their lives, so I wrote and invited them to correspond. Well, I soon realized that I wouldn't be able to do that with everybody, because so many of them started corresponding. So I now correspond with about 10 of them.

I have one prisoner who has just published a book in France. He couldn't get a publisher in this country but the French translated it and published it in France -- a good publisher, too -- and I wrote and congratulated him about that, and I sent him a copy of the essay that's in the new book about capital punishment, and he wrote back quite angry and hurt. I had said that I would be willing to give them life without parole instead of death, but he said that that was just unacceptably harsh, and I felt bad that I had hurt his feelings.

I wrote back to him and made an analogy that I hope wasn't facile -- that I have a kind of life-without-parole sentence myself. It's not the same, I didn't try to claim that my circumstances were the same, but that I did understand the harshness of it -- that when I said life without parole would be an acceptable punishment for them, I didn't say it lightly, I understood what the implications of that were. You know he said you give us no hope then, and I said, I live with no hope, and that to me is a connection between me and my prisoners.

But because I have MS, which is not intrinsically a terminal illness, I don't have the death sentence that they do. I have much more the sentence that I would be willing to give them which is life without parole, and I do think it's a better sentence, I do think it is, because they can still do things. And I said that to Richie. You've just written and published a book; you've made your incarceration into something productive.

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