Politics, Religion and Death:
Memoir of a Lobbyist
PORMMES
RELIGION
By Carl Wedekind
Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty,
2006
200 pp.
Reviewed by Doug Stern
July 9, 2006
First, change the title on the copy you buy.
This is the memoir of an amateur lobbyist. Amateur in
the most literal sense of the word.
Wedekind’s story relates how he stumbled into
CarL WEDEKIND the issue of the death penalty and emerged as one of
our nation’s most sure-footed abolitionists. It's a tale
that should be required reading for anyone interested in how our vaunted, lofty-
appearing system of lawmaking looks from the perspective of a small frog at the very
bottom of a very murky pond.
The book covers about five years, beginning just before the July 1, 1997,
execution of Harold McQueen in the state penitentiary at Eddyville, Ky. Wedekind, a
retired corporate lawyer and businessman, was serving on an ACLU legal panel when
McQueen's lead counsel recruited him to help that summer with last-ditch appeals.
As Wedekind puts it, “Harold McQueen's journey ended, and my journey as an
abolitionist began.”
The book ends in the summer of 2002. That was when Wedekind and other
Kentucky abolitionists saw their hopes fulfilled with the August 1 exoneration and release
of a young death row inmate, Larry Osborne.
In between McQueen’s alpha and Osborne’s omega, Wedekind describes the
birth of a social and political movement. It was a painful labor and delivery.
Wedekind, a nationally respected civil libertarian, describes, for example, the
utter frustration of opposing the death penalty in Kentucky in 1997. “This taste of
powerlessness lit a flame that became a fire in my belly.”
He needed that fire to weather the chill he and other abolitionists found in
Frankfort when they started organized lobbying in earnest. Wedekind describes
Kentucky's capital city as the domain, with a few righteous exceptions, of imperious,
arch-conservative religious zealots...sometimes all wrapped up in one.
There are many candidates, but the poster boy may have been a “...pleasant,
intense-looking man in his early forties” named Stan Lee, a state representative from
Lexington. Wedekind tells how he and Father Pat Delahanty (the father of the abolition
movement in Kentucky) met this newly-elected lawmaker.
The two were a few minutes into their routine briefing when Representative Lee
suddenly stood. He raised his hands and delivered a lightning bolt from the Book of
Revelations, telling the slack-jawed lobbyists that their concerns about this and all other
worldly matters would soon be over. What was over was the briefing.
But State Representative Gross Lindsay clearly took the cake. As the all-powerful
chair of the all-powerful House Judiciary Committee, Lindsay deflected every question,
cajole, challenge, strategy and datum that Wedekind and his crew threw at him.
Sometimes that deflection was delivered with aw-shucks charm. Sometimes it felt
like a sledgehammer.
Despite proof of Kentucky citizens’ growing opposition to the death penalty,
Lindsay bottled up death penalty bills in his committee session after session. Other state
representatives were cowed by him or disagreed through the veil of old-school gentility.
Wedekind pushed Lindsay to the boiling point. Finally confronted, the chairman
snapped. “Banging his fist on his desk, Lindsay announced, ‘I don’t have to tell you why |
do anything. | don’t owe you, or anyone else, any explanation for what | do.”
So it goes when the lobbyist tries to go through the wall.
Wedekind’s story, despite the frustrations, is ultimately a story of hope. That
hope has often come in the form of the people who have fought the good fight alongside
him.
He wraps up this way. “I continue to be amazed at the workings of this world, but
| decided it is simply better to believe that if you keep after it, good things will eventually
happen. | believe this, and off we go again.”
Spoken like an amateur.
Doug Stern is a writer living in Louisville. He has lobbied against the death penalty in
Kentucky and currently serves as a grassroots abolition organizer working with faith
groups. He may be reached at stern.doug@gmail.com.
