ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, when visiting my family in California, I asked my sister Jessica (a California State Public Defender) if I could join her to visit San Quentin’s Death Row to speak to Manuel (Manny) Babbitt – her client at the time. This first meeting led to a few others as well as to several years of written correspondence. Through Manny, as well as Jessica’s colleagues, I also began a long correspondence with another man on the Row, Jay Siripongs. 2 These two men spent some 18 years on Death Row before both being executed by lethal injection by the State of California in 1999.
