OTTAWA - Diane Abshire began her involvement in the issues surrounding the death penalty three years ago when she and her husband, Riley, began exchanging letters with an inmate on Florida's death row.
Abshire stumbled onto a prison pen pal Web site while surfing the Internet.
"Charles had a brief paragraph listing, and he just got into my head and I couldn't get him off my mind," Abshire said. "I just had to write to him."
She said she and her husband accept him as family now. The Ottawa residents have driven to Florida twice to visit him and plan on more visits in the future.
Charles Finney was convicted of killing a neighbor woman in 1991. Through her correspondence with Finney, Abshire has become convinced of his innocence.
"The perception of the average person is that the justice system works," Abshire said. "They think that if a person is found guilty, it must be true."
But, she said, mistakes occur all the time.
In the case of her pen pal, she said, Finney was linked to the murder of his neighbor through a videocassette recorder. According to Abshire, Finney scavenged the videocassette recorder out of his neighbor's trash to repair, then pawned it for some extra cash. Police traced the VCR after the murder and further linked him to the scene through fingerprints at the neighbor's apartment, she said.
But, the neighbor was a friend of Finney, so fingerprints naturally would be there, Abshire said. She also said hair found at the scene indicated the murderer was a Caucasian. Finney is a black man.
Finney was convicted of committing another crime in the same month the murder occurred. Charges in that case included sexual battery, robbery with a firearm or deadly weapon and kidnapping. In addition to the death sentence, Finney was sentenced to life for a charge associated with the murder and for the kidnapping charge. Sentences for both crimes were issued the same day, Nov. 10, 1992.
Now Abshire is a member of two advocacy groups trying to protect the rights of death row inmates and abolish the death penalty. She belongs to the Florida Death Row Advocacy Group and Florida Support, an innocence watch group.
Abshire said hers is a grassroots effort to eliminate the death penalty. She talks to individuals and groups about the death penalty and busies herself with writing letters and making phone calls to politicians. She also writes news releases and keeps updated information flowing to interested people.
A lot of what Abshire does, she does over the Internet. She and her cats curl up on the sofa with her WebTV keyboard sending and receiving e-mails of the latest developments in death penalty issues.
Some of the people Abshire corresponds with are family and friends of death row inmates. Some are professors, criminal investigators, a forensic pathologist and other professionals. She also maintains contact with various death penalty abolition groups such as Citizens United Against the Death Penalty and Amnesty International. Her contacts are international, including people from Norway, Scotland, England, Australia, Germany and Canada.
"What always amazes me is how much more aware people in other countries are about issues of capital punishment, and how barbaric we appear to be because of our insistence on legalized killing," Abshire said. "We have so much to learn by their example."
"We're scattered, but we're organized," she said.
She's also a member of an international group working to get the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Sister Helen Prejean, author of the book "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States," which was made into a movie.
That international group has other local ties. One member of the European chapter is Karen, the wife of Ohio death row inmate Kenneth Richey. Richey was sentenced to death in Putnam County in 1987 for setting fire to a Columbus Grove apartment building; the blaze killed a 2-year-old girl.
"I personally don't believe there should be a death penalty," Abshire said. "I don't think that life should be taken as retribution for the victim. The death penalty shouldn't be the healing factor."
But members of the opposition point to cases like John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted in Illinois in 1980 of killing 33 young men. Surely, they say, he deserved to die.
"I still have to say no, he doesn't deserve to die," said Abshire, adding that it's not her intent for someone like that to be released from prison.
Abshire describes the death sentence as a form of revenge. It tears families apart, she said, and many people don't even care whether the person sentenced is really guilty.
"It's just sick," she said. "It's gotta stop. You can't just keep going on hurting and hurting and hurting."
Reporter John Fike can be reached by phone at 993-2098 or e-mail at jfike@limanews.com.