From Your Friend, Carey Dean
Letters from Nebraska’s Death Row
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2022
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Publisher's Description
When Lisa Knopp visited Nebraska's death row with other death penalty abolitionists in 1995, she couldn't have imagined that one of the inmates she met that day would become a dear friend. For the next twenty-three years, through visits, phone calls, and letters, a remarkable, platonic friendship flourished between Knopp, an English professor, and Carey Dean Moore, who'd murdered two Omaha cab drivers in 1979 and for which he was executed by lethal injection in 2018. From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska's Death Row, tells two other stories, as well. One is that of a broken correctional system (Nebraska's prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, and excessive in their use of solitary confinement), and what it's like to be incarcerated there, which Moore frequently spoke and wrote about. The other is the story of how a double murderer was transformed and nourished by his faith in God's promises. Though Moore and Knopp were different types of Christians (he was a Biblical literalist and an evangelical; she is a Biblical contextualist with progressive leanings), they shared faith in God's love, grace, mercy, and abiding companionship.
Endorsements (4)
“Knopp’s account of her twenty-three-year friendship with a death-row inmate is a powerful argument for the abolition of the death penalty and against the cruelties of the prison system. It is also a deep exploration of the demands of friendship in the context of Christian faith and a meditation on the call to forgive.”
“The story about Lisa’s unexpected friendship with Carey Dean opens our eyes to the realities of death row and tells a lot about who she is and her capacity to love. It also challenges us to consider what’s possible and what is to be gained when you choose to look beyond judging someone by the worst act of their life. It is an important lesson for our time.”
“Knopp has achieved a style that is both artistically subtle and morally extraordinary. . . . It’s easy to make a case for or against capital punishment, but Knopp’s quiet moral clarity and self-awareness allow her to do the much more difficult and necessary work of jettisoning abstraction and embracing humanity.”
“There are some books that transcend words on the page, becoming an ethical and spiritual force. This is one of those books. A moving account of an unlikely friendship, a meticulously researched argument against state-sanctioned killing, a compassionate act of witness to the redemptive power of faith. It is all this and so much more: a story for our time that, as the scripture says, ‘has been clothed with the imperishable’ (1 Cor 15:54).”
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