Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton Kevin Green’s lawyers were pleading with the governor for mercy. It was spring 2008, and Mr. Green, a 31-year-old who had shot and killed a grocery owner, was on Virginia’s death row. His woes, his lawyers said, dated to childhood; he was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, repeated three years of elementary school, could not even tie his shoes. His was precisely the kind of execution a young Tim Kaine , a Harvard-educated lawyer with a deeply felt revulsion for capital punishment, would have worked himself to the bone to stop. “Murder is wrong in the gulag, in Afghanistan, in Soweto, in the mountains of Guatemala, in Fairfax County,” he once declared, as one of his clients was about to be put to death. “And even the Spring Street Penitentiary.” But on the night of May 27, Mr. Green was led into the execution chamber at the Greensville Correctional Center , strapped to a gurney and hooked up to intravenous lines. ...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment