Life After Murder
By Karynn Fish
This week on the public radio program This American Life, 2009 Soros Justice Fellow Nancy Mullane presents the story of Don Cronk, a man who has served 27 years of a sentence of "life with the possibility of parole" for first-degree murder in a California prison. A parole board has finally granted his release, but a law passed by California voters in 1988 requires that the governor have the last word on parole for individuals convicted of murder.
Cronk is one of 12 men Mullane interviewed for Life After Murder, a two-hour, four-part radio documentary that takes listeners behind prison walls and inside a world where people struggle to redeem themselves amid diminishing hope they will ever be granted parole. The documentary will be available in the spring of 2010 through Public Radio Exchange.
The podcast for this episode of is available online via iTunes or the This American Life website.
Until May 2010, Karynn Fish was a communications officer for U.S. Programs at the Open Society Foundations.