Fontana decided the victims' families in death penalty cases should always come first.
LOUISIANA:
Amy Fontana of Monroe has taken a fortuitous path on the way to becoming a state death penalty abolition coordinator for Amnesty International, a worldwide organization that advocates for human rights and the abolition of the death penalty.
Far from an ideologue, she hadn't been involved with or even really thought about the death penalty until a friend at Tulane University started up an Amnesty International chapter.
Fontana, working on a graduate degree in social work at LSU at the time, decided to find out what her friend was up to.
She joined up, paid her dues and attended the meetings. But her galvanizing moment wouldn't come until her last year of school in 2003.
A speaker visiting her class gave Fontana a test before the speech to assess how much she knew about the death penalty.
"I failed every question on the pre-test," Fontana says.
"At the time I don't know what I was. I was Catholic, and Catholic views are supposed to be anti-, anti-death penalty. I took the test, and I'm like, 'My goodness, I was so misinformed,' and so was everybody else in the class."
She decided to learn more about the issue, and when a local law firm, the Baton Rouge Capital Conflict office, was looking for a mitigation investigator, she joined up. Fontana worked on eight cases over 2 1/2 years and investigated the lives of perpetrators the state was seeking to put to death. She worked with defendants and indigent board defense attorneys to try to figure out what had gone so wrong in defendants' lives.
She found the perpetrators almost always come from broken homes, grow up in awful living conditions and are uneducated.
"They never had a chance in the world," Fontana says.
She discovered what she calls the arbitrary way in which offenders are convicted and given the death penalty.
Those whose victims are white are statistically more likely to get the death penalty than those whose victims are black, Fontana points out.
Furthermore, perpetrators usually can't afford their own attorneys.
"I hate to bring it up, but O.J. was ruled innocent," Fontana says, referring to his murder trial, not his recent conviction on robbery and other charges.
Working as a mitigation officer, Fontana presented the information she found to juries to try to persuade them to vote for life in prison instead of death.
Fontana is most proud of her work with Jesse Schwartz, who was accused of killing a police officer and could have received the death penalty. Fontana said she helped convince the victims' parents to forgive Schwartz, and she also helped convince Schwartz to plead guilty and take life in prison.
"He said he felt God had forgiven him," Fontana says.
During those two and a half years, Fontana attended national conferences and became well versed in all the issues surrounding the death penalty.
She found strength in the example of Sister Helen Prejean, the author of the book "Dead Man Walking."
"All of us are worth more than our worst act," Prejean has said. Fontana decided the victims' families in death penalty cases should always come first. And that's part of the logic behind her efforts, Fontana says.
She believes families suffer unnecessarily when they are put through the wringer during years of trials and appeals, and the country can ensure justice without the death penalty.
"We don't want court processes to bring them through suffering, suffering, suffering, only to either have the person get the death penalty and be executed years later, or they just constantly relive all the trials," Fontana says.
Now 33, Fontana works for the state as a medical social worker in Monroe, and will work for Amnesty on nights and weekends. She makes sure to separate her Amnesty work and her work for the state.
Her activities in northern Louisiana will include working with the local Amnesty chapter at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, outreach to victims' families and perpetrators’ families, and fostering general awareness of death-penalty issues.
"I'm not here to persuade someone to believe some way or the other, but to know the facts," Fontana says.
Her and Amnesty's ultimate goal is to get a national moratorium on the death penalty.
"There's too much of a chance of executing an innocent person," Fontana says.
"And until we can get this fixed and figured out, we should stop using it."
(source: The News Star)
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