Ward Larkin has been an activist against the death penalty in the Houston, Texas area for several decades. When he was a young man he became interested in leftist politics, as the Vietnam War was raging during his years as a high school student. He managed to avoid the draft when he enrolled in college at Furman. After attending college, he lived in Nicaragua from 1987-1989 and upon his return to the States, he became engaged in immigrant and refugee rights. During his work as an activist in the Houston area, focused on immigrant and refugee rights, he encountered death penalty aboitionists. Texas had resumed executions in 1982 and had quickly become one of the nation's leaders in the number of executions that were being carried out. Ward was encouraged to become involved in the death penalty abolition movement and in 1995 he began to write to and visit the men on Texas' death row. Several years later, one of these men, Jerry Hogue, asked Ward to be a witness at his execution in 1998. Jerry Hogue professed his innocence from the time of his arrest, throughout more than two decades on death row, up to his execution and many people agreed that he was indeed innocent. Hougue's case gained national attention when it became the focus of Dan Rather's 60 minutes show, titled Dead Wrong? This 60 minutes program, aired just a few years after Hogue's execution explored the grave possibility that Texas had executed an innocent man. Click on the link below to find a sample of this 60 minutes show and read the transcript of the entire show:
https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C2781045
On February 16, Ward Larkin sat down with me in Conroe, Texas to share his recollections of the execution of Jerry Hogue, as well as the three other executions that he came to witness over his years as an activist and advocate for the men on Texas' death row.
Over the years that Ward Larkin befriended the men on Texas' death row, he became an advocate for them in the legal realm as well, often assisting them with their legal paperwork, such as their clemency application. Click on the two links below to find just a couple of examples of the numerous cases whereby Ward Larkin's assistance proved to be instrumental in the legal battles carried out on behalf of Texas death row inmates.
https://www.wptv.com/news/national/texas-man-executed-for-1997-rampage-that-killed-5
https://www.texastribune.org/2012/10/26/death-row-inmate-between-activists-and-lawyers/