Truth Be Told
Life Lessons From Death Row
by
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On a day in November, 2001, I was visiting my friend, Agi, when I noticed a letter on her coffee table.
“You’ve got mail,” I said, half joking.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a letter from my friend, Rich, on death row.”
That was the first time I’d really paid attention to the correspondence between Agnes Vadas and Richard Neilds. On that day, I asked Agi to get Rich’s permission to read his letters. A week or so later, in a letter to Agi, he granted permission and so I began to read this astonishing correspondence between two people brought together by the death penalty.
Agi met Rich through an Amnesty International program that links death-row prisoners with those who oppose the death penalty. It is a correspondence that began haltingly, the way relationships do. And then, through honesty, constancy, loyalty and humor, it became a relationship about love. Not the romantic love that comes and goes easily, but the transcendent love that transforms our lives. Over the years, Rich and Agi have grown to trust one another. They counsel and chide one another. They buck up one another’s spirits, follow the details of one another’s daily lives, and share a consuming passion for music.
They are both professional musicians. As a violinist, Agi brings her love of classical music to their correspondence. As a pianist, Rich brings his love of jazz. They riff back and forth in a melody of language and musical metaphor. It infuses their correspondence with that which only music can offer – transcendence over ordinary life and extraordinary suffering.
Like music, death, too, is a theme that transcends ordinary time. When we face our death, we become free to face our life. Through his letters, Rich faces both, even as he never loses sight of the daily blessings that slip by most of us unnoticed. As a Holocaust survivor, Agi writes of her own losses, but with relentless humor and acceptance.
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About the Book
Nobody knows how long it will be before Rich is executed – if he is executed. For this, too, is a bewilderment. How he went from being assured by his attorney of manslaughter charges to being on death row is a story that comes to light in the letters, as do the details of a justice system that, once unjustly underway, cannot easily be restored. In November, 2004, when Agi and I sat in the office of Rich’s public defender, he told us, “Rich does not belong on death row. And I have very little hope that he will not be executed.” He said that publishing the letters might help Rich’s cause.
As this book goes to press, Agi and Rich have six years of letters between them and no idea of how much time is left. By sharing their letters, they share their hope, most of all, for a future in which the death penalty will no longer exist.
About the Author
Agnes Vadas is a musician and a human rights activist. She started to write when she was in her seventies, and that not even in her native language. Her autobiographical stories, “Tales from
In her work for Amnesty International her personal focus is to fight against the death penalty, and so it happened that she started to correspond with a death row inmate, which became a wonderful friendship. Rich should not be on death row, but in this country money decides that matter. If you can’t afford to pay a good lawyer you are easy victim of unscrupulous prosecutor whose “success” is to put the guy into the death chamber.