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Peckerwood Hill: An Artifact of the Death Penalty

By standdown

That's the title of a lengthy article in today's Beaumont Enterprise.  LINKA shroud of low, ashen mist cuts a swath across Peckerwood Hill on a corpse-cold day in Texas. No matter. The Rev. Carroll Pickett knows the spot he seeks. The ground is spongy with night rain, sunken in some places where cheap pine-box coffins have rotted and collapsed, so he walks respectfully among the dead. A plastic grocery sack flutters in the highest branches of a yellow pine, a ghost guard keeping watch over almost 3,000 dead, indigent criminals Texas has buried here for the last 160 years. The history of the American death penalty is written across the handmade concrete headstones on Peckerwood Hill, Texas' biggest and oldest prison cemetery. It is as much an artifact of capital punishment as "Old Sparky," the Texas electric chair, now a museum piece...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).