At 3:35

Damien Echols our special in studio guest to talk about his new book Life After Death. He has a book signing event tonight at the Tattered Cover in Lodo starting at 7:30 pm with Westword journalist Alan Prendergrast. Echols was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, and Arkansas. At age eighteen, he was arrested along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley and charged with the deaths of three boys, now known as the Robin Hood Hill murders, in West Memphis, Arkansas. Echols received a death sentence and spent almost eighteen years on Death Row, until he, Baldwin, and Misskelley were released in 2011. The West Memphis Three have been the subject of Paradise Lost, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and West of Memphis, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Echols is the author of a self-published memoir titled Almost Home. He and his wife, Lorri Davis, live in New York City. In Life After Death Echols reveals with tragedy and irony in equal measure: he describes the terrors he experienced every day and his outrage toward the American justice system, and offers a firsthand account of living on Death Row in heartbreaking, agonizing detail. Life After Death is destined to be a riveting, explosive classic of prison literature.    

At 4:05

Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for the presidency our special guest. Last week Dr. Stein was arrested, along with VP candidate Cheri Honkala, attempting to get into the presidential debates in Hempstead, New York.  This week her fight continues with a lawsuit filed today against the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), claiming that the CPD, Democratic National Committee, and Republican National Committee, together with the Federal Election Commission and Lynn University, had deprived her of her constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and free speech, as well as her statutorily protected civil rights. The lawsuit sought both an emergency court order enjoining tonight’s CPD presidential debate from taking place. According to the lawsuit pleadings, “Dr. Jill Stein is not only equal under the law to the two “major party” candidates, she is better, because she became a viable contender for the Presidency while being discriminated against by the defendants at every turn.” Stein was a candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in the 2002 and the 2010 gubernatorial elections. She is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. Among others, Jill Stein has been endorsed for 2012 President by linguist, author and activist Noam Chomsky and by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent Chris Hedges.