Steve Earle

Click here to return to the issue 33 cover story home page.

The date at the bottom of Steve Earle’s liner notes for his 2002 album, Jerusalem—July 4—nails home his point like a hammer: True patriots, he says, are those who dare to question their country’s actions

By the time the Americana Music Association gave Earle its Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award in 2004, he’d already spent several July 4 weekends loudly questioning our nation’s use of the death penalty from the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., where he often joins the “Starvin’ for Justice” vigil.

Though Earle has opposed the death penalty since age 9, his direct involvement began after he released “Billy Austin,” a song about a Death Row prisoner, on 1990’s The Hard Way. He started getting letters from inmates even before he became one (incarcerated briefly for heroin possession in the mid ’90s). Then he watched Texas prisoner Jonathan Nobles die.

“[He] asked me to witness his execution just because he wanted one person there who didn’t hate him,” says Earle, who doesn’t deny that Nobles or Karla Faye Tucker—on whom he based his play, Karla—are guilty of horrible crimes. But Earle argues that we’re all responsible every time a prisoner is put to death, and he doesn’t want that blood on his hands.

As more cases of wrongly convicted prisoners come to light, Earle and his fellow abolitionists sense they’re getting closer to their goal. These days, governors are as likely to sign stays of execution as they are death warrants. “The main catalyst,” says Earle, “is people realizing mistakes have been made.”