Conversations with the Capeman

Book excerpt: In the neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen, 1959, a playground confrontation leaves two white youths bludgeoned to death by a gang of Puerto Rican kids. Sixteen-year-old Salvador Agron, who wore a red-lined satin cape, was charged with the murders, though no traces of blood were found on his dagger. At seventeen, Agron was the youngest person ever to be sentenced to death in the electric chair. After nearly two years in the Death House at Sing Sing Prison, a group of prominent citizens, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the governor of Puerto Rico, convinced Governor Rockefeller to commute Agron's sentence to one of life imprisonment. In 1973 Richard Jacoby began a voluminous, twelve-year correspondence with Agron. His Conversations with the Capeman is guaranteed to challenge deeply held notions of crime, punishment, and redemption. Salvador Agron was released from prison in 1979 and died in the Bronx in 1986 at the age of forty-two. With a new preface