A Death Row Blogger's Advice for Life

In an exchange withJay from New Hampshire, Evans reflected on prison life. "A man must find even in the worst things something good or positive to focus on," he wrote. "Sometimes if the forces are with you, blessing will come your way."

To the despairing Brazilian, a musician who had moved to Canada, Evans responded: "Listen to me, I am not always right, but listen to me anyway, and you might get something out of what I have to say. . . . You are young, and you should not have such fear when you are a talented young man."

Confronted with a question from Robert Trouts, who asked that he take his punishment "like a man," Evans wrote that "I have an education on how meaningful life is" and then seemed to strike a note of anger.

"Society dresses up and hires the justice system to kill for its revenge," he wrote in a portion of the response that was removed from the site yesterday. "I bet you are one of those people who would have been for slavery too."

A death warrant signed two weeks ago orders that Evans be executed during the five-day period beginning Feb. 6. Barring intervention by the courts or Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), Evans will be put to death almost exactly two months after Maryland's last execution.

Some supporters of the death penalty say they find little of value in Evans's blog or in the larger effort to focus on the humanity of the condemned. "People can exchange notes with him if they want, but I don't think it really adds anything," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director at the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a group that supports legal execution. "The question is whether he deserves the punishment he was sentenced to, and I don't find much enlightening in these discussions."

In a world awash in personal narratives, where millions tune in to watch ordinary people do ordinary things on reality shows, the blogosphere has deemed an exchange with a man sentenced to die to be of limited interest. Fewer than 7,000 people have visited the site.

One of Evans's lawyers, Julie Dietrich, relayed this information to Evans by telephone yesterday. According to Dietrich, he responded: "I don't want to be judgmental about why people do things. In America, people have a comfort zone and try not to deal with anything that's too stressful."