The death of 24-year-old PCV Kate Puzey was an absolute tragedy. It never should have happened.

Without question, the actions of Peace Corps administration in Benin put Kate in a vulnerable position. And that’s putting it mildly. Alarm bells should have gone off when Kate revealed that a fellow teacher and Peace Corps employee had been raping students. Clearly, this man was dangerous and capable of violent crimes. The alarm should have woken Washington before they decided to fire the teacher on the spot, in the middle of the school year. We’ll never know why Peace Corps didn’t swoop in and take Kate out of her village proactively before confronting and firing the teacher. They are refusing to share any insight into their strategy or protocol for this type of situation. Or if one even existed.

Perhaps the stickiest part of the story–and likely the one that got Kate killed–is that fact that the brother of the teacher in question worked for Peace Corps as well. I believe this is the root of the problem and the leak that led to Kate’s murder. This is also perhaps the most obvious element of risk that Peace Corps could have eliminated in this situation.

They never should have employed two members of the same family.

While they couldn’t have foreseen doing so would lead to a volunteer’s death, clearly the bonds of blood are strong. And even more so in developing countries, where families live together for generations. It’s not hard to understand how two brothers loyalty to each other would supersede company rules about privacy.

Without taking anything away from the egregious mistakes made in Benin, or the plight of any volunteer that has been raped or abused during service, I would like to step back and look at the inherent issue of risk in the Peace Corps.

I’m not making excuse for the Peace Corps in Benin. I’ve already addressed how they dropped the ball. But to say that the Peace Corps as a whole is to blame for these crimes would be short-sided.

Yes, Peace Corps Washington should make it against the rules to hire two members of the same family.  They should also establish a protocol for situations when volunteers need to share potentially life-threatening information with staff. This is a gaping hole in volunteer safety. But no matter what new rules Peace Corps implements, there will be another risk.

Sadly, there will likely be another death.

You can’t take all the risk out of Peace Corps service anymore than you can take it out of life in America. People will continue to die in senseless acts of violence. They will die because of accidents, because of negligence. No matter where in the world they are living. But there is a difference between all the senseless deaths in America and the ones that occur in the Peace Corps.

When someone joins the Peace Corps, they are opening themselves up to very different risks than those that exist on the home front. Tuberculosis, for one, Malaria, for two, and then there are the non-disease risks. Like the safety net that’s removed when you land in a country where you don’t speak the language with a native tongue. Or know the cultural nuances of life and love. If you’re in danger on the street in America, you know how to react to get attention. You know you can trust the police. You can scream “Help” and be understood.

I remember a story Peace Corps staff told in Ukraine about the importance of learning safety words. She said a volunteer had her phone stolen in a crowded train station. She knew it instantly but couldn’t find the words to express what had happened, so she cried out the first thing that came to her mind, “помідор!” or “Tomato!” The word for help still didn’t come to her, and she kept repeating, “Tomato, tomato,” with increasing desperateness in her voice. Needless to say, the phone thief got away.

But there are other stories of volunteers in Ukraine who knew how to say help, who confronted their attacker, and told police what was happening in perfect Ukrainian. But they still got robbed. In some cases, the police didn’t care. In others, bystanders thought the two people, a woman and a man, were in a lover’s quarrel, and didn’t want to interfere.

The risks in Peace Corps service are heightened because you don’t have the basic level of security that comes with being native born. But the rewards are also heightened.

A successful trip to the grocery store feels like you’ve graduated from college all over again. Navigating public transit with ease is like medaling in the Olympics.

These are accomplishments that don’t merit acknowledgment in America. But in the Peace Corps, they are huge.

The gravity of ABC’s investigation is real. Peace Corps needs to act quickly and decisively to make sure any risk that can be more effectively managed is being dealt with. Kate’s death exposed two prime candidates. But I hope it won’t discourage anyone from joining the Peace Corps. That may sound careless, naive, or overly optimistic, but I don’t think fear should determine anyone’s life choices.

If we all acted out of fear, we’d never leave the house. We wouldn’t drive cars, or go skiing, or ride in planes. And we’d never move halfway around the world to live beside strangers, learn a new language, and hand wash our clothes. But you could die from a house fire, or get struck by lightning in your own backyard. We all have to face risks, whether or not we join the Peace Corps.

But for the people who do become volunteers, there should be a confident, proactive, comprehensive volunteer safety strategy in place to manage as many of the risks of service as possible. While steps to ensure volunteer safety do exist, Kate’s death merits another look at them. I can think of no better way to honor Kate’s service than to seriously address what happened with new volunteer safety provisions. The midst of the Peace Corp’s 50th birthday seems as good a time as any.

p.s. I apologize for going radio silent since starting my job in July. When you get paid to write, it seriously decreases your motivation to do it for free.

The examples of gross delays of justice aren’t limited to those with variations on the name Anthony Michael. Two of the stories on the July 24 front page of the Houston Chronicle addressed men wrongly convicted of heinous crimes. One man, Allen Wayne Porter, spent 19 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. The other man, Cameron Todd Willingham, was executed in 2004 for the deaths of his own children based on evidence that is now being called “flawed science” by the state commission investigating the contentious conviction.

It’s about time.

Willingham’s case first caught my eye with this excellent article in The New Yorker from September 2009. It then enraptured me with this heart-wrenching article in Texas Monthly, which is well-worth the free account you have to make to read it.

Willingham was executed in 2004 for allegedly setting fire to his home, killing his three young children two days before Christmas in 1991. He maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration and refused to enter in a plea bargain to reduce his punishment to life in prison.

A year after Willingham’s execution, the Forensic Science Commission was created by the Texas Legislature to investigate “scientific negligence and misconduct.” When the commission investigated Willingham’s case, and that of another Texas death row inmate exonerated for arson, Ernest Willis, renowned arson expert Craig Beyler found that neither fire had been set intentionally. Willis and Willingham were both innocent of the crimes they were accused of committing. But Willis walked out and Willingham never will.

If you haven’t heard about this case before, there’s a good reason. Governor Rick Perry doesn’t want you to. On Sept 30, Perry effectively halted the official release of the commission’s findings. He replaced the chairman of the commission with Williamson County district attorney John Bradley, a Perry appointee in 2001. Among Bradley’s first tasks as chairman? Canceling the scheduled meeting between Beyler and the commission. Finally, on Friday, July 23, the commission was allowed to rule on the issue. While they didn’t find Deputy Fire Marshal Manuel Vasquez and Corsicana Assistant Fire Chief Douglas Fogg negligent or guilty of misconduct, they did agree that state and local arson investigators (ie Vasquez, Fogg) used flawed science to determine the blaze was the result of arson.

How ironic that Vasquez and Fogg are spared the guilty verdict that Willingham was not. Official rulings aside, their findings still led to what is all but certainly the death of an innocent man.

I know the old saying that prison is full of “innocent” people. Of course nearly all inmates claim innocence. But what about the ones that really are? I’m not talking about crazy, hair-brained conspiracies on Prison Break. I’m talking about plain-and-simple, wrong place at the wrong time. Mistaken identity. False evidence. Just bad luck. One-hundred and thirty-eight times on death row they got the wrong man. And those are just the exonerations that have been proven so far. Rarely is there a 100 percent success rate in anything, so it is not a stretch to say that innocent people have been executed. It’s the most logical conclusion, actually, given the circumstances of 138 proven cases. The numbers spike even further for wrongful convictions not resulting in death row, 255 for post-conviction DNA exonerations.

Given the fact that the US has 2.3 million people behind bars, less than 500 wrongful convictions seems like almost nothing. Except when you remember these are people. American citizens who have spent decades locked up for crimes they didn’t commit. And those are the lucky ones. Some, like Willingham, were executed. When you can’t trust the evidence, a conviction beyond a shadow of a doubt is impossible. The death penalty as carried out in our fair land is anything but just. In light of these exonerations, and the most recent ruling in the Willingham investigation, the use of the death penalty should be suspended in the U.S. Once a better method of collecting and interpreting evidence is developed, the court can reevaluate the use of capital punishment. It won’t be an easy, cheap or fast process. Many may lose their jobs or election seats, but at least none of the casualties of the legal process will be an innocent life.

I’ve always enjoyed telling a good story. And my lot in life has cast me plenty of them. My friends and family often remark that an inordinate amount of strange things happen to me. As far back as I can remember, I’ve come home saying, “You won’t believe the day I’ve had.” My ability to find trouble, redemption, and humor all before lunch led my family to categorize my stories as “Claire’s World.” They didn’t come up with it entirely on their own though. I penned that phrase in an elementary miniseries about talking monkeys, tree houses, and babies left in baskets on doorsteps. Basically all the things I thought were missing from my slice of reality. While my penchant for creative writing was short-lived, the phrase stuck. So when I’d call home from Baylor with my famous—and on occasion infamous—refrain about my day, my parents were amused but never surprised. My time in Ukraine has been full of stories. There have been enough goat attacks, (yes, plural), classroom shenanigans, public transportation adventures and language debacles to keep the phone bill exorbitantly high. But lately I’ve encountered something truly bizarre. I don’t feel like I have any stories worth telling. My days are normal and uneventful. In my eyes at least.

It’s 9 p.m. in Ukraine, which means it’s lunchtime in Texas. I’m online chatting with my sister Amber. “What’s new with you?” she asks. “It started snowing this week,” I reply. This was the single-biggest event of my recent history. I was truly appalled when white chunks of ice and powder started cascading from the sky on October 13th.

Autumn, I hardly knew thee.

About thirty minutes passed before Amber grew tired of my descriptions of the barren landscape. “So what else is happening?” she prodded for a subject change. “Oh, not a lot,” then I thought a little harder. “I did get detained by the police this weekend,” I replied. “WHAT?!?” she said. “Spare no detail!” I really wasn’t that pumped about telling the story. For me, it had seemed pretty uneventful, barely worth mentioning. “It’s really not that exciting,” I told her and began to recount the humdrum tale.

My friends and I had decided to take a trip to L’viv to commemorate our first year in Ukraine. We arrived in the city, guidebook in hand, early Saturday morning and hopped on a tram. “This is fun,” my friend Molly said. “We don’t have these in Frankivsk.” After buying three tickets, we took our seats. It had only passed one stop when a woman flashed her badge at us and asked to see our tickets. Smiling, we produced them. Law-abiding citizens that we are, we felt no concern with her request. She told us that we hadn’t followed the rules and needed to pay a fine of 60 UAH. We actually understood her Ukrainian perfectly, but needed a logic translator. How could the tickets be wrong? We bought them on the tram, and besides, we had only gone one stop, even if we bought some low-level ticket, it surely took you this far. Another woman showed up, and they were in no mood for conversation. They began to shout and point to their badges with increasing hostility. Fellow passengers came to our rescue, “Leave the girls alone,” one man said. “This isn’t how we treat people in L’viv.” Sensing they were outnumbered, the badge-welding women demanded that we exit the tram with them.

Out on the street, the confusion escalated. We called our Peace Corps Safety and Security Officer, who is like a magician when it comes to getting Volunteers out of tight spots. They refused to speak with him. Straight-up wouldn’t do it. After about ten minutes of this impasse and us still in the dark as to our alleged crime, we had a stroke of genius—We put him on speakerphone. Suddenly, they couldn’t help but talk. Our victory was premature, however. After a few minutes they stopped and said, “That’s all. I can’t say anymore.” Apparently there is a strict code of secrecy among tram ticket checkers. Although highly tempted to just walk away, at the advice of our SSO, we followed the women to the police station. He assured us it was not a big deal and he would be able to sort it out better with the police.

We walked into the station and the officer looked up kindly at us. Molly flashed a big TV Reporter smile and said “Hello.” Immediately he asked, “Where are you from?” Molly answered, “America.” Now the women were getting even more upset. “They can speak Ukrainian, you know! Don’t believe them if they say they can’t.” To be fair, it did seem prudent at that time to play the I-don’t-speak-the-language-card, even though we had understood nearly every word they had said. Our Ukrainian hadn’t helped, and had somehow landed us in a police station so we decided to fall back on our mother tongue. When I felt a Ukrainian answer was completely necessary, I purposefully spoke with errors. I doubt this had any bearing on the final outcome, but after a few short minutes at the station, we were free to go. And told to make sure we time-stamped our tickets next time we rode the tram. Apparently you can go one stop without it. So the public defenders of L’viv had watched us buy the tickets and waited until we “broke the law” to fine us.

“Like I said, it wasn’t that big of deal,” I typed. But Amber’s digital laughter and exclamations left me doubting the dullness of this story. It did have all my usual components: trouble, redemption, humor and a noon expiration date. Somehow, it had flown below the story-worthy radar. Then I realized this wasn’t the only lead I had buried lately. There was the broken-down bus with a leaking roof that tried to drop off all fifty passengers an hour outside of town, my neighbors who only wash their clothes on delicate cycle because they are afraid of the noise and motion their new washing machine makes, and of course the combination water-gas-electricity outages that accompanied the snowstorm. All of which sound perfectly mundane in my head until I get them down on paper.

One of my friends likened my situation to a disaster zone. “Oh it’s not that bad,” I assured her. Upon further reflection I realized lack of light, heat, and water would probably qualify as a disaster in most parts of the world, but all it meant here was that the students wore gloves in class and we shortened each lesson by fifteen minutes. My family is incredulous that I don’t have pictures of any of these so-called calamites. But it seems weird to take pictures of my ordinary life, even if I am wearing a rain jacket inside a bus while a steady stream of water pours over my head. It’s just another day in Ukraine.

Yet the so-called “public defenders” spend next to no time chasing down the top execs at Fannie Mae or AIG. The government bailouts are costing taxpayers billions of dollars, while the guilty parties sneak off with hefty paychecks and bonuses. Companies like the Lehman brothers and Merrill Lynch aren’t so lucky. They took bad advice, disguised it as good investments, and hoped for a greater return due to their risk. The companies don’t get to ride the government’s coat tails because their effects weren’t calculated to be as large as Fannie or Freddie. Oh well, at least the CEO of Merrill Lynch stands to make about $252 million from the Bank of America buy-out. That makes me feel better.

I understand the AIG bailout is perhaps the lesser of two evils, considering the effect of huge corporations going under on our already fragile economy, but that’s not good enough. The stock market is holding, while our national debt climbs the charts at an alarming rate. Somewhere, our capitalism credo has run amuck, and predatory lenders are looking out for no one but themselves as they hand out mortgages to the masses and set off a chain-reaction of problems.

Sure, in an ideal world, the public would be highly educated, fiscally responsible, and wouldn’t even apply for a loan they didn’t qualify for. But back in reality, people want nicer homes than they can afford. It’s the professional responsibility of lenders and credit agencies to tell people their limits. That’s why you have to get “approved” for a loan. The idea isn’t to pick the weakest candidate and exploit them. This isn’t the African Sahara.

These checks were in place to determine suitability for large financial responsibility, but now they are being used to take advantage of people. This is the crime of the century. It’s affecting the entire country, and except for saying “Shame on you,” playing the blame game, and writing a check with our money, the government isn’t doing much about it.

So what do I want? A full-scale attack.

We must go after the predatory lenders with vigor. We have to make an example out of them. Right now it’s the perfect crime. We’re telling business men and women, go ahead, screw over the public, write yourself a nice, fat check, and we’ll bail you out. Literally. I want investigators on the case. I want undercover raids. I want to turn the small-time peddler of bad loans into a snitch to reel in the big fish. I want the corporate version of the SWAT team assembled.

This isn’t going to be cheap. But I’d give a rough estimate that falls somewhere below $85 billion.

The study, released in April, said 37 percent of young people listed religion as “a very important part of their lives” and 45 percent expected it to “become more important as they grew older.” But traditional “religious” issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research aren’t as popular with the younger demographic. The idea of voting for morals or family values doesn’t mean what it used to. Hallelujah. 

As a religiously affiliated youth voter myself, I am overall more concerned with poverty, social justice, and the environment as moral causes than any others. This is also a reflection of the Democratic Party affiliation of the majority of the 18-29-year-old age group, reported by the Pew Research Center. It’s not that abortion and homosexuality aren’t worthy of attention or thoughtful discussion/legislation, but for too long these two issues have defined the religious movement. I’m proud to be part of a generation that is broadening our moral focus and redefining what it means to be a politically-active religious citizen.

We can talk all day about when life begins and what rights women have, but as long as people are poor and scared and uneducated, we won’t stop abortions. We can obsess over homosexuality and the theories of sexual orientation, but how can we love like Jesus when we don’t even treat people who are different than us like people?

My hope for my generation and the emerging religiousity in America is that our votes will speak about a great love for all people and a concerted effort to make life better in this country. I hope issues like the environment won’t fade into merely a trendy interest, but will manifest into a dedication for alternative, clean energy and a renewed zeal for conservation.

I think criminal justice is another neglected Christian issue that has seen an increase in popularity with the restorative justice movement. The religious right may not be famous for hugging trees or fighting for prisoner’s rights, but I believe the religious left could be. And maybe, we can even stop using terms like left and right to describe and divide ourselves. I’ll try to work on that.

They all systematically kill citizens who break the law.

Of course they aren’t alone. Sudan, Uganda, Pakistan and Swaziland are our fellow compatriots in this ghastly fraternity of 70 countries.

The goal of institutional punishment is part correction, part restitution, and part community protection. Violators of the law are subject to sanctions in an attempt to dispense justice, that is to correct the wrong committed in a meaningful way, prevent it from happening again, and in the process remove harmful individuals from society.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the death penalty is not an appropriate punishment for the rape of a child. This ruling reflects largely what the judicial process of our nation has already decided. As the article in the Times states,  “Not since 1964 has anyone been executed in the United States for a crime other than murder.”

While I happen to oppose the death penalty unilaterally, the idea of killing child rapists sounds appealing at first glimpse. The despicable nature of the crime and the irreparable harm done to children causes something in my normally peace-loving nature to cry out with vengeance with the mob.  But this knee-jerk reaction is short-sided. What I really want is assurance that this won’t happen ever again, or, at the very least, it will occur with far less frequency.

Systematically killing the perpetrators one by one sounds like the literal way to eliminate the problem and “protect” our children. But if preventing child rape is really what this debate is about, then the death penalty shouldn’t even be a consideration. New Orleans and Houston rank as the second and fifteenth leading cities for murder. Louisiana and Texas also rank among the highest in number of executions per state.

Since 1976, Texas has executed four times more inmates than the next leading state, Virginia, and four hundred times that of Wyoming. It’s painfully clear that the death penalty fails to deter crime. While several cities in Texas have less crime (Austin, Plano), that likely has more to do with the socioeconomic status of residents than the deterring factor of the death penalty. As the Death Penalty Information Center reports, “The murder rate in non-death penalty states has remained consistently lower than the rate in states with the death penalty, and the gap has grown since 1990.”

I oppose the death penalty not only on moral grounds, but because it fails to prevent crime. Instead of thinking of harsher punishments, we need to ask ourselves is why are grown men raping children? Where has our society failed? How can we address the root of this problem instead of reacting to the end result? These questions may be harder to answer, but they are the ones that will actually save lives.

I believe the true impetus behind capital punishment is far less noble than the call of justice or the desire to protect children. We want revenge. We want to inflict pain on others to make them feel as badly as their victims did. This isn’t exactly a foreign concept. It’s human nature at its worst, and, if left unchecked, it will result in breeding hatred and, ironically, crime. We already lock up more than 2 million of our own citizens—the most in the world. Our great love affair with punishment may look prettier than the public hangings of our forefathers, but it’s no less uncivilized.

Amnesty International reports that 135 countries have abolished the death penalty—countries like Norway, Sweden, Italy, France, and Australia. If you ask me, they make far better bedfellows than our current company.