ArchPundit writes a nice tribute to "Dick Cunningham: Attorney for the Damned." Cunningham was another hero in the fight against the death penalty, who recently met a tragic fate. He was stabbed to death by his mentally ill son.

The Chicago Tribune recently wrote about Cunningham--in eleven installments. The Prologue and first installment are here.

Cunningham walked through a world of hurt, a world where killers raped and stabbed and set people on fire; where the killers themselves had often suffered, getting beaten or abandoned or shot.

He walked some of our criminal justice system's darkest halls -- through police stations where suspects are tortured and courts where judges don't care and prisons where inmates are executed in front of witnesses who sit in a room where the floor slopes from back to front so that any vomit will flow toward a drain and can be easily hosed away.

He offered lessons on living and dying to men on Death Row. Don't leave this world with your middle finger extended, he told one man about to be executed. Don't give them that to remember you by. To others, he said, paint, read, write, learn, hope. Live a life that is worth saving, a life that will be missed.