Oprah stated she was touched by the story of Jarvis Jay Masters, who’s at the moment on dying row in California’s San Quentin State Jail.
NEW YORK — Oprah Winfrey has chosen a jail memoir by Jarvis Jay Masters, at the moment on dying row in San Quentin State Jail in California, for her newest e book membership decide. Masters’ “That Chook Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Harmless Man on Demise Row” was first revealed in 2009.
Activists for years have known as for the discharge of Masters, sentenced to dying in 1990 for collaborating within the homicide of a San Quentin jail guard. Masters, first imprisoned in 1981 for armed theft, has filed quite a few appeals in efforts to have his homicide conviction overturned. A listening to is scheduled for subsequent month in federal court docket.
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“A bit greater than 10 years in the past, I used to be given a memoir by Jarvis Jay Masters, a person serving a dying row sentence in San Quentin,” Winfrey stated in a press release Tuesday. “His story, of a younger boy victimized by dependancy, poverty, violence, the foster care system, and later the justice system, profoundly touched me then, and nonetheless does right this moment, which is why I’m naming ‘That Chook Has My Wings’ as my newest Oprah’s E-book Membership choice.”
Masters stated in a press release that he could be “without end grateful” to Winfrey for selecting his e book.
“I turned 60 this 12 months, having entered San Quentin on the age 19. I wrote ‘That Chook Has My Wings’ whereas in solitary confinement, remoted and alone,” he stated. “My best hope at the moment was that just a few younger individuals would learn my story and be taught from my errors. Because of Ms. Winfrey and her e book membership, my story can be launched to a nationwide viewers. It’s my best hope that their lives would be the higher for it.”
Supporters of Masters have backed his claims of innocence and cited him as a mannequin of how individuals can rework themselves. In “Don’t Cease Believing That Individuals Can Change,” a New York Occasions essay revealed in April, writer Rebecca Solnit wrote that “he has usually defused potential violence and supplied solace and a reliable ear to the sorrows of these round him.”
Masters has additionally written “Discovering Freedom: How Demise Row Broke and Opened My Coronary heart,” revealed in 1997.