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Stan Faulder was a Canadian on death row in Texas. Shortly before his scheduled execution date, he agreed to give MacIntyre an interview, the first time he'd ever spoken to the media. Although Faulder had murdered a man while in his 20s, he had suffered a brain injury and had been under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
Now he was a grandfather in his 60s, and in MacIntyre's eyes substantially different from the man who committed the crime for which he was sentenced to die. After the interview, Faulder was given a stay of execution. "I thought that would be the end of it," MacIntyre recalls. "Reason would prevail and eventually his death sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment."
To MacIntyre's
horror, Faulder's execution was re-scheduled and he asked MacIntyre to
be a witness to it. The sentence was postponed and rescheduled again,
and finally, at Faulder's request, MacIntyre spent significant parts of
the man's final two days talking to him about life and death, religion
and justice. 
"I have never been afraid to tell anyone that I am profoundly philosophically opposed to the death penalty," says MacIntyre. "But afterwards I asked myself about the wisdom of allowing myself to get so close to subjects. Certainly an experience like this is a bit of baggage that one will carry around forever. But now that a couple of years have gone by, I realize that I'm glad that I did it."