Sue Hartigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: ROME (Reuters) - A condemned U.S. murderer to be put to death this week told an Italian newspaper Monday he had repented for his crime and was ashamed to die by execution. The interview will be broadcast prime-time on state television in Italy, one of the most vocal proponents of a worldwide ban on the death penalty. "I want people to know I have repented for what I have done and if I could do something -- anything -- to change what has been, I would," Joe Cannon, 38, said in an interview with Milan daily Corriere della Sera from a prison in Huntsville, Texas. "I am very ashamed that I have to die in this way... This is not the way I want to leave this planet," he said. Cannon was condemned to death for murdering a woman when he was 17. He is due to executed by lethal injection Wednesday. RAI, the state television channel will broadcast the interview on Monday. It is one of several programs on the death penalty to be aired as part of a United Nation's campaign against capital punishment. Among the programs and debates, the network will broadcast "Dead Man Walking," the 1996 U.S. film drawn from the book by famed death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean. In the past 12 months, Italians have rallied behind two other death row inmates, U.S. convicts Joseph O'Dell and Karla Faye Tucker, holding night-time vigils and writing letters until the hour the two convicts were put to death. Pope John Paul and Prime Minister Romano Prodi appealed for clemency in both cases. The U.N.'s Geneva-based Human Rights Commission passed a resolution earlier this month urging a general moratorium on executions and moves towards universal abolition of the death penalty. The following day, a U.N. investigator accused the United States of applying the death penalty in an unfair, arbitrary and discriminatory way. He specifically criticized the execution of criminals convicted of offenses committed when they were under 18. Washington rejected the report as "severely flawed." In the interview, Cannon said he had changed during the 21 years he spent in prison. "I am no longer 17. I have received a long education... If (the authorities) saw who I am now, they might like the man before them more than they are prepared to think," he said. "It is wrong to kill a man for errors he committed when he was 17...killing me will not resolve anything, it's an illusion." -- Two rules in life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know. 2. Subscribe/Unsubscribe, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the body of the message enter: subscribe/unsubscribe law-issues
