Huddersfield’s woman campaign to save Death Row killer
Jul 8 2009 by Huddersfield Daily Examiner
Huddersfield’s woman campaign to save Death Row killer
RETIRED teacher Sandra Leyland usually goes on holiday to France, staying with friends in the Pyrenees. But this year her holiday will be dramatically different.
She is heading to America . . . for a date on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California.
There she will meet for the first time convicted murderer and bank robber Danny Ray Horning who has been her pen friend for the past four years.
He has been on death row for 14 years while fighting his sentence – and 64-year-old grandmother Sandra, of Lane Ings, Marsden, is doing all she can to give him moral support.
Horning was sentenced to death in 1995 for allegedly killing fish farmer Sammy McCullough.
Before that sentence, he had escaped from an Arizona prison, where he was serving a life term for bank robbery. He is an army veteran and an expert in surviving in the wilderness and he was compared to the film character Rambo as he eluded searchers in the Grand Canyon national park during nearly two months on the run.
But Sandra believes he is innocent of murder.
“Danny Ray was sentenced to death for a murder he swears he did not commit,” she said.
“I believe he is innocent, but my attitude towards him would still be the same if he were guilty.”
Sandra is a committee member of Human Writes, a UK organisation founded for the purpose of befriending prisoners on death row in the United States.
San Quentin has California’s only death row. It is the largest in the USA with more than 600 men awaiting execution.
It has a gas chamber, but since 1996 executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection.
“It’s murder by the state,” said Sandra. “In a civilised society there is no justification for taking the life of someone, even though that person has taken the life of another.
“That’s revenge, not justice.”
Horning, aged 50, is a divorced father of three and has two grandchildren.
“He does not hear from his family, except occasionally from one brother,” said Sandra.
“ I write to him every week, at least a 12-page letter. He sometimes writes twice a week.
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