Friends, I hope you’ll allow a different kind of update today. I have been looking at my Facebook feed, and right now, 100,000 people are talking about Mike Pence. The lead story seems to be one published in England about some of the controversial positions Pence has taken, but there isn’t a single word in that article about Pence and Keith Cooper’s pardon or about Pence and issues of race. This frustrates me because what other petition involving Pence’s governance in Indiana is currently approaching 112,000 signatures? On August 1, I began the petition to get our Republican governor to correct an ongoing injustice, approaching 20 years, against a Black man wrongly convicted and incarcerated (until 2006) for armed robbery. About ten days after I began the petition, someone left a dead animal, I think a dog, in a bag in front of my house. Today, that governor is our VP-elect and Keith Cooper is still a convicted felon. I am a prison volunteer. At one of Indiana’s prisons, I meet with inmates almost weekly as we study, rehearse, and perform from Shakespeare’s plays. I began this in 2013 following several years of an occasional volunteer association with Kentucky’s Shakespeare Behind Bars program. One thing my experiences have shown me is that prisons are no place for anyone to spend any time in unjustly. The injustice of Keith Cooper’s situation is obvious and ongoing, now perpetuated by Indiana’s upcoming attorney general, Curtis Hill, and the current governor, soon-to-be-VP Pence. They didn’t begin the injustice in 1997, but they are its current cause. Keith Cooper should not have spent one day in prison. He should not spend one more day unpardoned, though he will, of course. While I have been glad for any national coverage we have had, from the Atlanta Black Star, the Washington Post, the Young Turks, the Community Newspaper Holdings, and Roland Martin, we have never reached the national discussion I think Keith Cooper’s case has deserved. It reveals so much about Mike Pence’s perspectives on race and justice, a now crucial subject as he helps to shape the next administration. Besides my work in the prisons, several experiences and readings have influenced me in this effort. First is my faith. When Jesus calls upon his followers to visit the prisoners, I have been persuaded to take it seriously. I do consider that I am called upon to be a neighbor, as the Samaritan is. Besides my work on Shakespeare, I am also a scholar of Minority Literature. A number of readings have contributed to my thinking, but most especially the essays of James Baldwin, the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, the plays of August Wilson, and two novels by Ernest Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. Of non-fiction writing, I have been greatly influenced by Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. If you have a way to reach a member of the national press that we haven’t yet reached, I do think it is important for people to know how Pence has handled Keith Cooper’s pardon. But for this update, I thought I would recommend some of the influences on my effort here. I will have strategies in upcoming updates. Thank you for your support of this effort. Jack Heller