FOR DEAR LIFE

Rick Halperin doesn't celebrate his birthday anymore.

It's not his age that bothers him. It's the date: July 2.

On that day, in 1976, Halperin was sitting down to a creole dinner at the home of friends in Auburn, Ala. The television news droned in the background. The mood was festive.

At 26, Halperin was already a seasoned war protester and dedicated human-rights activist. A scholar, too. In a couple of years, he would complete his doctorate in Southern U.S. history at Auburn University. Eventually he would end up back in Dallas, teaching at Southern Methodist University, where he'd received his master's degree.

Everything might have been different though if, on a rainy July evening, in the middle of Halperin's birthday dinner, the news that night hadn't come from the steps of the Supreme Court.

The death penalty was legal again.

Halperin was crushed and enraged. And he did what he says that he was put on this earth to do: He raised his voice in protest.

Twenty-eight years later, Halperin sits in a metal folding chair with his back to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. It's July 2, "a national day of shame," as he now refers to the date of his birth. He's here, along with others, to demonstrate against the death penalty and for alternatives, he says, that don't condone the "obliteration" of human beings, no matter how detestable they are.

This doesn't mean, he stresses, that he'd like to see homicidal felons turned loose on the streets.

"Society has a right to be protected. There's no question about that," he says. "This is not arguing that the guilty need to be freed. This is a much bigger struggle. Are we to be a nation which advocates human decency, human dignity and an end to dehumanizing people or are we not? And the current answer with this court on this issue," he says, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder, "is no."

At 54, Halperin is, as much as one can be, a human-rights celebrity. Over the past three decades, his uncompromising opposition to capital punishment has catapulted him to the forefront of the worldwide human-rights movement. He has served as chairman of Amnesty International USA, the domestic arm of the world's best-known human-rights organization. He has addressed foreign parliaments. A dizzying number of European human-rights groups have invited Halperin to talk about the U.S. death penalty.

His travels have taken him to Palestinian refugee camps and the site of death-squad atrocities in El Salvador. And every year, Halperin, who is an authority on the Holocaust as well, spends his Christmas vacation guiding students and colleagues through the sites of Nazi death camps in Poland during World War II.

But paper credentials reveal little about Halperin's life -- a life that is focused, to the near exclusion of all else, on ending torture and the death penalty. SMU colleagues describe him reverentially as "uncommonly uncompromising," "saint"-like and "a prophet."

Halperin, notoriously self-effacing, won't hear of it.

"I don't think there's anything special about me. I'm an average person with a fanatic commitment to the right cause," he says.

Or a wrong, deeply misguided, even sick cause, as many of Halperin's critics contend. And nowhere are those critics harsher than in Texas, where the death penalty is arguably more entrenched than anywhere in the Western world.

Four hundred and sixty people, including nine women, are on the state's Death Row. Since 1982, 326 others have been executed, more than three times as many as in Virginia, the state with the next highest number.

Here and across the nation, capital punishment is viewed by most people as a just and appropriate penalty for heinous acts.

Halperin's hate mail is usually blunt. It comes from people who simply disagree with him -- "You are truly a sick and poor representation of an American" -- to those who have suffered unimaginable losses -- "Wait till they rape and murder your mother or sister like they did mine, then you'll get it . . ."

The daily condemnation, and the rare death threats, are a price Halperin willingly pays. But his fervor has cost him personally, too: It leaves precious little time for anything else.

"I call him our human-rights monk because he lives such a focused and disciplined life relative to human rights," says the Rev. William Finnin, SMU chaplain. "He has literally given his life to the cause of human rights."

"Everything about me, with the exception of when I play ball or go running, centers around human rights," he acknowledges. "I feel that I am on call 24 hours a day to this cause.

"This isn't something that I do," Halperin says. "It's who I am."

Giving all for the cause

Halperin works out of the SMU Women's Center, a small white duplex in the middle of the campus. His office, a former upstairs bedroom, exists in a state of permanent dishevelment. A maze of papers covers the floor and buries most of his desk. His many bookcases runneth over with accounts of the Holocaust, genocide, eugenics and lynching, to name a few subjects.

But it's the student artwork on the walls -- and spilling out of closets -- that Halperin wants to talk about.

Completing a creative project is a requirement of Halperin's undergraduate human-rights class, and after 15 years, he has stockpiled an impressive collection. His favorites include a miniature electric chair sporting an "Out of Order" sign, a canvas symbolically splattered with red paint, and a multimedia work portraying the international symbol for "woman" with the circle doubling as a bull's-eye.

Despite the setting, Halperin's mood is consistently cheery. The windowsill near his computer is lined with desk toys. He has taped to his computer monitor dozens of photocopied cartoons about the vagaries of modern technology. He's got a touch of Luddite in him: He didn't have a touch-tone phone until Amnesty International ordered one for him in the early '90s. He still relies on an unair-conditioned 1983 Honda station wagon to get him around town.

Halperin's apartment is only two blocks away from his office, and he has lived there by himself since he moved to Texas. That wasn't exactly the plan. If you had told him 30 years ago that he wouldn't be married or have children by now, he would have laughed, he says.

But giving everything to human rights has left little time and emotion to invest elsewhere. His fanaticism has come "at the cost of his own personal life," says longtime friend Jojo White.

"Most people who deal with me know from the very beginning this struggle comes first," he says. "If a byproduct of that commitment was the lack of a long-term personal relationship or a family, that's just the price that had to be paid.

A global classroom

Halperin grew up in small-town Alabama during the civil rights era. He displays a pronounced drawl every few words -- "human rots" -- and has a knack for emphasizing an unusual syllable -- SOO-preme Court, DEE-troit. He opens doors for women and still calls the Civil War "the war between the brothers."

His mother was strict about certain things. She didn't, for instance, tolerate the word "hate."

"You couldn't hate people; you couldn't hate peas," says Halperin. She hammered home the philosophy of activism: "Do good. Keep doing good. And don't find a reason not to do good."

Ever since he was 7 years old, Halperin has known that he wanted to study and teach history. The epiphany came one Sunday morning as he read about ancient Greece in the encyclopedia. He was ecstatic then, and his course has never wavered. By age 16, before he could drive, he was a George Washington University freshman in Washington, D.C.

It was the 1960s then, a turbulent time for the country and for Halperin. He applied for conscientious-objector status during the Vietnam War but was never called up. He took part in anti-war demonstrations and was arrested in connection with acts of civil disobedience.

During his sophomore year, Halperin studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was traveling in Prague when he witnessed firsthand the self-immolation of student protester Jan Palach, who killed himself in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Halperin was close enough to feel the heat of the flames. The incident left him traumatized.

He would suffer his own tragedy less than two years later.

Four days after the Kent State riots, May 8, 1970, Halperin was standing on the steps in front of his dorm. He was watching protesters flee as police broke up a demonstration. As the chaos grew closer, he turned his head, only to find a canister gun inches from his face and a riot officer shooting acid gas in his eyes.

The incident left Halperin partially blind. Thirty-four years later, he remains without peripheral vision and has poor depth perception. He doesn't see colors at all. The dark glasses that he wears indoors and out have become something of his trademark on campus.

Halperin's injury didn't prevent him from pursuing his studies, but the going was rough. He reads with a magnifying glass, and his eyes tire easily. Acidic buildup requires that he have his eyes scraped regularly.

In the end, Halperin was forced to give up his ambition of a university professorship. Performing the research necessary to publish scholarly articles would have been too physically grueling. Nevertheless, he has made university campuses his professional home. Before coming to Dallas, he taught history at Auburn, Tulane and the University of Mississippi.

SMU hired Halperin in 1985, first as a full-time academic adviser and, in 2000, as assistant director of SMU's Office of Leadership and Community Involvement. But he's known mainly around campus as a history professor. The undergraduate seminar that he has taught since 1990, The Struggle for Human Rights, has a reputation for being particularly challenging. It's also always in high demand.

Of the myriad awards bestowed upon Halperin, it's the two Outstanding Faculty Teaching Awards, voted on by SMU students, of which he is proudest. (They hang on the wall behind his desk, while the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has been relegated to the floor.)

Halperin, says Finnin, is "always, always, always available to students. . . . The man lives for students." Indeed, a hand-written note on Halperin's door reads, "People are always welcome in this office."

Does Halperin wish he could teach full time instead of part time as an adjunct professor? Definitely. But he never, he says, feels sorry for himself.

"I see. I function," Halperin says. "I wasn't prohibited from becoming who I am."

Constant vigilance

Halperin has been working on Texas death penalty issues ever since he set foot in the state in 1985. He's president of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. For more than a decade he has organized monthly anti-death-penalty rallies in downtown Dallas.

Early on, he was known for his prodigious output of photocopied materials on the subject, sent to a mailing list of anti-death-penalty allies. "He'd fill as much stuff as he could in a No. 10 envelope, and you'd get two or three of those a week," notes Abe Bonowitz, who directs Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Now Halperin posts those documents on the Web site he administers, Death Penalty News and Updates. His résumé notes that both the Department of State and the Department of Justice have used the site.

By the early '90s, Halperin had been anointed an expert. "Anytime an execution was coming up, I finally began to expect for television cameras to be setting up in the office," says Rebecca Bergstresser, who worked with Halperin at SMU for several years.

When the Amnesty International USA board made him chairman for 1992-1993, SMU granted Halperin a paid sabbatical -- almost unheard of for someone who's not a full professor, notes History Department Chairman Jim Hopkins. Halperin traveled nonstop, speaking about the U.S. death penalty to audiences throughout Europe and North America.

"Much of the horror of the [capital punishment] system had yet to be exposed," he says. In fact, unprecedented attention to the issue would come late in the decade when Illinois Gov. George Ryan placed a moratorium on the state's death penalty; when Texas inmate Karla Faye Tucker's execution was imminent; and when then-Gov. George W. Bush announced his candidacy for president and the national media turned its eye on the Bush record.

But as Amnesty USA's top dog, Halperin found himself in demand nonetheless. He appeared on Nightline, CNN and Crossfire, as well as local radio and television.

"If you can attach Rick Halperin's name to something, it lends instant credibility in the [anti-death-penalty] community," says Bonowitz.

Halperin has, over the years, become something akin to a death-penalty oracle. People from around the globe -- prisoners, their relatives, their pen pals, their supporters -- call or write him for information and for moral and practical support. Immediately after the lethal injection of James Reid on Sept. 9 in Virginia, Halperin did what he always does following executions: He returned to his office that evening to field hours' worth of phone calls and e-mails.

"There's a price to pay -- constant vigilance -- to make it happen," he says.

Rick Halperin believes it's going to happen. Soon.

A question of immorality

An orange oblong moon rises from behind the U.S. Supreme Court Building. It's Thursday night, and First Street is relatively quiet. A few Capitol Hill staff members trickle past the marble Corinthian behemoth without looking up. They have been jaded by the grandeur that is central Washington, D.C.

Others stand in awe before the nation's highest court. They understand intimately the power it wields. Is this what Halperin is thinking as he strolls across the court's expansive plaza, his head turned upward toward the building's heralded inscription: "Equal Justice Under Law"?

On the sidewalk not far away, singer-songwriter Steve Earle commands a spirited discussion about prison conditions with other anti-death-penalty advocates. Earle has just come from playing a solo concert in Senate Park on behalf of the 11th Annual Fast and Vigil to Abolish the Death Penalty. Of the hundred or so concertgoers, a handful have wandered back to the steps of the court to linger at the demonstration site; a few will spend the night on the concrete here.

Halperin co-founded the Fast and Vigil with activists Bill Pelke and Marietta Jaeger-Lane in 1994. It commemorates two dates: June 29, 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, effectively banning it; and July 2, 1976, when the court reversed itself. The four-day span seemed a natural opportunity for public dissent; why not at the foot of the institution that most symbolizes the struggle?

There's no civil disobedience at the vigil. The event is a loosely organized gathering of abolitionists who keep a low-key presence. (Like those who opposed slavery around the time of the Civil War, anti-death-penalty activists refer to themselves as "abolitionists." "We are their ideological descendants," Halperin says). Tabletops are strewn with information. Banners are unfurled. Participants mainly sit and chat while busloads of tourists snap photographs of the Supreme Court Building and leave.

The final morning of the vigil is Halperin's birthday. He sits a few feet from the court's steps near a plastic water cooler on which he has scrawled "Celebrate life," one of his favorite mottoes. His shirt reads "I oppose the death penalty. Don't kill for me."

He hasn't eaten in almost 36 hours, but the professor appears utterly content. "He's in his element here," says Bonowitz.

Halperin can talk for hours about his cause. And, on occasion, he'll advance the oft-stated abolitionist claims -- that capital punishment kills innocent people, that it is expensive, that it is not a deterrent, that it is biased against racial minorities and the poor.

But for Halperin those are secondary arguments. His revulsion boils down to one fundamental principal: the immorality, he says, of taking a human life at any time and for any reason.

"There is no such thing as a lesser person," he repeatedly insists. "There are different people, but they're not lesser."

The fact that the United States is the only Western democracy to maintain the death penalty comes as no surprise to Halperin. It's part and parcel, he says, of his country's abominable human-rights record: from the Founding Fathers' disenfranchisement of anyone but wealthy white males, to the slaughter of the American Indians, to hate crimes against gays.

"The study of American history, in a social justice sense, is the study of bigotry, intolerance, segregation and human obliteration of peoples," Halperin asserts. As for the death penalty itself, "it's almost 400 years old. It's not hard historically to see why this has been so difficult to get rid of. We're fighting the longest-running institution in America."

It's an institution that at least a couple of his closest friends stand staunchly behind.

"I don't know if I'll ever be able to change his mind, and he knows he'll never be able to change mine," says Jojo White. She and her husband, Pat Pope, have known Halperin for 20 years. Their 17-year-old daughter calls him "Uncle Ricky." But White and Pope view the death penalty as a deterrent and as a fitting penalty for the brutal taking of life. And there are some moral lines White, a printing broker, won't cross. She has, in the past, declined to print some of Halperin's anti-death-penalty materials.

"You know how much I love you," she's told him, "but some stuff I can print for you and some stuff I just can't."

Death is at 6:27

The Struggle for Human Rights course meets Tuesday nights in SMU's Dallas Hall. Halperin has been teaching it for so long that his preparation consists only of photocopying relevant articles from the past week for his students. The class covers a variety of subjects, from the philosophical underpinnings of human rights to the history of lynching, to the death penalty at home and abroad. There are 15 required books in 15 weeks and an option to do community service with one of three local nonprofits.

On an April evening, about 40 undergraduates take their seats. The U.S. death penalty is the topic, and Halperin leads them through a legal history of federal court and Supreme Court rulings. After showing a couple videos, Halperin relates to the class his own experience watching a 1998 Texas execution.

The inmate had asked Halperin to be there and to use the experience in his classroom. Halperin, who had never witnessed an execution, reluctantly agreed. A week later he drove to Huntsville with the inmate's sister, who was nine months pregnant.

As the professor describes it, the scene in Huntsville is both distressing and chilling: the condemned man's family wailing with grief; the straps, needles and seeming indifference of the executioners.

"Death is at 6:27," Halperin says, echoing the only statement made in the chamber. "Death is at 6:27."

When Halperin is finished, some of the students are visibly moved. And though he insists the class is not "Amnesty 101," the reaction Halperin means to prompt is clear.

"We have got to get out of our comfort zone," he says. "The average person doesn't want to be engaged in this issue . . . because it's such a negative, dysfunctional issue to confront. They just know how they feel at a gut level."

His students are not granted such a luxury. Says Halperin: "I want to eliminate from my students' vocabulary the most dangerous words in the English language: 'I don't know.' "

Hopkins, the history department chair, is comfortable with Halperin's dual role as activist and teacher.

"He does not sermonize," Hopkins says. "He invites his students into worlds they've never known, and through challenging reading and writing assignments, and his own experiences, does more than any class I know of to transform their view of the world and their role in it."

On Death Row

On a clear August day, it takes four hours to drive to Texas' Death Row in Livingston, where Halperin is scheduled to visit an inmate. On the way, the conversation veers from human rights. Halperin, it turns out, is something of a sports junkie, especially hockey. And he's shockingly apolitical. He won't vote for candidates who support capital punishment, so he doesn't vote at all.

But on certain subjects, Halperin comes off as charmingly naive. He asks whether the car he's in takes leaded or unleaded gas. He wonders if 3-year-olds have their teeth yet.

On the other hand, Halperin possesses an impressively up-to-date music collection, thanks to his students. Those who decline to do an art project must fill two CDs with human-rights-related songs.

Chances are no one else in SMU's history department has lately listened to C-Murder and Trick Daddy's gangsta anthem Watch the Police.

Halperin spends two hours with the inmate, Robert Fratta, who was convicted of hiring someone to kill his estranged wife. They are separated by thick glass. They talk about Fratta's case, his Web site, his deteriorating eyesight.

Inmates ask for a lot from Halperin, and most of the time, he provides. He'll find them attorneys and relay messages to their families. He's even made their funeral arrangements. The only thing he won't do is give the condemned prisoners money.

He can't afford to financially help the nearly 3,500 U.S. Death Row prisoners, he says, "so I won't pick and choose on whose behalf my money will go."

Fratta has been on Death Row for eight years. Will Halperin's struggles save him? Maybe. After all, Halperin contends, the process to abolish the death penalty has already begun.

"I will live to see it abolished, and even if I don't and that statement is wrong and I go to my grave and we are still killing people, I'm still right."

It's not simply chance, he says, that the most significant date of what Halperin calls the most significant human-rights struggle should fall on his birthday. He has always believed in some cosmic explanation for it.

"I don't think it's a coincidence," Halperin says. "I have known my whole life why I'm here and what my purpose is.

"I'll get my birthday back.