The great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., Kennedy has taken the family business beyond its comfortable confines before.
“Karen didn’t deserve what happened to her,” Hunt said.Hunt said he had been drinking and doing drugs on the night of the crime and became jealous when he saw Lane in a car with another man.
“You have your come-to-Jesus moment. Of course, after the fact, you can’t believe what has happened. You can’t believe you were part of it and did it,” Hunt said.Hunt, who was born in 1960 and came to death row in 1990, is now among the longest-serving inmates on Alabama’s death row. He said prison became his “hospital” to heal his broken mind. He said since 1988, he has been leading a Bible class attended by two dozen or more inmates.“Just trying to be a light in a dark place, trying to tell people if I can change, they can too. ... become people of love instead of hate,” he said.
Lane’s sister declined to comment when reached by telephone. The family is expected to give a written statement Tuesday night.“The way she was killed is just devastating,” Denise Gurganus, Lane’s sister,
at a 2014 vigil for crime victims. “It’s hard enough to lose a family member to death, but when it’s this gruesome.”
The Alabama attorney general’s office, in asking justices to reject Hunt’s request for a stay of execution, wrote that Hunt has now been on death row longer than Lane was alive.To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.
“When you talk about God’s design for anything, there’s not a lot of room for compromise,” said Nancy Ammerman, professor emerita of sociology of religion at Boston University. She was an eyewitness to the Dallas meeting and author of “Baptist Battles,” a history of the 1980s controversy between theological conservatives and moderates.“There’s not a lot of room for people who don’t have the same understanding of who God is and how God operates in the world,” she said.
Mohler said the resolutions reflect a divinely created order that predates the writing of the Scriptures and is affirmed by them. He said the Christian church has always asserted that the created order “is binding on all persons, in all times, everywhere.”Separate resolutions decry pornography and sports betting as destructive, calling for the former to be banned and the latter curtailed.