Berry College senior Grace Snell, a digital storytelling major, has released a five-part podcast series that looks at race and the death penalty in the state of Georgia. Titled “Georgia v. Foster,” the series launched this month at VikingFusion.com, the student-led multimedia hub of Berry’s Department of Communication.
Centering on the death penalty case against Rome, Georgia’s Timothy Tyrone Foster, the podcast asks, “Who lives? Who dies? Who decides?” Foster is a Black man sentenced to death for murder by an all-white jury in 1987, a case that returned to the courts and reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. The case finally ended when Foster accepted life without parole in late 2022.
"I tackled this project to help illuminate a dark, difficult issue and encourage people to work towards greater justice for all," said Snell, who is also a staff writer for the World News Group in Asheville, N.C.
Included in the podcast are John Bailey, managing editor of the Rome News-Tribune; Bob Finnell, a local attorney who represented Foster during his 1987 murder trial; Eddie Hood, a resident of Rome and one of two Black prospective jurors the U.S. Supreme Court ruled as having been struck for racially discriminatory reasons; Kristina Joseph, a mitigation specialist with the Georgia Capital Defender office who worked on Foster's defense team after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case back to Rome for retrial; the Rev. William Moore, a resident of Rome and a survivor of Georgia’s Death Row; and Gary Parker, an attorney with nearly four decades of experience working on death penalty cases who also served on Foster's defense team after the high court decision.
Completed in partial fulfillment of her honors thesis, Snell’s podcast invites listeners to “wrestle with the ideas in this story and leave with greater thoughtfulness and compassion for others," said of the one-year-long project. Also credited for work on the series are fellow student Anna Rich, Viking Fusion advisor Steven Hames and Kevin Kleine, a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication.
“The podcast is among the most important work we’ve ever published at VikingFusion,” said Brian Carroll, chair of the department and Snell’s honors thesis director. “Grace tackled an enormously complex topic and treated it with all the care, sensitivity and diligence that we hope for in the very best of our digital storytellers.”
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