AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa Boys at the Alpha school in Kingston.

In 1998, when he pleaded guilty in the death of his cellmate, Hammer read about D'Arienzo's anti-death penalty drive in an Associated Press story about her Declaration of Life —a wallet-size card anyone can sign and carry that says, "If I'm murdered, I want my killer punished but not executed."

Hammer's own execution was scheduled for January 1999.

"All of a sudden, I had a letter one day and it was from David. He was looking for someone to pray for him and to pray for the man he killed in prison," D'Arienzo said. "I was surprised. I didn't know anybody in jail. And I didn't know what I was going to find."

AP/Courtesy of Earlene Howard David Paul Hammer at 2 1/2 years old, on his mother's lap.

Through D'Arienzo, the boys got to know Hammer, a man on death row whose memories of an abusive, impoverished childhood in rural Oklahoma have resulted in profound personal links, by mail, with the children in Jamaica, 1,600 miles away from his prison cell.

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When D'Arienzo, a radio commentator and educator, drove to Pennsylvania to visit Hammer, a prison official warned her that he "was the most dangerous prisoner they had, and asked if I really wanted to go in."

Face to face with the convict in chains, she listened as his tears dropped onto a table, with an armed guard keeping watch.

Days later, his first scheduled execution was stopped.

Since then, D'Arienzo has become Hammer's godmother, visiting him in both Pennsylvania and Terre Haute, Ind., where he's now imprisoned. In 2000, he and another man on death row were confirmed by the archbishop of Indianapolis and received communion — a rare moment when they could have flesh-to-flesh contact with other human beings.

"David said they had never felt such peace as when the archbishop put the oils on them, through the food slot in the prisoner cage," D'Arienzo remembers. "It was the first positive human touch either of them had experienced in years."

Soon after, the government again won its case against Hammer. Again, his execution was stayed. In 2004, he came within three days of the lethal injection, and was yet again spared.

There have been various legal reasons behind his execution being stayed, over and over. Most recently, last December, a judge ruled that jurors were not told that Hammer had used pieces of bed sheets to improvise bondage sex with his cellmate, a convicted bank robber. The man was strangled in the process.

Had jurors known that, the judge reasoned, they might have concluded the slaying was accidental.

Now, Hammer is awaiting a U.S. government appeal to reinstate his death sentence.

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Amid the legal wrangling, Hammer and D'Arienzo started a project: creating and selling holiday cards, with the profits going to at-risk boys —like Hammer himself had been. He does the art and she organizes the production with a printer in New York, and handles the worldwide marketing.

This year, the Alpha boys have some new tools for their workshop, bought with a $4,000 check —a result of Hammer's creativity. From pine, mahogany and Jamaica's blue mahoe national tree, they make clocks, pens, wine racks and candle holders. Proceeds from their sale benefit the boys' education, as well as the century-old Alpha Boys' Band.

The band's young musicians are inspired by Bob Marley, who composed songs an hour's drive away in the hills under a wild waterfall.

"Let them all pass all their dirty remarks (One love)/ There is one question I'd really love to ask (One heart)/ Is there a place for the hopeless sinner/Who has hurt all mankind?"

"One Love," Marley's 1977 song of brotherhood, drives the drumming of Psyche Campbell, a 17-year-old at Alpha.

Psyche sat one day under the whirring ceiling fans of the school's assembly hall, his sticks rolling out brilliant rhythms, the bass like a booming heartbeat.

He never knew his father and his mother suffers from what he calls a medical "nervous problem" that keeps her from caring for him. If he hadn't come to Alpha as a 5-year-old, he says, "I would be in some gang or on drugs. Here, I'm getting my love from the teachers and staff."

After an intense, five-minute drum riff, he grows pensive.

"Psyche is the goddess of love. And it also means the human mind," said the young drummer. "To me, love means helping those who are less fortunate than I am. Unconditionally. It's love for that person, and making that person feel happy —not what you can get from that person."

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For many boys, the Alpha school is about survival, and the future. This is where David Paul Hammer comes in.

One 17-year-old, Edney Samuels, said he learned from Hammer "that a bad person can really be a good person in the end."

Edney was 12 when he took refuge at Alpha from Spanish Town, a violent community just west of Kingston.

"If I didn't come to Alpha, maybe I would not be on Earth now," Edney said. "David taught me a good lesson. He was in violence too, and he killed someone. But then, he turned around his life. If you want to change, you can."

Sister Susan Frazer, a Michigan native who directs both Alpha and Bosco, reads Hammer's letters to the boys, "and each time, you can hear a pin drop."

And the boys write back. Tegona Lewis, 15, wrote: "Sometimes when I'm tempted to fight someone, I remember David Paul Hammer in prison, so I just let the person go because it save them, and it save me from getting in trouble."

Alpha is home to about 150 boys who learn trades that lead to jobs when they graduate: tailoring, woodworking, farming, and printing and binding books.

At Bosco, where another 150 boys live, they raise and slaughter pigs and chickens and grow fruits and vegetables. They learn to become butchers and run a professional catering business.

Frazer re-enacted for them the physical reality of life in Hammer's cell, more cramped then the animals at Bosco. She built a small space hemmed in by benches and asked the boys to stand inside.

"How would you feel anchored in this one spot for years — and you can't move, and you have to eat only what they feed you?" she asked them. "This is where you are for your lifetime. The toilet is in the corner, the sink is here, and your bed is there. And that's it."

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Each summer, in a real prison cell, Hammer paints holiday cards.

Proceeds from selling them go to various charities —a food bank near the Terre Haute prison, hungry children in Haiti, a children's clinic in Peru, the families of women on parole in New York.

"I've been in the deep, dark hole of depression on so many occasions that I've finally come to see that instead of letting the depression rule me, I fight it by doing something positive that brings a smile to my mind," Hammer said by telephone through his lawyer. "Over my life, I've done so much bad that doing good for someone who is in need makes me feel good about myself."

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PART I: A death row inmate and troubled Jamaican boys trade life lessons: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1049316.s

Tomorrow, PART III: On Hammer's past —and the Jamaican boys' future.

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asap contributor Verena Dobnik is an AP reporter based in New York.

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