Christopher Vialva grew up on death row. In 1999, at age 19, Vialva, along with a few other teenagers, carjacked and killed Stacie and Todd Bagley; he was later convicted of murder and sentenced to die. At the time, a doctor assessed his mental age to be 16. He was nearly illiterate, struggling to read a short paragraph and unable to remember the first sentence by the time he got to the last. In the two decades he spent in custody, he became an avid crocheter and a student of the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. When his lawyer, Susan Otto, asked why he wanted President Trump to grant him clemency he said, “I would like to preach and teach and learn. I think I can help. I remember what it was like being a 19-year-old kid with your thoughts all over the place and not having a clue what to do next. I think I could talk to kids and keep them from coming back [to prison] time after time.”
