Last month a Jacksonville, Fl., a jury recommended the death sentence for Andrea Jackson, a black woman convicted in the 1982 fatal shooting of a black police officer. If the judge presiding in the case formally sentences her to die in early January, she will be shipped back to death row where she has spent most of the last 13 years. Jackson is one of approximately 270 women living on death row in America. PNS editor Kathy Dobie profiles Jackson as a woman of faith whose life is devoted to turning death row into life row. Dobie writes for Vibe, Vogue, the Village Voice and Salon, the new San Francisco-based online magazine.

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA -- Andrea Hicks Jackson has become engrossed with the subject of demons. She reads any book on the subject she can get her hands on, notes their every appearance in the Bible. She has an eye for the cracks where disease and despair slither in. The more Andrea knows, the deeper her prayers become. Kneeling in her jail cell, the air around her clatters, a passageway for the spirits; an ill wind, then a reassuring warmth.

Andrea's in solitary confinement where she asked to be put so she could pray in peace. In the cells around her are women stripped down to their underwear, under suicide watch. Down the hall, a woman shouts in her sleep, "Get off me! Get off! Don't hurt me!" Over and over the same plea until Andrea yells, "Don't make me come down there and cast you out!" Quiet follows, like an astonished pause...there's a Christian on the suicide block!

For over twelve years now, Andrea Jackson's lived in places where the air's thick with grief. For almost as long as that she's been engaged in battle. She murdered a man and then she was saved by Jesus. As soon as she was saved, as soon as she allowed herself hope, Andrea committed herself to battle against despair.

She wears her hair in a short Afro, "natural as God intended it," and has an impish gap between her two front teeth. Her sneakers are covered with scripture. She's written the names of God there, dozens of them in silver and purple ink. "Anchor of our Souls," "Rose of Sharon," "El Shaddai," and "Most Ancient of Days." There's a passage in the Bible that explains the scripture. "Therefore take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. Stand therefore...having shod your feet with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace."

In 1983, when Andrea was 25, she shot and killed a black Jacksonville police officer, and was sentenced to die. She was sent to Broward Correctional Institute which currently houses Florida's death row for women. Twice, the Supreme Court of Florida lifted Andrea's sentence, and each time she was returned to Jacksonville to be re-sentenced. In November, a jury recommended that Andrea be sentenced to death, her third death sentence. Early in January, a judge is expected to sentence her and she'll be shipped south to death row.

At her November re-sentencing hearing, the jury heard the story of Andrea's early life, beginning at age two when her stepfather raped her for the first time, sticking a towel underneath her and a pillow over her face. At sixteen, Andrea fled, moving in with the man who would become her husband and father of her two sons. The first time he beat her up, she was asleep in bed. On the night of the murder, Andrea was high on several different drugs and carrying a gun in the waistband of her pants because her husband had threatened to kill her. The officer had arrested Andrea for a misdemeanor and was trying to push her into the police car as she struggled. She pulled out the gun and shot him six times.

Psychiatrists testified that Andrea had suffered a traumatic flashback from the countless rapes and beatings and shot the officer thinking he was trying to hurt her, too. The prosecution told the jury that Andrea had fooled these shrinks, and wanted only to escape arrest when she killed the officer in cold blood. Given the choice of life in prison or the death penalty, the jury unanimously recommended death. No one doubts that the judge will follow their recommendation and give Andrea the electric chair.

There was an awful, closed logic to the story the jurors heard -- the raped child grows up and kills the innocent man. Sin begets sin, hopelessly. But where the secular story ends, inescapably, in tragedy, another story was just beginning -- a journey of one soul toward the light. Andrea wrote that story in a prison cell, under a death sentence.

After she was arrested for murder, Andrea says she felt a numb despair that deepened day by day. She couldn't believe she'd killed a man -- couldn't remember the murder, couldn't bear the thought of it. Guards told her they hoped she would die. Her mother was ill; her sons cried for her in the courtroom. On visits, her arms and legs were shackled, so when her three year old jumped into her lap, pushing and nuzzling like a puppy, she couldn't hold him. Andrea began to hallucinate a noose hanging in front of her face and wondered how she might make a real one and use it.

Andrea's husband was saved shortly after her arrest. He went to the jail to try to save her. "I'll never forget when he said, 'Look at my hands' and they were white as snow," Andrea says. "At that moment, I realized my husband had changed." But she was too angry to listen so he sent his minister in. When he asked her what happened, Andrea blurted out, "I don't remember," and began to sob. When he touched her forehead and prayed, she vomited into her jail dress. She didn't know this then but those were demons coming out of her. "When that man left, all that suicidal stuff, all that burden was gone." All the years since, she has felt Jesus at her side, sometimes even talking to her, and has struggled with demons that want to snatch her soul back.

First, she had to separate herself from that animal, that piece of trash she saw in her jailers' eyes -- that wasn't her, she was made in God's image, same as anyone else. But the worst demons of all resided in herself, in unbearable thoughts and memories: Her stepfather always laying the towel down first. Her husband beating her on the head with her own shoe. Her sons eating dinner, another night, another month, year without her. The officer she murdered, the man whose mother sat in the courtroom every day during her trial. She had to make herself stop thinking about him. "I'm the first to say I belong in jail, just not on death row," she says. "Because what I did was wrong. What kind of value or price can you put on a human life? I can't change it, I can't bring him back, I mean as much as I would like to. If they think taking my life is going to change the situation, let them go on. But that hate they have in their hearts for me, it will be there when I leave. Some people just need to hate."

Immediately after the jurors voted for the death penalty, Andrea set her mind away from it. She doubled her prayers and her phone conversations with her two teenage sons, pushing the youngest to find some goal in his life, pick a sport, go out for the school team. She comforted her lawyers with the thought that even F. Lee Bailey couldn't have saved her, unless God willed it. She sent a birthday card to a friend.

"The mind is where all battles will be fought and they'll be won or lost," she says. "If I allow the devil to put things in my mind that will distract me, that will depress me, that will oppress me, I will fail. I keep my trust and my eyes on Jesus 'cause I know that he loves me. If I have to go to the electric chair, that's what he would want from me. And he will give me the strength and grace to do it."

Any day now Andrea will be shackled and driven south to Broward's death row. There she'll unpack her Bible, the photos of her mother and sons. She'll holler out the window of her cell to the guards entering the row to work. "Good morning! Come on in!" She'll do her Bible studies; write her sons and evangelical pen pals. She'll keep an eye out for the guards she likes and for Miss Denmark, the assistant superintendent whom she loves. When Miss Denmark looks depressed, Andrea will joke with her. "Tough day, huh, girl?" while the guards look on aghast. Miss Denmark will say warily, "Tell me something good, Andrea." And Andrea will give her some scripture, reciting the verse from heart.

Some officers will say what they've always said, "Andrea Jackson's crazy. She's got no sense." And she'll reply, "Come on, you know you love me. You're just afraid to admit it." She will drive them all crazy with her joking and endearments. She's a cop killer; she's been sentenced to die. Yet she's been able to make some of them see her as a human being and lifted a great burden of hatred from their hearts.