Until last week, the last time I had attended a protest was in 2003, when a group of activists in Chapel Hill announced that they planned to demonstrate in the nude to protest the war in Iraq.

I was there for my job. Really.

As it turned out, the activists didn't get nude, and we're still fighting in Iraq. I wonder how they can sleep at night.

No empty promises about clothing-removal were made at last week's rally to protest capital punishment. That's understandable. The temperature was in the 40s and the wind was brisk. No activist has ever kept a prisoner from a death sentence through the willful onset of hypothermia.

Last week's protesters were members of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, and they hoped to persuade Gov. Mike Easley to issue clemency for a death row inmate named James Thomas, who was scheduled to die on Friday. (As it turns out, a lawsuit filed by Thomas' attorney and a judge's ruling stopped the execution.) It was a bit of a tough sell: PFADP didn't even try to make the case that he was wrongly convicted, only that he'd been abused as a child and subsequently became a teenage heroin addict. Also, Easley is a former prosecutor and therefore not naturally warm and fuzzy when clemency is mentioned.

So it wasn't exactly a meeting of like-minded souls.

The activists' other aim was to stage a vigil outside the Capitol, in hopes of attracting (in this order) media attention and a crowd. Indeed, television cameras arrived on cue and a crowd gathered. I even got the chance to talk to the crowd. His name is Duane Adkinson.

That's right. It was a one-person audience.

Adkinson is a retired "shop rat," which is car industry slang for those who toil in Michigan's endless assembly plants. He grew up in Greensboro, moved to Detroit to spend 37 years making Fords, then upon retirement moved back South with a full set of progressive values. "I'm against the death penalty, the war, torture," he says.

I have something less than a full set of progressive values, but I'll admit to being squishy on the death penalty. I used to be a hang-'em-high kind of guy, but that's changed. The court system, which gets pretty close to justice in most cases, occasionally misfires. It's one thing to wrongfully stick somebody in prison for a while. It's another thing to kill that person.

Adkinson says he attends every rally and vigil held in opposition to the death penalty. He says the justice system's dice are loaded against poor people: "If you ain't got the capital [for fancy lawyers], you get the punishment."

But he acknowledges that one thing can be said on behalf of the death penalty. It has sparked a rare bipartisanship that is otherwise absent from political life. Such Democratic governors as Easley and Bill Clinton have been just as loath to commute death sentences as any injection-loving Republican governor, he says.

That kind of togetherness makes you want to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya," doesn't it?

After Adkinson shared his feelings about the death penalty, and after detailing his involvement with PFADP, he did something that surprised me -- even though it shouldn't have, considering everything he'd just explained. He walked toward the group of activists picked up a sign, and joined the protest.

That's when I realized I'd been wrong about something. Adkinson wasn't the crowd.

I was the crowd.