RSS FeedInto the minds of the condemned: statements from Death Row
What’s it like to live on Death Row? What’s it like to die there?
I wonder how a person can stand to wait in a small cell, watching the second hand of a clock tick down to their execution? After an average 10 year wait, the person is finally led down a hallway, strapped to a gurney, and injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
Since 1982, when Texas began utilizing lethal injections to kill people, 441 people have been executed by the State. Moments before the execution, the warden asked each of these inmates whether they had any last words. All of their last statements have been recorded.
A friend of mine sent me a link to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Death Row page, which contains every last statement given since 1982.
I have to admit that I sat for an hour and read over a hundred of these last statements. There was something incredibly powerful and compelling about the final words that a person speaks when they know they are about to die. I had a hard time pulling myself away from them.
It doesn’t matter whether you are for or against capital punishment. If we move beyond the cold statistics of the offender’s height, race, and education level, their last statements poignantly remind us that these convicts are human beings that bleed and feel pain like you and I.
Many of the statements express remorse. Others are shocking. Some are even funny. But the common thread that ties all of the statements together is the foreboding sense of inevitability, resignation, and acceptance of a pre-determined fate. I have reproduced some of the statements below (in their entirety):
