Final Words
What death-row inmates said as they prepared for their execution
The state of Texas has executed nearly 600 men and women since 1982. Most of them had something to say in their last moments, and those words are now collected in a book, Final Words: 578 Men and Women Executed on Texas Death Row. About 100 chose to say nothing at all; “this inmate declined to make a last statement,” the book notes. But many more opted to share their final thoughts. Taken together, their words—on religious faith, love, violence, regret, and capital punishment itself—form an evocative portrait of the moieties of the death penalty in Texas: the crimes these men and women committed, and the death they now suffer for it.
Each entry appears as a two-page spread, with a prisoner’s final words on one side (obtained from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice) and a brief description of his or her crimes on the opposite page. There are exceptionally short remarks—Freddie Lee Webb, executed in March of 1994, simply said, “Peace”; Jessie Gutierrez, executed roughly five months later, said, “I just love everybody, and that’s it”—and there are long monologues. Sometimes prisoners’ last words appear to have been written by someone else: Richard J. Wilkerson, executed in August of 1993, referred to himself in the third person, saying, “Killing R.J. will not bring [his victim] back.” Some are accepting. “It was horrible and inexcusable of me to take the life of your loved one and to hurt so many mentally and physically,” David Lee Herman said in April of 1997. “I am here because I took a life and killing is wrong by an individual and by the state, and I am sorry we are here but if my death gives you peace and closure then this is all worthwhile.” Others barely register at all: Harold Amos Barnard, killed in February of 1994, apparently mumbled the last of his words. They are described only as “a couple of sentences garbled.”
[Elizabeth Bruenig: What it means to forgive the unforgivable]
Articulations of guilt and shame are common—rarely does a prisoner come across as unrepentant. “I could never forgive what I’ve done,” said Joseph John Cannon, executed in April of 1988 for the 1977 murder of his benefactor Anne C. Walsh. Kenneth Bernard Harris, found guilty of the 1986 rape and murder of Lisa Ann Stonestreet in Houston, told those gathered to witness his June 1997 execution that he was “sorry for all the pain I have caused both families—my family and yours … I have had time to understand the pain I have caused you.” “I am the sinner of all sinners. I was responsible for the ’75 and ’79 cases,” said Markham Duff-Smith, a Tarrant County native convicted of the strangulation murder of his adoptive mother, Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio, in 1975. Duff-Smith was also suspected of planning the murders of his sister, his brother-in-law, and their baby son. “I am so terribly sorry,” Karl Eugene Chamberlain, executed in June 2008 for the 1991 sexual assault and murder of his neighbor Felecia Prechtl, said before he died. “I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.”
Religious conviction likewise makes a frequent appearance in the final remarks of Texas’s execution subjects—not only in personal expressions of faith, but in exhortations to find God. “I plead with all the teenagers to stop the violence and to accept Jesus Christ and find victory,” Danny Ray Harris said in July 1993. “Today I have victory in Christ and I thank Jesus for taking my spirit into his precious hands. Thank you, Jesus.” In December of 1995, Hai Hai Vuong voiced similar thoughts: “I thank God that he died for my sins on the cross, and I thank him for saving my soul … I hope whoever hears my voice tonight will turn to the Lord.” Harris was convicted of the 1978 murder of Timothy Michael Merka, whom he beat to death with a tire iron in rural Brazos County; Vuong was found guilty of the shooting deaths of Tien Van Nguyen and Hien Quang Tran in 1986. It’s natural—and common—to question the sincerity of expressions of faith among condemned people, but it’s worth noting that there was no way these particular statements of religious belief could have helped the men and women who made them. If it were all pretense, it was extended long past the point of utility.
The same can be said of the numerous expressions of love and hopes of forgiveness in Final Words. “I love you, everyone, I go out with great love and respect,” Miguel A. Richardson said at his June 2001 execution for the 1979 slaying of the Holiday Inn security guard John G. Ebbert. “Stop killing start loving. Stop the violence.” Many prisoners addressed their victims’ families directly. Michael Adam Sigala, convicted of the 2000 murders of a young couple in Plano, asked “forgiveness of the family. I have no reason for why I did it, I don’t understand why I did it. I hope you can live the rest of your lives without hate.” Forgiveness is ordinarily imagined in therapeutic terms, something one asks for to free them from the bonds of old guilt, pave the way for reconciliation. But forgiveness requested on the brink of death is perhaps purer. It’s a prayer for which there is no future, a hope without a chance. But it must be precious, because scores of people executed in Texas spent their last breaths begging for it.
Some spoke about the death penalty itself. “Texas is carrying out a very inhumane injustice. It’s not right to kill anybody just because I killed your people. Everyone changes, right?” said Lee Andrew Taylor, put to death in June 2011 for the 1999 murder of another prisoner while he was doing time for aggravated robbery. Napoleon Beazley, who was 17 years old when he murdered John Luttig during a 1994 carjacking, chose to speak about the system of capital punishment before his May 2002 execution: “The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here—I am … I’m saddened by what is happening here tonight. I’m not only saddened, but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake.”
[Elizabeth Bruenig: Jimi Barber died a forgiven man]
Scattered among confessions and acknowledgments of guilt are innocence claims. “I have said from the beginning and I will say it again that I am innocent,” Kenneth Ray Ransom remarked at his October 1997 execution. “My only statement is that no case is error free,” Dale Devon Scheanette reminded witnesses to his February 2009 death. Their claims are made more disquieting by the book’s afterword, contributed in part by two death-row exonerees, Sabrina Butler and Ray Krone. Butler was wrongly convicted of the murder of her nine-month-old son in 1990 and exonerated in 1995 after her lawyers proved that the state of Mississippi, where she had been convicted, had never so much as conducted an autopsy on her baby, who was later found to have suffered from a severe kidney condition. Krone was convicted in 1992 of the sexual assault and murder of an Arizona bartender based in part on forensic bite-mark analysis, which has since been exposed as junk science. Krone was exonerated 20 years after his conviction, having spent more than a decade of his life on death row. “I used to support the death penalty,” Krone writes, “but now I know that what happened to me can happen to anyone, that the criminal justice system is flawed and once inside of it, you become less than human and the system exerts its full force on you.” The exact number of people executed by Texas despite their innocence will never be known, but some of their words may be captured here.
What is rare within this catalog of dying declarations are the monstrous personalities for whom the death penalty is ostensibly reserved, the so-called worst of the worst. There are certainly angry remarks—prompted for his final statement, Joseph Bennard Nichols, executed in March 2007 for the murder of the Houston deli worker Claude Shaffer Jr., simply directed profanity at execution staff; one prisoner invited witnesses to kiss his Black ass, another his proud white ass—but the crimes are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not especially shocking. There are murders in the course of interpersonal disputes, altercations, robberies, burglaries, carjackings, drug transactions. As the pages go on, these murders emerge as the more common type, far more typical than sexually motivated killings, torture slayings, and premeditated child murders. If crimes of impulse were eliminated from the catalog of killings here, the book would be a much thinner volume.
Final Words is a haunting read for a number of reasons, and one of its more poignant lessons has to do with how death curates priorities. Like anyone else, the men and women executed in Texas since 1982 approached their deaths with fear, faith, hopes for their families, and regrets about their transgressions. The people whose words make up this volume all had time to contemplate their last words on earth, and they reflect something more universal than the particular experience of prisoners on death row. They were only human.