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An NBC News analysis of every final statement shows that some convey a readiness to die. Others are defiant. And many seek salvation.
Strapped to a gurney, moments from death, prisoners in Texas’ execution chamber have been asked a solemn question for as long as the state has administered lethal injections: Do you have a last statement?
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Over five decades, hundreds have spoken, envisioning entry into heaven, begging for forgiveness and trying to reckon with their crimes. They’ve lashed out at the justice system, proclaimed their innocence and admonished the death penalty. They’ve expressed acceptance and urged the warden to carry on: “I’m ready.” “Send me home.” “Goodbye.”
For people to end up on the state’s death row, a unanimous jury must find them guilty of capital murder — which involves aggravating factors, such as killing multiple victims or a law enforcement officer. The crimes of the executed have included the slayings of wives and children, store clerks and strangers. Those convicted include serial killers, bank robbers and avowed racists.
Texas last week carried out its 600th execution. The state is unrivaled in its pursuit of capital punishment, accounting for more than a third of all executions nationwide since the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty constitutional in 1976.
Since then, officials have preserved each and every prisoner’s final words.
NBC News analyzed all of the last verbal and written statements, pulling them from Texas’ online database and categorizing common themes by hand.
The statements show that across 50 years, little has changed in the way people on the row face their impending deaths. Last words are last words, despite the passage of time, conveying similar messages of sorrow, love, anger, camaraderie, defiance, hope and guilt.
“I am so sorry. I ask that you please, please don’t hate me and that you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the part that I played in what happened to her,” said Edward Busby Jr., who was executed Thursday.
Busby, 53, was convicted in the 2004 suffocation death of retired Texas Christian University professor Laura Lee Crane. Tarrant County prosecutors said Busby and an accomplice abducted Crane, 77, from a grocery store parking lot, robbed her and then asphyxiated her with duct tape, wrapping 14 layers around her face.
“Please forgive me, please, if not for me, for yourself,” Busby said. “Because the Father said if we don’t forgive those who wrong us, He will not forgive us.”
Bryan Mark Rigg, a former student of Crane’s, watched the execution on behalf of her family from a viewing area outside the chamber. Busby’s remarks about needing to forgive felt “presumptuous,” Rigg said, but he found it important to hear him “embrace responsibility.”
“I’m glad he had the self-reflection by acknowledging, ‘What I did was wrong, and I wish I didn’t do it, and she was a good person,’” Rigg said. “Not hearing anything vs. hearing that, I’m glad I heard that.”
Texas ushered in its modern era of executions in 1982, when it became the first state to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection drugs, still its only legalized form of capital punishment.
Death penalty states generally allow last statements from the execution chamber, but Texas catalogs the prisoners’ last words online, except for vulgar and racist language or what sounds unintelligible. Executions are not recorded, so statements are transcribed at the time by hand. Taken together, the collection serves as a haunting reminder that behind the execution numbers were people who asserted, one last time, what was important to them.
“The words often show us the humanity that exists within those we would otherwise write off as ‘monsters,’” said Scott Vollum, a University of Minnesota Duluth criminology professor who analyzed the last words of Texas prisoners for a 2008 book. “They also exhibit the ability of people, even those who have done really horrible things, to transform themselves and reclaim their humanity.”
Vollum said that in reviewing the statements — he examined over 300 at the time — there were consistent themes, tying many of their stories together. They mostly leaned positive, he said, like general expressions of love, encouragement of others on death row and wishes of peace and closure for victims’ families.
Asked about the state’s compilation of last statements, a Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson said its page dedicated to executed inmates — 594 men and six women — was visited more than 1.1 million times last year. The state previously shared inmates’ final spoken and written words. But it changed the policy in 2019 to include only verbal statements after prison officials drew controversy for reading the written words of an avowed racist who was executed for the gruesome dragging death of a Black man.
Not all death row prisoners choose to make last statements, but over time, a greater share of inmates have decided to do so. Overall, 20% have opted to say nothing.
“I would imagine in some cases it’s defiance or refusal to go along with the rituals being imposed,” Vollum said, “which would be another way to assert one’s agency.”
Sentiments of love, family and religion are shared most often. Prisoners have wished loved ones “happy birthday” and given final instructions: “Bury me right beside momma.” “God” has been invoked 283 times and “Lord” referred to 187.
Jermarr Arnold, who was executed in 2002, said he had “made peace with God” and sang “Amazing Grace.”
Arnold was sentenced to death after he robbed a Corpus Christi jewelry store in 1983 and fatally shot a worker.
“I can give you one thing, and I’m going to give that today,” he told the victim’s family. “I’m give a life for a life.”
Feelings of remorse and regret are also prevalent. “I’m sorry” or a variation of it was said 234 times; “forgive me” was expressed 117.
“There is no excuse for what I did,” Larry Hayes said at his 2003 execution for fatally shooting his wife, Mary, and then driving to a nearby convenience store, where he killed a Black clerk named Rosalyn Robinson. His case was the first since 1854 in which a white man in Texas was put to death for the murder of a Black person, The Associated Press reported.
“Rosalyn’s mother asked me at the trial, ‘Why?’ and I do not have a good reason for it,” Hayes said. “Please forgive me.”
Prisoners have also used their last statements as platforms to speak out. Twenty raised moral quandaries about capital punishment, with some referring to their impending deaths as “unnecessary,” “inhumane” and “an act of revenge.”
“I cannot agree with this injustice. The Bible says that you shalt not kill,” said Tony Roach, who was executed in 2007 for the sexual molestation and strangulation of a woman nine years earlier.
Others tried to find rationale in the death penalty once faced with it. Jeffery Doughtie, who was executed in 2001 for killing an 80-year-old store owner and his 76-year-old wife, spent almost nine years on death row weighing “whether it is right or wrong,” he said, “and I don’t have any answers.”
Fifty-eight inmates have claimed innocence, while a handful of others have suggested there were critical facts about their cases that weren’t publicly known. One prisoner, Markham Duff-Smith, called his trial unfair but also made a confession: “I am the sinner of all sinners. I was responsible for the ’75 and ’79 cases.”
Duff-Smith was executed in 1993 for arranging the murder of his mother in 1975. He had been charged with attempting to kill three other relatives in 1979 to collect a family inheritance but had never been tried.
Jim Willett, a former warden at the prison in Huntsville where inmates are put to death, oversaw 89 executions from 1998 to 2001. He described his job as unrelenting: “We did 40 executions in one year.”
Twenty-five years later, the names of prisoners have faded from his memory, but their last statements have stuck. There was the inmate who spoke crudely to the victim’s family, another who told his sister’s fiancé to take care of her right before she fainted in the chamber viewing area and another who talked extensively about his case.
“I had to tell him it’s time to wrap it up,” Willett said. “The guy was never going to stop if we didn’t make him.”
Despite the unpredictability, Willett said, the tradition is necessary.
“No matter what they may say,” he said, “it’s giving a human being an opportunity to be human one last time.”
Mixed with somber messages, too, are moments when prisoners reach for levity. Inmates have referred to their favorite sports teams, cheering on the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers. Others have turned to gallows humor.
“I’ve been hanging around this popsicle stand way too long,” said Douglas Roberts, who was executed in 2005 after he was convicted in a 1996 robbery and murder. “Before I leave, I want to tell you all. When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead.”
Others spoke with little fanfare.
“Let’s do it, man,” G.W. Green told the warden in 1991 before he was executed for the 1976 robbery and shooting death of a juvenile probation officer. “Lock and load. Ain’t life a [expletive]?”
None expressed fear of dying.
Condemned inmates in Texas spend an average of 11 years on death row, according to the Department of Criminal Justice. They often find camaraderie in how they are isolated, in their protracted legal fights and in the agonizing period when their execution dates near.
Those bonds become immortalized through final words.
Inmates have called out their “brothers on the row” more than two dozen times. Lisa Coleman, who was executed in 2014 for killing her girlfriend’s son, encouraged other women sentenced to death to “keep their heads up.”
Kristin Houlé Cuellar, the executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she supports the state’s gathering last statements. They serve as reminders of the “ripple effects” that every execution can have, she said, exacting physical and emotional tolls on not only the condemned, but also the victims, families, legal teams and prison staff.
“The death penalty causes tremendous collective harm,” Cuellar said, “and I believe that often comes through in the last statements.”
When George Hopper, an auto insurance appraiser, was executed in 2005, both his loved ones and those of the suburban Dallas nurse he killed, Rozanne Gailiunas, assembled to watch him die.
Hopper, 49, acknowledged that “the things I did changed so many lives.” But while he was on death row, he turned to God.
On the gurney, he addressed Gailiunas’ family, which included her son, who was 4 when he discovered his mother’s body after the 1983 crime. “I can’t take it back, it was an atrocity,” Hopper said. “I am sorry.”
He then looked to another window, where his parents sat in prayer behind the glass: “I love you, mom and dad.”
Twice, witnesses reported, Hopper gasped as the lethal injection drugs flowed into his bloodstream. Eight minutes later, he was dead.
Erik Ortiz is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital focusing on racial injustice and social inequality.
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