Book excerpt: Death Row Welcomes You, by Steven Hale

A Tennessee journalist finds hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places

Steven Hale is one of the finest journalists here in Nashville. I mean, he’s one of the finest journalists in the country. He just happens to live and cover Nashville. (Disclosure: He’s also a friend.)

He now works for the new publication the Nashville Banner, but for many years he wrote for our local alt weekly, the Scene.

Like many red states, Tennessee has in recent years throttled up its machinery of death. In the 56 years between 1961 and 2017, the state executed just six people. In 18 months between 2018 and 2020, it executed seven. One man the state executed in 2006 may have been innocent, but the state won’t allow the DNA test that could say for certain.

At the same time, state officials have become less and less transparent about and given the media less and less access to how that machinery operates. The state was finally forced to pause executions in 2022 due to questions about about lethal injection protocol and how the state had obtained and stored the drugs used in the procedure — all of which had been done in secret.

One big problem with death penalty coverage right now is that there’s a lot of churn in our industry, so journalists move from beat to beat and from market to market. Consequently, media witnesses to executions don’t always have the background knowledge and institutional memory necessary to contextualize what they’re seeing. This is why Steven’s death penalty coverage here in Tennessee has been particularly important. He knows this stuff.

His new book Death Row Welcomes You is the product of that coverage, and it’s a deeply affecting piece of writing.

Steven himself has witnessed three executions, and he writes with admirable candor about what he has seen has done to him — how he has struggled to reconcile the need for witnesses to state-sanctioned killings, a journalist’s natural curiosity and desire to write about such important and consequential matters, and the nagging feeling that by simply by covering this stuff you’re complicit in its brutality. I’ve never witnessed an execution. But my wife has recently witnessed two, and I’ve seen in her how powerful that feeling of complicity can be.

Despite all of this, Steven’s book is, against all odds, a hopeful one. It isn’t that Tennessee will stop killing people any time soon. But while covering these executions, Steven found a flicker of decency and humanity in the community of people who visit, comfort, and have forged bonds with the condemned. This community tends to be older, white, and Christian. And they take their faith very seriously.

As an agnostic who grew up among a lot of white evangelicals, I found this far more moving than I had expected. There’s a hymn we used to sing in elementary school that’s still stuck in my head all these years later. The refrain was “Yes, they will know that we are Christians by our love.” (If you’re wondering, yes, this was a public school.)

I still hear that hymn in my head all these years later. That’s partly because it’s catchy, but it’s also because we live in age in which the most visible and vocal parts of white, Christian America choose to define themselves not by love, but whom they want everyone to hate. Each time I read or see self-declared Christian disparaging immigrants, gay and trans people, prisoners, or the myriad other vulnerable people they’ve deemed the enemy, that bouncy little earworm starts playing in my head.

The message of Death Row Welcomes You isn’t an overtly political one, but this contrast between the humble group of people quietly living out the core values of their faith and the image Christianity’s projected by its most powerful and influential figures looms throughout the book. This is particularly true because the book takes place over a period during which the white evangelical right has, er, climbed into a bed with a man whose entire worldview is set by whom he hates. And few states have given Trump more support than Tennessee. And of course as president, Trump carried out more federal executions in six months than in the previous 72 years combined.

Tennessee has carried out four executions under current Gov. Bill Lee, who during his campaign often touted his work with a prison fellowship. In June of 2019, 32 Christian prisoners on Tennessee’s death row wrote Lee a letter. They didn’t ask him for clemency. They simply asked him to pray with them — to see and accept them as people, as fellow Christians. Lee never did. He was later asked if he’d consider witnessing an execution himself — also not an unreasonable request. He said he would not.

Both questions seem like non-starters, to the point where merely asking them almost feels like a stunt. But it’s worth asking why that is. Lee is a politician who has had no compunctions about praying in public, praying on the campaign trail, and talking openly about his faith. It’s odd that it seems odd to ask him to demonstrate and lead when it comes the harder parts of his faith, too.

The community Steven writes about in his book have done both, though they don’t feel compelled to talk about it. They have quietly, determinedly, and persistently provided comfort, solace, and companionship to the most loathed and least loved among us. And they’ve done so knowing there’s a decent chance the friendships they’ve forged will be abruptly ended when the state decides to kill again.

Most of the men on Tennessee’s Death Row — and all but one are men— lived unimaginably harrowing lives. Most were themselves victims of relentless abuse. Many were failed by parents, teachers, caretakers, clergy, community and the state more generally long before they committed their crimes. In some cases, the fellowship group Steven writes about provided the first genuine kindness these prisoners experienced in their lives. It wasn’t until they’d been condemned to die for taking a life that someone offered them the sort of human connection that makes life so worth living.

No, this doesn’t excuse their crimes. But it also doesn’t excuse us for failing them.

Somehow, despite the best efforts of the state of Tennessee, Steven has written a book that leaves you with some hope for your fellow human beings. You should buy it. Read it. Encourage others to do the same.

The excerpts below are taken from different parts of the book. I’ve separated the different sections with dividers.

Death Row Welcomes You comes out on March 26. If you’d like to support a terrific independent bookstore here in Nashville, you can pre-order it from Parnassus Books. Or you can preorder it from Amazon here.

---

Steven Hale/ photo by Daniel Meigs

---

It was past 7 p.m., the appointed hour. The execution seemed to be running behind schedule. We’d been sitting in the dark viewing room for more than half an hour, occasionally straining our eyes to check the time. No one spoke, really. But what was there to say? It had been almost ten years since the last time the viewing room had hosted witnesses for an execution. But that didn’t mean the executioners were out of practice. The state’s execution protocol calls for monthly mock executions, rehearsals known to some inside the prison as “band practice.”

The simulation, according to the state’s Lethal Injection Execution Manual, “includes all steps of the execution process with the following exceptions: A. Volunteers play the roles of the condemned inmate and physician; B. Saline solution is substituted for the lethal chemicals; C. A body is not placed in the body bag.”

Now the real thing was here, and we were the audience. At around 7:12 p.m., the deputy attorney general and Shiles were taken out of the room so that they could observe the IVs being placed in Billy’s arm. As we sat in the darkness, we could hear what sounded like the rattling and squeaking of a gurney being wheeled into the execution chamber. Sutherland and Shiles returned around 7:25, and Shiles told us that he’d touched Billy’s arm and kissed him on the forehead.

Around a minute later, the curtain jerked open, and we peered into hell—the brightly lit execution chamber where Billy was lying on his deathbed. Above him, a large clock hung on the wall to help us take accurate notes on his execution. A heavy-set man with shoulder-length hair and an unkempt beard, he wore an off-white Tennessee Department of Correction jumpsuit. There were heavy straps across his chest, arms, and legs. His hands were taped down and his belly protruded from between the straps, contracting with each of his labored breaths. His eyes were open.

Two men stood in the chamber with him, a few steps from the gurney. It was Riverbend warden Tony Mays, a short Black man with a bald head, and a towering Black deputy who looked chiseled out of stone. Both wore black suits and straight faces, with their hands folded in front of them. The rest of the execution team was hidden behind a wall, but the presence of Mays and his deputy clarified an easily obscured truth. The State does not execute prisoners. People do.

“Billy, do you have any last words?” Mays asked, his voice carried into the witness room through a microphone hanging in the middle of the execution chamber.

Billy sighed. “No.”

Mays wiped his hand over his own face, signaling the executioners— who were behind a wall—to start administering the drugs. But it was at that point that Irick spoke, offering what seemed like a spontaneous apology.

“I just wanna say I’m really sorry, and that—that’s it.”

I knew Paula Dyer’s mother and other members of her family were watching too, seated in a witness room adjacent to ours. While we had a side-view of the gurney, they were positioned at the foot of it, looking at their daughter’s killer in the face. I remembered that same interview with the Knoxville TV station weeks before the execution in which Kathy Jeffers said her daughter’s story had too often been displaced by coverage of Irick’s abusive parents and mental illness.

“All you ever hear about is him. Nothing about her,” she told the station. “What he did to her is the reason he’s where he is. I am sick of hearing about his pain and his suffering. What about her pain and her suffering? She was seven years old, raped, sodomized, and strangled to death. I’m sorry, I feel nothing for his pain. Nothing at all. God, forgive me, but I don’t.”

In the run-up to the execution, as I wrote thousands of words about Billy’s mental illness, his traumatic childhood, and the possibility that his lethal injection would amount to a slow, torturesome death, angry readers had emailed me. Repeating the horrific details of little Paula’s rape and murder, they would ask: What if that had been your daughter? It wasn’t as hard a question as they seemed to imagine. I was as certain about the injustice of the death penalty as I was about what I would want to do if it had been one of my daughters, who were sleeping in their beds at home as I sat there looking into the execution chamber: I would want to light the man on fire myself.

After his hurried final words, Billy faded quickly. His eyes soon closed, and he began to snore loudly. Around seven minutes passed before Mays stepped forward to perform a consciousness check. The protocol called for the warden to reach down and pinch the muscle between Billy’s shoulder and his neck, which he appeared to do although our vantage point made it tough to see clearly. Then the warden shouted.

“Billy!” he yelled, his voice carried into the witness room through a microphone hanging in the middle of the execution chamber.

“Billy!”

His executioners knew him on a first name basis.

But there was no response.

Around two minutes later, though, Billy’s body appeared to react to the second drug. He jolted and made what sounded like a cough or a choking noise. He moved his head slightly and appeared to briefly strain his forearms against the restraints. We scribbled furiously on our legal pads, a task that momentarily kept the horror at bay.

A few minutes later, his face turned almost purple. We sat in the dark, watching for nearly ten minutes as he lay there. He did not appear to be breathing. At 7:46 p.m., Mays shut the blinds and our room went dark again. Soon his voice came through the speakers.

“That concludes the execution of Billy Ray Irick. Time of death, 7:48 p.m. Please exit now.”

---

Not long before the execution, a note had been passed to me from death row, written in blue ink on a cheap prison napkin. This is what it said:

“Am a friend of Billy, I was asked how he is feeling, my opinion is, okay. He spends his days painting what he feels, which is some of the most beautiful paintings I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t complain, he just rolls with it. How do I feel about him having a date. It’s not easy because I care, he’s a human being like we all are.”

Standing in the prison as we waited for Billy’s execution to begin, his attorney, Gene Shiles, had lamented his client’s mostly loveless life. “I don’t know if there’s been one day in his whole life when his life was celebrated,” he told me. But it turned out that wasn’t entirely true. I was beginning to learn that there was a community transcending the boundaries of death row and the “free world,” a fellowship of the living and the condemned. There were men and women who regularly came to the prison to visit the condemned men in Riverbend’s Unit 2. They had come to know Billy as something more than the horrible act that put him on death row. They had celebrated him, and they would mourn him.

---

One weekday evening, I walked into Gold Rush, a dimly lit and since shuttered midtown bar that had been a popular local haunt since it opened in 1974. The execution of Billy Ray Irick was around a week away. Seated at a table near the back was David Bass. A convivial middle-aged man, he greeted me warmly, his conservative appearance befitting his Alabama accent. But he admitted he felt a bit uneasy about speaking to a reporter.

“I’m not an activist,” he said.

It was not a derogatory statement about activists or their work but an acknowledgment of his shock that he’d ended up being the sort of person who meets a reporter in a bar to talk about death row. I could tell he wouldn’t be here but for the fact that, as he would tell me later while the state kept adding execution dates to the calendar, “they’re trying to kill my friends.”

We were both able to relax a little bit when we realized we shared an alma mater, Auburn University, which meant we also shared a familiarity with the state of Alabama and probably a less-than-healthy relationship with college football. Soon I could see how David’s personality must have made him a natural fit for his job as a university fundraiser. He began to speak as if we’d known each other for years, and I became convinced that if he’d wanted to, he could have gotten everyone in the bar to go in together on appetizers. He seemed like a man driven by an innate urge to make sure everyone he knew met everyone else that he knew. Now, some of those people were on death row, and so, here we were. Over the next few months, in this awful context, we got to know each other.

For most of his life, David did not fret over the fates of death row prisoners. In fact, born and raised in Alabama—and brought up in the Southern Baptist church—he’d been far from indifferent on the topic. From a state with one of the nation’s largest death row populations—and an electric chair named Yellow Mama, because it was covered in a coat of yellow highway-line paint from the Alabama State Highway Department—he’d inherited an enthusiasm for executions. His time in church did not temper that verve for retributory violence. The Southern Baptist Convention is one of the few prominent Christian denominations that still supports the death penalty.

As a younger man, David had adopted the words of former Alabama attorney general Charlie Graddick, who reportedly pledged while campaigning for the job in 1978 that when it came to convicted murderers in the state, he’d “fry ’em until their eyes pop out.” Now David seemed almost to choke on the words, repeating them only as a confession.

There came a point in his life that he became disillusioned with the Southern Baptist church and felt increasingly alienated from its more legalistic teachings. He began to wander spiritually, reading the work of the Catholic monk Thomas Keating and even going on a silent retreat. Around 2013, he found his way to a regular gathering at Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal church in downtown Nashville. It was a meeting devoted to Centering Prayer, a form of Christian meditation that originated with Trappist monks, including Keating, in the 1970s. There, he encountered a man named Joe Ingle.

David found himself intrigued by Joe, a blunt older reverend who often spoke about prisons at the meeting. He looked him up online and discovered that Joe had been an advocate and spiritual adviser for death row inmates across the southeast since 1974. He’d also written two books about his experiences.

“I would read the synopsis of his books, and I would go, ‘Now that makes a lot of sense and I agree with that,’” David told me. “Then I would read his detractors that were coming at him, and I would go, ‘That makes a lot of sense and I agree with that.’ Right there started the turmoil.”

David sees most interactions as the potential starting point of a relationship, but in Joe he also saw a possible spiritual guide. So, he asked him to lunch. They met and Joe just listened.

“He didn’t quite know what to do with me,” David recalled.

But after about six weekly lunches, Joe had an idea about what to do.

“You need to go to death row,” he told David.

That was how David became friends with the men now facing execution. Over the course of five years he had been making almost weekly Monday night visits with a condemned man named Terry King. During that time, the state tried to start up the death penalty machine, at one point scheduling ten executions across 2014 and 2015. But those dates were all canceled due to pending legal challenges around the state’s execution methods. And so, David had been able to operate with a sort of denial about what the prison really was and what the state really meant to do with the men on Unit 2. The reality of executions was, for him, like a far-off storm whose thunder was not close enough to wake one from a dream. But now the storm was overhead.

David, like many others close to death row, strongly suspected that Billy had been chosen as the first man to be executed because his crime had been so heinous. In Tennessee, the state Supreme Court sets execution dates, and since they refuse to comment on how they make these grim scheduling decisions, the theory was all but impossible to confirm. But it was easy to see the logic in it. The state and the governor seemed far less likely to face significant resistance to resuming executions after nearly a decade if they did so by first executing a man convicted of raping and killing a little girl. The fact that Billy was a white man—as were most of the men who would be scheduled after him—also obscured the fact that Tennessee’s death row, like death rows around the country, is disproportionately Black and diverted attention from the racism of the death penalty.

The truth, as we would all learn in the months to come, was that officials in this state were unlikely to face significant resistance to executions, no matter the circumstances of the crime or the particular history of the condemned.

In his years visiting the prison, David had seen and spoken to Billy once or twice. Billy was a fairly quiet guy. But he knew one of Billy’s visitors and offered to connect us, as came naturally to him. It was a young attorney named Alvaro Manrique Barrenechea, one of Billy’s last and only close friends on earth.

---

The saline solution—what would help conduct the fatal electric current— poured down Steve’s face as the guards fastened a helmet on top of a soaked sea sponge on top of his shaved head. The salty accomplice mixed with the tears still leaking from his eyes. As the guards removed his glasses and wiped his face with a towel, I noticed that one of them had a tattoo on his forearm featuring the American flag and the words “We the People.”

They attached the thick veil to the helmet, covering Steve’s face. I have often wondered since then what it looks like from the other side of that veil. Did Steve look ahead or close his eyes and wait?

The guards soaked the sponges at Steve’s ankles, then gathered their materials and left the chamber. Another man picked up a large cable and plugged it into the chair. Then, around 7:19 p.m., the exhaust fan kicked on. Did Steve know this was the last sound he would hear?

The executioner’s ballet began with Steve’s body rising from the chair. As the current coursed through him for twenty seconds or so, the fingers on one of his hands, gripping the arms of the chair, snapped back one-by-one into a fist until only his pinky was still pointing out. He fell back down, then rose again with the whine of the current. Then it was done.

We sat there, looking at the dead body that used to be Steve West. The chair held him, and we leaned forward to be sure he was not breathing. He did not appear to be. I looked into the execution chamber and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. There was another window over the chair’s left shoulder. I saw my reflection in it, my face hovering there next to Steve’s body. We the people.

At 7:25 p.m., the curtains were closed. Two minutes later, the warden announced the time of death and told us to leave.

As we left the viewing room and started to make our way out of the prison, Steve’s attorney, Justyna, handed me a printed statement from Steve’s legal team and asked me to read it at the press conference and share it with the other reporters.

We kept walking out, quiet, and I felt sad and angry and tired. What had we just watched? A man who grew up poor, hungry, abused, and mentally ill, put to a violent death by low-paid prison employees while the state’s most powerful officials, Attorney General Herbert Slatery and Gov. Bill Lee, stayed far away. Slatery sent a deputy to witness the executions he sought, and Lee had nothing to say when it was finished.

Most of the close relatives of Wanda and Sheila Romines, including their husband and father Jack, had died since their murders. But Eddie Campbell, Jack’s nephew, had spoken to Knoxville’s WBIR in 2018 about how painful the decades had been.

“Jack would have done it himself if he could,” he said. “He was never able to get over it. It devastated him his entire life. And he had to relive his wife and daughter’s death over and over his entire life, every time there was another appeal or delay in West’s execution. If you’re going to have the death penalty, have the death penalty. If you are not going to have it, don’t have it. But just make it one way or the other. Leaving families in limbo for thirty years is not how the justice system should work.”

Outside under the white tent, The Tennessee Department of Correction’s spokesperson Dorinda Carter read a statement from Campbell . . .

When it was my turn to speak, I read the statement from Steve’s legal team.

“We are deeply disappointed that the State of Tennessee has gone forward with the execution of a man whom the State has diagnosed with severe mental illness; a man of deep faith who has made a positive impact on those around him for decades; and a man who by overwhelming evidence did not commit these murders but has nevertheless taken personal responsibility for his involvement in these crimes. We don’t believe the decisions of the courts and ultimately the Governor reflect the forgiving and merciful citizens of this State.”

I shared a few observations from the execution before answering a couple of questions. I’d not really thought about what I was going to say, but after answering one question about the differences between witnessing a lethal injection and witnessing an electrocution, I went on:

“The only other thing I would say is, I don’t think I’ll be coming out to another one of these. I think it’s very important that people bear witness to these and that’s why it’s meant a lot to me to do it and why I’ve felt strongly about it. But I think I’ll probably be taking a break. Maybe the governor or someone can take my seat if they want, but I think I’m probably done for now.”

In that moment, I wished I could erase the nightmarish knowledge I had acquired, and I felt like the people who’d decided these killings were necessary should be the ones holding it. I felt what I deemed a righteous indignation—manifested in a somewhat smartass comment—at a multi-millionaire governor who had traded on his faith in a redemptive Christ during his campaign for office, only to sign off on the executions of men claiming that same redemption or suffering from profound mental illness. Was he even awake to watch our press conference? Later in the month, Kimberlee Kruesi, a local Associated Press reporter who had witnessed one execution and would soon witness another, asked the governor about witnessing one himself.

“I’ve certainly thought about if I would, but I have not felt compelled to do it,” he said.

But if I’m honest, I was wrestling with more than just the governor’s distance from the executions his signature approved as I left the prison that night. I felt uneasy about the compulsion I’d felt to voluntarily witness these state killings. I believed what I’d said about the importance of bearing witness, but I’d also started to question my motives for raising my hand. There is something in the reporter— the writer—that drives them to see something dramatic, something significant, something violent, and to be the one who gets to tell everyone else about it—to get the big assignment. I felt unsettled about the fact that this drive, which was, I suppose, a positive professional attribute, had led me here.

My wife had been upset with me when I told her that I’d volunteered to witness a third execution. I had done it without thinking more than twice, and I hadn’t told her beforehand. But she had seen the toll these nights were taking on me more clearly than I could at the time and, I think, had begun to see it as a sort of psychological recklessness on my part. When that bill came due that night outside the prison, it did not occur to me that its cost was in large part due to the proximity I had gained to the people facing execution; that I was becoming more than just a reporter in relation to the men on death row and that this had intensified the trauma of seeing and anticipating their executions.

I had been to Riverbend on Monday night, for visitation, and on Thursday night, for executions, and I was now absolutely convinced that someone who had experienced one would see their worldview shattered by the other.

---