ESSAY: Death Penalty Fan Becomes Condemned Women’s Friend

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) I was a staunch supporter of the death penalty until I met my first death row inmate and the issue went from political to personal. I first visited the maximum security women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas, nine years ago. I went as a journalist, to meet Karla Faye Tucker, […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I was a staunch supporter of the death penalty until I met my first death row inmate and the issue went from political to personal.

I first visited the maximum security women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas, nine years ago. I went as a journalist, to meet Karla Faye Tucker, who was on death row for murdering two people with a pickax. And I went as a grieving daughter whose mother had just died.


My mom had been involved in a group that ministered to inmates. She had become good friends with Tucker and other women on death row. She couldn’t say enough kind things about these women, describing Karla as a “kind, loving and wonderful, Spirit-filled Christian.” She described Frances Newton as “sweet and innocent, like a child.” Newton’s husband and children had been found shot dead in their home, and Frances was found guilty of killing them. Karla told my mother that Frances was innocent.

When my mom began her visits, I made fun of her. She’d try to tell me how Karla and so many of the inmates had changed, but I’d cut her off. “People like that don’t change,” I’d tell her. And to make sure she wouldn’t say any more about it, I’d call her a “do-gooder” _ the ultimate insult in our family.

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I believed all inmates, whatever their crime, deserved to rot there. As for Karla Faye Tucker, Frances Newton and the rest, I believed they couldn’t be executed fast enough.

My mom once had shared these views. As a child, I used to eavesdrop on long dinner table conversations among my parents and their circle of friends. My mom helped organize campaigns for “tough on crime” candidates, and I helped stuff their literature into thousands of mailboxes from the back of her white station wagon.

But something had dramatically changed my mom’s views on the death penalty, and it happened down in Texas. I had to find out what it was.

(OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS)

The first time I came through the gates, I was hit by the stench. The women in the general population of the prison share communal showers, and their toilets are wide open. A lack of privacy and being treated without dignity are part of their punishment, I suppose.

Some dorms house 72 women in one room, with beds lined up and stacked in cubicles. Under each bed is a drawer that holds everything they are allowed to have. The inmates whose families haven’t disowned them make out better than those who have no one. Family members send breath mints, paper, pens and sometimes a book, a Bible or a journal. Three fans hanging from the rafters push around hot, stale air that smells like sewage and too many bodies packed into too small a space. The rank smell crawls in and fills every pore.


Death row inmates are sometimes disciplined by being kept in cells 23 hours a day. This can go on for years at a time. Visitors are allowed to sit 5 feet from a death row inmate’s cell door. The women are hungry for any human contact; many sleep most of the time, for lack of anything else to do.

The first time I sat cross-legged on the floor of death row, in front of one of those cells, I realized I was witnessing what happens when a person is made to literally rot to death from boredom, lack of human contact and the absence of hope. It was one thing to pontificate that this is exactly what these types of people deserve, as I had done all my life. It was another thing to see it take place.

The first time my mom met Karla and the other women, she asked them, “What could have kept you women from committing these heinous crimes?”

One inmate told her that she had asked herself that same question many times. She then proceeded to tell my mom about her childhood _ how her father had sexually abused her after her mother abandoned them; how her mother died in a car accident the year after she disappeared; how she was sent to a juvenile center at age 10. My mom was flabbergasted that this inmate considered her childhood “normal.”

When I listen to the stories of these women’s lives _ learning about their children, their mistakes and how one bad decision inevitably led to another _ I come away thinking how much we as a society failed them before most of them set foot in prison. Most would never tell you that, though. Contrary to what I used to believe, most do not walk around claiming they are innocent.

Karla didn’t. But like so many of the women I’ve met, Karla changed so much from the angry, violent young woman she was when she murdered those two people.


After my first visit, I expected to tell the world that Karla and the rest of the inmates who were claiming they’d “found God” and had “changed” were nothing but a bunch of phonies. Seeing the sincerity of their faith took me completely by surprise. It changed my mind about capital punishment, as it had my mom’s.

Karla was executed on Feb. 4, 1998. When she was killed, I lost a friend.

Frances was granted a stay in December, two hours before her scheduled execution, so that evidence in her case could be tested using current technology. Any day now, she likely will be given a new execution date. When she dies, I will lose another friend.

Last year, as I waited to clear prison security, I overheard one of the guards mutter, “There goes one of them do-gooders.”

I was going to say something but didn’t.

Being a do-gooder isn’t an insult anymore.

RB/JL END KEOUGH

(Diana Keough is a staff writer for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at dkeough(at)plaind.com.)

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