“LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE” Dante Alighieri
Dante and Virgil among the gluttons
Honest-To-God Truth:
There are men and women in prisons in the United States who should never again see the light of day as free people.
I’ve met more than a few.
The erudite, charming, well-spoke young man who – according to one of his inmate friends – had gotten away with somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen murders. (He was caught and convicted after he got sloppy and rolled a victim down the banks of the Tamiami Trail canal before making certain his mark was dead.)
The 19-year-old who admitted to me that – after forcing her into her apartment, severely beating her, rolling her behind the sofa, making dinner and settling in to watch a movie, he and his girlfriend kicked an elderly woman to death “because she made noises.” [As he left my office, he told my inmate clerks “I should have stomped that skinny priest when I had the chance.” Danny and Jon later “invited” him behind the handball courts for a teaching session.]
The men so cruel that, when I notified their families of their deaths of cancer or HIV/AIDS (part of the chaplain’s job), they didn’t even want to know about burials or receive the men’s possessions.
Men so genuinely evil that their families had secretly moved and changed phone numbers to eliminate any possibility of future contact.
Leave them there. Let them grow old and die behind the high walls and barbed-wire fences.
Minos, judge of the damned
As I began writing this, I exchanged text messages with a friend who did almost seven years behind bars - three in Miami-Dade County Jail and three-plus in the Florida prison system. His responses:
“I’m pro-choice and I struggle with the death penalty only because I feel death is much better than life in prison. Especially if you are young. Some people have committed crimes that I feel they need to pay with suffering…
“I’m not a good source. I literally met and lived with men that were pure evil. Only God knocking them off a horse and speaking to them could work. I didn’t want them out.”
Prison life is indescribably, unspeakably harsh. It is impossible to adequately describe life on death row.
Imagine for the rest of your life:
Never being able to choose your meal. Eat what’s on the tray that is shoved through the slot in your cell door. Or don’t eat.
Family visits. With a life sentence, forget it; visits will slide to holiday seasons and then never.
Knowing within feet precisely where you’ll be buried: the cemetery with unmarked gravestones at one of the larger state prisons. If you’re on death row or doing life without parole, that gravesite is not-too-far-away and maybe even visible (without the spiritual value and meaning of monastic cemeteries).
Reading and educational opportunities? Are you kidding?
You will, on average, spend twenty-three hours a day in a space so small you can stand in the middle of your cell and extend your arms and almost touch both side walls. That cell will be sparsely (tastefully, depending on your preference) decorated with a polished metal mirror attached to the wall and a toilet/sink combination bolted to floor and wall. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a shower every second or third day.
Punishment of the Avaricious and the Prodigal
On December 1, 2023, the Death Penalty Information Center released its “Year End Report.” Among the critical issues in the “Executive Summary”:
For the first time, a Gallup poll reports that more Americans (50%) believe the death penalty is administered unfairly that fairly (47%).
Only Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama executed people; and only 7 states (Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas) sentenced people to death. For the first time, the number of executions exceeded the number of new death sentences.
Twenty-nine states have either abolished the death penalty or paused executions by executive action.
2023 was the ninth consecutive year with fewer than 30 people executed (24) and fewer than 50 people sentenced to death (21).
Three exonerations in 2023 brought the total in the modern death penalty era to 195.
Despite high-profiles and intense media attention to innocence cases in several states, the accused found no relief in courts, raising questions about the adequacy of state procedures and the ability of the legal system to protect innocent people.
Prisoners who were executed spent an average of 23 years in prison – the longest average since executions were resumed in 1976 – and were an average age of 54 at the time of their executions – tied with 2021 for the oldest age since 1976.
Founded in 1992 “to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice” guided by science and grounded in anti-racism,” the Innocence Project claims 250 “victories” “as of March 28, 2024.” Of those 250 victories, 202 clients were exonerated by DNA; their clients collectively spent 3,898 years wrongfully incarcerated.
According to the Innocence Project, an exoneration occurs when a person who has been convicted of a crime is officially cleared based on new evidence of innocence. Exoneration can occur through a pardon based on actual innocence, an acquittal, a retrial or a conviction being vacated and indictment dismissed.
Spendthrifts running through the wood of the suicides
In April, four months after Governor Ron DeSantis abandoned his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida legislators made theirs one of only two states - the other is Alabama – that allows for a non-unanimous [eight of twelve jurors in Florida] death sentences. The same legislative session also authorized the death penalty as punishment for sexual battery of a child under the age of twelve that does not result in the death of the victim. The new sexual battery law is in direct conflict with the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court’s Kennedy v. Louisiana, which struck down a similar law.
According to the Innocence Database maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center, as of February 2, 2024 there have been 196 exonerations of death row prisoners in the United States since 1973. [The DPIC also lists almost seventy other wrongful convictions and executions between 1820 and 1973.]
The Texas-based Neal Davis Law Firm maintains the Web site “Exonerations By State (Report): Statistics on Wrongful Convictions in the United States.” Across the categories of murder, sexual assault, child sex abuse, drugs, robbery and “other” offenses since 1989, Texas leads the nation with 363 exonerations (including 49 for murder), followed by Illinois (303); New York (281); California (205) and Michigan (99).
The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute lists Oklahoma as one of the “most restrictive” states in the nation for abortion policies and access to abortion after the overthrow of Roe v. Wade.
But that doesn’t make Oklahoma a “pro-life” state. It’s only “pro-birth.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in May 2023 the nationwide median – right in the middle and different from “average” – annual wage for corrections officers was $53,300. According to DATAUSA.IO, in 2022 Rhode Island ($92,196), California ($90,810) and Massachusetts ($84,187) had the best average annual wages for corrections officers.
Punishment of the panderers and seducers
While the nationwide average annual salary of a corrections officer is $48,213 ($23 per hour); the majority of CO salaries range between $42,500 (20th percentile) to $55,400 (75th percentile).
ZipRecruiter reports that “As of June 8, 2024, the average annual pay for a Correction Officer in Oklahoma is $50,549 a year… that works out to be approximately $24.30 an hour… Oklahoma ranks number 19 out of 50 states nationwide for Correction Officer salaries.”
In 2022, the Republican-controlled state established a new schedule of 25 executions – one every sixty days. The goal of the aggressive plan of the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals was to execute 25 prisoners in less than three years, eliminating 58% of the states Death Row population.
The demands of the pace of scheduled judicial killings had begun to expose prison staff to such extreme levels of psychological and physical stress that officers at the McAlester state penitentiary, home of the death chamber, requested that the gap between executions be widened from 60 to 90 days. In a letter to Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, nine former senior corrections officials warned that staff were being subjected to “lasting trauma” and a “psychological toll” that included Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, alcohol abuse and distress due to the “non-stop executions” and constant rehearsals.
Justin Jones, Oklahoma DOC director from 2005 to 2003, told The Guardian (April 28, 2024) that executions affected not just those employees actually deployed in the death chamber but every worker at McAlester. The 60-day schedule required constant “mock executions” within earshot of prisoners, staff offices and visitors. “It affects your mental state when it becomes so routine.” The culture of prisons is such that staff rarely talk about their emotional responses. “We don’t talk about it. Correctional officers are public servants on the lowest salaries in state government, and they get home at the end of the day and just absorb it,” Jones said.
Punishment of the thieves
PEW Research Center and other studies consistently rank Oklahoma as one of the most religious states in the nation – generally hovering right around the Sixth Most Religious spot.
Surprising!?!?
Especially when we consider the reaction of Oklahoma Appeals Court Judge Gary Lumpkin, who responded to the officials’ request that more time be allowed between executions to “suck it up” and “man up.” According to the non-profit Oklahoma paper The Frontier, the judge was unimpressed by arguments which he described as “sympathy stuff.”
“Man up. If you can’t do the job, you step aside and let somebody do it that can,” Lumpkin said at a public hearing. “We set a reasonable amount of time to start this out, and y’all keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.
“Who’s to say next month you won’t come in and say I need 120 days? This stuff needs to stop, and people need to suck it up, realize they have a hard job to do, and get it done in a timely, proficient, professional way,” Lumpkin added.
He said 30 days was more than enough time between executions, according to The Frontier.
Oklahoma has a history of botched executions.
On April 29, 2014, during the execution of Clayton Lockett, the state used Midazolam – a sedative (not an anesthetic) – as the first in what was supposed to be a fatal three-drug cocktail. The execution began with officials struggling for 51 minutes to place an IV line to deliver the fatal three-drug combination. The inmate then writhed and moaned on the gurney for 43 minutes before officials called off the execution. Locket suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after the execution was called off.
During the October 28, 2021 execution of John Grant, the prisoner suffered repeated convulsions and vomited over a nearly 15-minute period after he was administered the Midazolam.
Dante and Virgil among the falsifiers
But Oklahoma is not alone.
The Death Penalty Information Center lists 61 “botched” executions or attempted executions between August 10, 1982 and February 28, 2024.
“Botched executions occur when there is a breakdown in, or departure from, the ‘protocol’ for a particular method of execution. The protocol can be established by the norms, expectations, and advertised virtues of each method or by the government’s officially adopted execution guidelines. Botched executions are ‘those involving unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner.’ Examples of such problems include, among other things, inmates catching fire while being electrocuted, being strangled during hangings (instead of having their necks broken), and being administered the wrong dosages of specific drugs for lethal injections.”
Dante and my friend are right. There are men and women out there who should, when they enter prison, be greeted "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" – “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Until we’ve abolished state-sanctioned murder – by firing squad, guillotine, three-drug combos or oxygen deprivation, I can’t stop asking what right a state or legislature has to tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.