What happens behind the curtain

Finding counternarratives about death row

(Members of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty or PHADP at Holman prison. Photo from Facebook.)

Ahead of the first ever experimental execution by suffocation using nitrogen gas scheduled in Alabama next week, it’s worth thinking about the many ways the state uses its iron-fisted power to control narratives about death row, and what happens during state-sanctioned killings. 

I seek out counternarratives on these subjects because the state lost credibility with me years ago. An obvious example of why can be found in the 2018 botched execution attempt of Doyle Hamm. 

After poking and prodding Mr. Hamm with needles for almost 3 hours, prison officials gave up as Mr. Hamm lay strapped to a gurney in a pool of blood. They called off the execution because they were unsuccessful in gaining IV access to administer the lethal injection. This was a risk Mr. Hamm’s attorney had predicted given Hamm’s advanced cancer and long history of IV drug use.

At the time, ADOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn did not provide details to reporters about what happened behind the curtain, only that his execution team ran out of time.  

“I wouldn’t characterize what we had tonight as a problem,” Dunn said. Hamm’s attorney later released photos and examination notes showing that prison employees had punctured Hamm’s bladder and an artery causing him to urinate blood for days. The state never publicly clarified why it didn’t view this as a problem, but privately agreed to never try to execute Doyle Hamm again. 

Other counternarratives about death row can be found in the 2023 book titled Ghosts Over the Boiler: Voices from Alabama’s Death Row. The book is a collection of writings previously published by Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, or PHADP,  the nation’s only nonprofit formed on and operated from death row. 

The organization, founded in 1989, has a goal to educate the public about capital punishment and the features of inequality that define it, while advocating for an end to the death penalty.

 All of the featured writers have been convicted of murder, although based on the rate of death row exonerations, some are likely wrongly convicted. Others took part in terrible crimes before they were sentenced to death, but that’s not the subject matter covered by PHADP. 

In fact, much of the writing in Ghosts over the Boiler is characterized by vulnerability, tenderness and contrition. The title of the collection comes from a stunning poem of the same name written by Darrell B. Grayson in 2005, two years before Mr. Grayson would be executed. Grayson writes about a suicide of a man on death row known as “Preacher,” and the brittle nonchalance from prison staff. 

He sees Preacher hanging, 

Walks to the cubical, 

Calls the operator and mumbles something, 

Lights a cigarette, then leans.

Another piece that stayed with me is a short, metaphorical essay by James Largin titled “Out to Pasture.” Largin writes from the perspective of livestock, comparing his experience of prison yard time as a bull being allowed to graze in a pasture for an hour. 

“The other bulls and I enjoy the air and the grass. We frolic in the field, but our eyes never stray far from the red door at the edge of the pasture. That is the door to the slaughter house. They can dress it up anyway they want to, but they murder us in there.” 

The work of the book shows that people can be more than one thing at the same time. Human beings convicted of murder and sentenced to death are still human beings, experiencing joy, sorrow, longing and regret. They can think critically and creatively, express deep emotions and communicate important ideas from perspectives the state would prefer stay silent.

Maybe that’s why Ghosts Over the Boiler feels incredibly subversive, an exceedingly rare window into what’s arguably one of the most brutal and opaque places in our criminal legal system. It’s extraordinary that this organization has thrived for more than 30 years, in Alabama’s Holman Prison of all places, especially given that most members of the organization will be killed. 

Another counternarrative in the pages can be found in the “Last Words and Testament” by Torrey McNabb. He was executed in 2017 for killing a police officer in 1997. Much of the media coverage referred to Mr. McNabb as a “cop-killer” and focused on his last words spoken as he raised both middle fingers in the air.

“To the state of Alabama, I hate you motherfuckers, I hate you,” McNabb said while strapped to the gurney, just before the state killed him. 

I remember being struck by the framing of McNabb’s final words as a selfish act from an unrepentant and dangerous monster, and not an understandable expression of despair in the face of his own destruction. Wouldn’t the killing of Mr. McNabb have been easier on everyone if he just cooperated and behaved? Instead, he went off script. This interested me, because it meant McNabb probably had a lot more to say. 

Turns out, he did. In his thoughtful “Last Words and Testament,” McNabb, a Black man who killed another Black man, directly addresses the racial imbalance with gun violence and implores his own community to make peace within its own conflicts. “We gotta point the guns in another direction,” he writes. “Our lives have to matter to one another first, because we’re all we’ve got.” 

Perhaps an even more dramatic counternarrative is McNabb’s acknowledgment of the victim in his case. He mentions the victim by name 9 times in the short essay, hardly a choice made by heartless and unremorseful man. This apology to victim Anderson Gordon and his family was nowhere in the coverage of McNabb’s execution, but here it is in plain language, nestled in these pages like a redemption song from the grave, one I’m glad to hear. 

I believe that Anderson Gordon was a good man who loved the people of his community so much that he was willing to wake up every day and put it on the line to help make the community around them a little bit better place to live. So I can understand that not only did the Gordon family suffer an irreplaceable loss, but that our community as a whole in west Montgomery was dealt a blow. For that, I’m sorry. As a community, we are in desperate need of more men like Anderson Gordon. 

I understand some of what you’ve been through in the midst of this tragedy because who Anderson Gordon was and who I am at the core of my being are probably not all that different. Everything that Anderson Gordon was to you, I was and am to my family. So on behalf of my family and from the depths of who I am as a man, and as a fellow African-American, I want to apologize to the Gordon family and to the entire African-American community nationwide. 

PHADP puts out a quarterly newsletter called On the Wings of Hope. In it you’ll find a range of writing by men on death row including essays, op-eds and poems. One of the most devastating costs of capital punishment documented in the pages, according to editor Dr. Katie Owens Murphy, is the erosion of empathy. 

These writers attempt to dam this erosion, building a bridge with their words, a monumental feat given their extreme incapacitation. Not everyone will be open to discovering their own empathy through this work, but for people unsatisfied with the usual story, Ghosts Over the Boiler and PHADP’s work in general provide a welcome counternarrative as the state invents new ways to crush the most powerless people. 

There is power in creating something under these conditions, a reclaiming and reframing of their own humanity and experience. And for readers, it’s a new opportunity for awakening, a way to open yourself up to a different truth, one that inconveniences the powerful and disrupts the status quo of cruelty and indifference.

Purchase a copy of Ghosts Over the Boiler here.

Sign up for PHADP’s newsletter here.