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.
