Texas has executed more than six hundred people since 1982, over a third of the American total since the death penalty was restored in 1976, and it has kept every final statement. The Department of Criminal Justice publishes them. Anyone can read all six hundred in an afternoon.
That archive is the best answer to the way last words are usually presented, which is as a list of the memorable ones. The memorable ones are memorable because they are unlike the rest.
NBC News read the whole Texas set and sorted it by theme. What dominates is readiness, apology and scripture. “I’m ready.” “Send me home.” “Goodbye.” Men and women strapped to a gurney asking their families to forgive them, naming their children, thanking a chaplain, quoting John. More than two dozen called out to their brothers on the row. Lisa Coleman, executed in 2014 for killing her girlfriend’s son, told the other women sentenced to death to keep their heads up. Across fifty years the statements barely change.
The first was Charlie Brooks Jr., executed on December 7, 1982, the first person in the United States to be put to death by lethal injection. He was a Muslim, and he said that at that moment he had no fear for his body.
Set that beside the quotations that circulate. Carl Panzram, hanged at Leavenworth in 1930 for killing a prison employee, telling the executioner to hurry up because he could kill a dozen men in the time he was taking. Gary Gilmore, shot by a Utah firing squad in a converted prison cannery in January 1977 in front of about twenty witnesses, saying “Let’s do it” after the legal order had been read. These are quoted precisely because almost nobody says anything like them.
Even those drift. Panzram’s line is reproduced on this site and elsewhere as an offer to hang a dozen men, and the versions that can be checked against each other have him saying kill. One word, changed somewhere in eighty years of retelling, in the most quoted sentence he ever spoke.
Two of the most repeated items in these lists do not belong in them at all.
Jeffrey Dahmer was not executed. Wisconsin has no death penalty. He was serving fifteen consecutive life sentences and was beaten to death by another prisoner in November 1994. Whatever he said, he did not say it on death row, and he had no reason to think he was about to die.
Timothy McVeigh made no spoken statement. He handed over a written copy of “Invictus”, a poem published in 1888 by William Ernest Henley, who wrote it in hospital after having a leg amputated. The line everyone attributes to McVeigh as his last words is Henley’s. What McVeigh actually did in the chamber was decline to speak.
The Gilmore line has a second life that is also usually got wrong. It is said to have inspired the Nike logo. It inspired the slogan. Dan Wieden has said that “Just Do It” came out of Gilmore’s “let’s do it”, and the logo is a piece of drawing from 1971 that has nothing to do with either.
There is a further problem with treating the record as though it were complete, which is that the state decides what the public sees.
In 2019 Texas stopped releasing written final statements. John William King, executed for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., who was chained to a truck and dragged to death, left a written statement that prison officials read out. A state senator objected. Within a day the executive director of the Department of Criminal Justice announced that only remarks spoken aloud in the chamber would be made public and that anything written would go into the prisoner’s property. The same senator’s objection had already ended the last meal in 2011, after a condemned man ordered a large one and ate none of it.
So the archive is not a neutral transcript. It is what the institution has chosen to keep publishing, and the rules changed twice in a decade in response to individual cases that embarrassed it.
What survives the filtering is still worth reading, and some of it is very strange. Billie Wayne Coble, seventy years old, said “That’ll be five dollars” before a fight broke out among the witnesses. Rosendo Rodriguez III said the state might have his body but had never had his soul. A man told a woman he had eaten well, chicken and pork chops, and asked someone to look after his mother.
One theme recurs often enough to be its own category, and it is the one the compilations never include, because there is nothing quotable about it. Men use the last sentence of their lives to say they did not do it. Cary Kerr told the chamber he was an innocent man, said never to trust a court-appointed attorney, and asked someone to check the DNA. Roy Pippin used his to charge the jury, the trial judge, the prosecutor and every appeal court that had heard him with the murder of an innocent man. Whether either was right is not the point. Several hundred people have had one paragraph each, and a proportion of them spent it on that.
That last one is closer to the average than anything a compilation will print. The statements are mostly domestic. People spend their final sentence on the people in the room, and on the ones who are not.
The numbers around them are worth keeping in view. The average person executed in Texas had been on death row for a little over eleven years. The shortest wait was 252 days and the longest was 11,575, which is nearly thirty-two years. The youngest was twenty-four and the oldest seventy-eight. Whatever a man says on a gurney, he has usually had more than a decade to prepare it.
That is the fact the quotation lists conceal. A last statement is not a spontaneous utterance. It is a composition, written over years, delivered under supervision, in a format the state controls, to an audience the state selects. The wit and the defiance are the exceptions. What almost everyone does with the opportunity is apologise, or say a name.