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“Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”

I don’t think that was what the famous (or now, infamous) thirteen words referenced on Lady Liberty’s tablet quite meant. Do you know the origin of that phrase? It’s really an interesting tale. These lines come from Emma Lazarus's 1883 sonnet "The New Colossus," written to support the building of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The poem, which portrays the statue as a welcoming "Mother of Exiles," was later engraved on a plaque inside the monument in 1903, transforming it into a symbol of immigration.

Those words literally transformed the new and quite in-its-infancy-stage nation into a beacon of hope for millions around the world, and allowed them to believe that they could really and truly come here and achieve whatever they were capable of. They struggled to get here, struggled to survive, and eventually some of them did quite well for themselves. Some failed, failed again, and then succeeded. They built America - the America they believed in.

That America is no longer here. I send those first two paragraphs out to the world to cause you to question and to wonder “what the hell does that have to do with today’s death penalty?” Well, really it’s quite simple: the will and determination of one person succeeding, more people succeeded, until a whole movement swept the land. Now, that America is stumbling around in the dark, lost and confused amidst ICE, for-profit prisons and mass incarceration, it needs to find its way back.

The Death Penalty Information Center’s new study finds that Florida has conducted 13 of America’s 23 executions in 2026 - approximately 57%. Florida’s total exceeds the combined total of the other five states that have executed anyone this year. Two more are waiting in the wings. Harold Lucas remains scheduled for September 1 and Daniel Conahan for September 10.*

I fully expect that by this coming Friday (the 28th) DeSantis’ blue Sharpie will once again scrawl across a prepared letter directing the warden of Florida State Prison to kill another person on such-and-such date and time, adhering to secretive policies and protocols that he refuses to disclose. He does it so casually. It’s a kind of simple but cruel and inhumane way of sealing a human’s fate and numbering his days. I write about it and you can read it here.

The broader national trend is moving in the opposite direction. Excluding Florida, executions during the first half of the year declined from 18 in 2025 to seven in 2026. Several states have self-imposed maratoriums in place. Several haven’t executed anyone in years. Several have abolished - or are legislatively attempting to abolish - capital punishment.

In the past 10 years (2016–2026), three U.S. states have legislatively abolished capital punishment, and one state had its death penalty ruled unconstitutional by its high court. Delaware, New Hampshire, Colorado and Virginia have abolished it entirely.

Ohio, Wyoming, and Kentucky, all have pending legislative actions moving towards abolition. Additional periodic or carryover repeal and limitation bills have seen introduction or discussion in states such as Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Texas, all monitored closely via the Death Penalty Information Center.

As of 2026, four U.S. states (California. Oregon, Pennsylvania and Ohio) have active formal gubernatorial moratoriums on executions, while several others maintain de facto pauses due to litigation, protocol reviews, or difficulties acquiring lethal injection drugs. Death Penalty Information Center A&E

So, let’s look at Florida. Moving in quite the opposite direction. They are literally expanding their use of the death penalty.

So, this is perfect in line with my earlier projection, only he beat it by two days, and displayed his special form of bloodlust…he broke out his trusty box of blue Sharpies and slashed it across a piece of paper, and summoned his employees to kill someone else.

Florida has conducted 32 of the country’s 70 executions since January 2025. That is a move in quite the opposite direction.

The state now averages approximately one execution every 14 days. The big question is: Will his particular zeal for executions - in the end - be the final tolling of the bell for Florida’s death penalty?

As of right now - 5:49 pm, Wednesday August 26th - Florida has executed 13 people while imposing five new death sentences in 2026. Only one of those five new sentences resulted from a unanimous jury. Florida has the absolutely lowest bar in the country: only 8 of 12 jurors are required to render a sentence of death.

• Approximately 60% of Florida’s death-row population received nonunanimous sentencing recommendations.

Still, capital juries chose life in at least 19 times nationwide, including 16 decisions in Florida and Alabama.

Clemency? It’s not in the equation. Florida has not granted capital clemency since 1983, when Bob Graham (D) was in office. Jesse Rutledge was commuted over serious doubts regarding his guilt and possible innocence, as evidence pointed heavily toward another suspect matching the attacker's description. This was the final commutation granted by Graham. (He granted clemency to a total of six death row inmates during his administration.)

As for today, Harold Lucas remains scheduled for September 1 and Daniel Conahan for September 10. And, as of a couple of hours ago, Curtis Beasley, Sr. set for September 29th. He also did not have a unanimous jury. No stay or clemency action stopping any of the scheduled executions was reported as of this evening.

• The national death penalty is not experiencing a broad resurgence. One governor, Ron DeSantis, exercising unusually concentrated warrant authority, is making Florida an extreme outlier while juries across the country continue to choose life.

As of August 2026, there are 256 inmates under a sentence of death on Florida's death row.

Ron DeSantis wants to clean house. He fills every cell in the death house (Maximum:4). Don’t let him. Join us in working to abolish the death penalty in Florida, Louisiana and across the country.

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Steven Gress walked into a Pinellas County (Florida) courtroom on August 19 and did something very unusual.

He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping. Then he told the judge that he wants to die.

The victim was 16-year-old Miranda Corsette of Gulfport, Florida.

According to investigators, Gress met Miranda through a dating app in February 2025. She was later held captive inside the St. Petersburg home Gress shared with his partner, Michelle Brandes.

Authorities say Miranda was beaten and tortured after being accused of stealing a ring. Court records reportedly show that several people knew she was in danger, yet nobody called 911.

Miranda was eventually killed. Her body was taken to another location, dismembered and thrown into a dumpster. Her remains were never recovered.

Gress has admitted his involvement, but he still claims that he did not personally kill Miranda. He has blamed much of the violence on Brandes, who has pleaded not guilty and is being prosecuted separately.

His guilty plea means there will be no trial to decide whether he committed the crimes. But that does not automatically mean that he will receive a death sentence.

Florida law requires a separate proceeding to determine the punishment in a capital case. Even after pleading guilty, a defendant would normally have a jury hear evidence about why death should - or should not - be imposed. That process is known as a “bifurcated” trial where, following a guilt/innocence trial, a separate trial is held to determine whether the defendant should receive a life sentence or be sentenced to death.

Gress waived that guilt/innocence jury trial.

He wants the judge to make the decision alone. He reportedly told the court that he would rather be sentenced to death than spend the rest of his life in prison.

That is an extraordinary request.

A presentence investigation is now underway. The judge is expected to return to the question of sentencing during a November 4 court appearance.

The judge must still consider the evidence. Gress cannot simply order the State of Florida to execute him. Under Florida’s capital-sentencing law, the court must examine the facts of the crime, any reasons supporting death and any reasons supporting a life sentence. This includes any mitigating evidence, or evidence that should serve as a reason not to receive a death sentence.

Even if Gress is sentenced to death, an execution would not happen immediately. Capital cases are subject to an automatic legal review, and that process can take years.

There is also an important difference between waiving a jury now and giving up every possible appeal later. Gress has clearly asked for death, but he has not yet been sentenced, and he has not necessarily surrendered every legal right he may have after sentencing.

This case is certain to raise hard questions about punishment, mental health and whether the state should execute someone who openly asks to die.

But through all those questions, one name must not be pushed aside.

Miranda Corsette.

She was 16 years old. She was somebody’s daughter and granddaughter. She was a mother - her baby was 11 months old at the time of her death. Both of Miranda's parents had already died before she was killed, and her grandmother had legal custody of both her and the baby.She was held, abused and killed by adults who should never have had control over her.

Whatever happens next, the courtroom must not allow the wishes or behavior of Steven Gress to become more important than the life that was taken from Miranda.

She deserves justice.

She also deserves to be remembered as more than the victim in another Florida death penalty case.

Sources: Tampa Bay Times and FOX 13 Tampa Bay.

I Oppose the Death Penalty. What Do I Say When a Man Asks for It?

Let me begin by making something perfectly clear.

I am not defending Steven Gress.

What happened to 16-year-old Miranda Corsette was horrible. She was held captive, beaten, tortured, killed and dismembered. Several people reportedly knew she was in danger, yet nobody called for help.

There is no excuse for that.

There is no soft or simple way to describe it.

There is no argument I can make that will lessen the horror of what happened to that child.

Gress has now pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping. He told the judge that he wants the death penalty. He waived his right to have a jury hear the penalty phase and wants the judge to decide his punishment.

That puts someone like me in a very difficult position.

I oppose the death penalty. I have spent years speaking against it. I have defended them, filed writs and motions for them, and have spent their final hours with them.

I have stood beside condemned prisoners, their families, victims’ families and people who have watched this system fail again and again.

But what do I say when the accused man himself asks to die?

Do I attack his decision and tell him that he has no right to make it?

Or do I defend his choice, knowing that the State of Florida may use it to carry out another execution?

There is no easy answer.

As activists, we have to respect that Gress has made his decision - provided that he understands it, is mentally able to make it and is not being forced into it.

It is his life. It is his case.

But respecting his decision is not the same as agreeing with it.

It certainly does not mean that we must support the State of Florida killing him.

Gress may decide that he no longer wants to fight. The state must still decide whether it is willing to kill.

Those are two separate decisions.

And that is where my outrage begins.

The State of Florida must not wash its hands of responsibility by saying, “He asked for it.”

An execution does not become humane because the condemned person requested it. The execution chamber does not become something clean or merciful simply because one prisoner would rather die than spend his remaining years behind bars.

The state would still prepare the drugs.

The state would still strap him to a gurney.

The state would still employ people to end his life.

The state would still call the killing justice.

I also worry deeply about what this case could mean for other death row prisoners.

Gress does not speak for them.

Most condemned prisoners are fighting to live. Some maintain their innocence. Some received poor representation. Some have serious mental illness or intellectual disabilities. Some were sentenced after juries heard only a small part of their lives, a tiny portion of what led them to do whatever it is they did.

Others have been on death row for decades, slowly losing hope while living under conditions that can break the human spirit.

When one prisoner asks to die, supporters of the death penalty may point to him and say, “See? Even he believes death is the proper punishment.”

That is absolutely 100% dishonest.

His personal wish does not prove that the death penalty is fair. It does not prove that the system is accurate. It does not erase wrongful convictions, racial bias, poor lawyering or the huge differences between counties in how death sentences are pursued.

His request may not create a new legal rule. But it can still shape public opinion. It can help make executions appear normal. It can keep Florida’s or Louisiana’s or any states’ machinery of death moving for the prisoners who desperately do not want to die.

That is what frightens me.

One man’s surrender can be used against hundreds of other prisoners.

There is another danger here. When a prisoner asks the state to kill him, the death penalty can begin to look like a form of state-assisted suicide.

The court may decide that Gress is mentally competent. But understanding a court proceeding does not answer every question about why a person wants to die.

Is he accepting responsibility?

Is he trying to escape decades in prison?

Is he seeking control over a situation in which he has lost all control?

Is his request connected to despair, guilt or mental illness?

Those questions matter because death cannot be reversed.

I can respect his right to stop fighting without supporting Florida’s desire to finish the job.

And I refuse to allow the awful facts of this crime to silence that position.

Miranda deserves justice. Her family deserves justice. The public deserves protection from Steven Gress.

It can hold him responsible.

It can ensure that he never walks free.

It can punish him without allowing the state to turn killing into public policy.

I am outraged by what happened to Miranda. I am also outraged by the idea that her suffering may now be used to justify another death - and then another one after that.

Her life should not become fuel for Florida’s execution machine.

Steven Gress may choose not to defend his own life. That does not mean the rest of us must abandon our principles.

His decision belongs to him.

The decision to execute belongs to the state - and, in a democracy, it is made in our name.

That is the line I cannot cross.

I can respect his choice.

I cannot support his execution.

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It is racist, classist, costly, traumatic, and capable of killing the innocent.

The death penalty keeps me awake at night. I mean that literally.

There was a time when I drank so heavily that after I posted or wrote about the death penalty, I would question myself: Was I too harsh? Too technical? Too tangled up in legal gobbledygook? Did I even make sense?

I spent 47 years inside Angola. I worked as an Inmate Counsel on death row and took care of the guys in the hospital. Everybody I worked with was waiting to die. The guys I had for clients in the hospital were waiting to die. The death penalty was never a classroom debate to me. It was never a political talking point. It had names. It had faces. It had families. It had men waiting in cells while the state decided the day and hour they would die and there was nothing they could do about it..

Once you have lived close to or worked in that kind of machinery, you cannot pretend it is clean. You cannot pretend it is just another sentence.

It is death, only it comes with a lot of paperwork.

On August 18, Florida executed William Frances Silvia by lethal injection. He was the thirteenth person Florida has executed this year. Thirteen human beings killed by one state in less than eight months. Florida alone has carried out more than half of America’s executions in 2026. (Associated Press) In 2025, Florida executed 19 people under DeSantis, setting a state record.

Silvia’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, had a simple message for Gov. Ron DeSantis:

“If you’re going to sign it, watch it.”

Exactly.

If a governor is willing to order a human being killed, he should have to look through the glass. He should have to watch the straps pulled tight. He should have to watch the needles go in. He should have to wait for the announcement that another life has been taken in our name.

Do not sign the paper and walk away.

Do not call it justice and hide from what it really is.

A Broken System Cannot Be Trusted With Death

Since the modern death penalty began, American states and the federal government have executed 1,677 people. As of January 2026, about 2,004 people were living under active death sentences. (Death Penalty Information Center, Death Row Population)

Those numbers are not proof that the system works.

They are proof that the system kills.

Who receives a death sentence can depend on the county where the crime happened, the prosecutor handling the case, the race of the victim, the money available for a defense, and the quality of the lawyer appointed to represent the accused.

Two people can take part in the same crime and receive completely different sentences. One may die. The other may eventually walk out of prison.

That is not “equal justice.”

In America, Money Can Buy a Better Chance to Live

Almost everyone facing a death sentence is poor enough to need an appointed lawyer. You won’t find any Perry Masons in capital trials. The quality of that representation varies wildly from one state and one county to another. (Death Penalty Information Center) I’ve had clients who had real estate lawyers. I’ve had clients whose lawyers were addicted to cocaine, arrested for cocaine and disbarred for cocaine.

Think about what that means.

The government brings whole teams: prosecutors, investigators, police departments, laboratories, experts, and tax money. A poor defendant may receive an overworked lawyer – a real estate lawyer! - with too little time, too little money, and too little help.

Then we pretend both sides entered that courtroom as equals.

They did not.

When the punishment is death, “good enough” lawyering is not good enough. A warm, breathing body in a chair at the defense table is not good enough. A missed witness, an untested piece of evidence, or a childhood history never presented to the jury can become the difference between life and death.

If wealth can change a person’s chance of surviving the legal system, then we are not executing the “worst of the worst.”

We are too often executing the poorest of the poor.

Race Still Decides Whose Life Matters

We cannot have an honest discussion about the death penalty without talking about race.

Black people make up roughly 40% of the people on death row, while making up about 12% of the United States population. And among death sentences imposed from 1972 through 2025, 72% involved at least one white victim. (Death Penalty Information Center)

That tells us something ugly and something most people don’t want to hear or won’t admit.

The system does not treat every victim’s death as equally valuable. Cases involving white victims have been far more likely to produce death sentences than cases involving Black victims.

Every murder victim matters.

Every grieving family matters.

Their race should not decide how hard a prosecutor pushes for death.

The victim’s wealth or political influence should not decide a person’s life.

But in America, and especially in the South, it still does.

The death penalty did not grow in clean soil. It grew out of slavery, lynching, racial terror, and a legal system built for wealthy white men. We changed the language. We moved the killing behind prison walls. We dressed it in court orders and legal phrases. In other words, we dressed it in camouflage.

But the old bias did not disappear.

Innocence Should End This Debate

Since 1976, 203 people who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated.

Two hundred and three.

For roughly every eight people executed in the modern era, one person has been freed from death row after a wrongful conviction. A major study estimated that at least 4.1% of people sentenced to death may be innocent. (Death Penalty Information Center)

Read that again and think about it.

Wrongful convictions are not freak accidents. They grow from familiar failures: mistaken eyewitnesses, false confessions, lying witnesses who are secretly rewarded, junk science, poor defense work, hidden evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. In Louisiana, prosecutorial misconduct has helped send innocent people to death row and has played a major role in multiple exonerations.

People with intellectual disabilities are especially vulnerable. They may try to please authority figures. They may not understand the danger they are in. They may confess to something they did not do. They may be unable to help their own lawyers. (ACLU) We had cases just like that in Louisiana. There are cases exactly like that in Florida.

The Supreme Court has said they cannot legally be executed. Yet states still fight over who qualifies, while human beings remain trapped between something called “clinical definitions” and an execution date.

Supporters of the death penalty often ask me, “What about the worst cases?”

I ask a different question.

What error rate are you willing to accept when the punishment is death?

One innocent person?

Ten?

Two hundred and three nearly killed before the truth came out?

There is no acceptable number.

It Does Not Keep Us Safer

We are told the death penalty prevents murder.

The evidence does not support that promise. Research has found no meaningful proof that executions deter murder any better than other severe punishments. Even the National Institute of Justice says the certainty of being caught matters far more than the harshness of the punishment. (National Academies, National Institute of Justice)

That makes sense.

Most murders are not committed after a calm review of sentencing laws. No one who commits a murder sits around at night studying statutes. They happen in the midst of rage, fear, desperation, intoxication, mental illness, or chaos.

An execution years or decades later does not stop that moment.

If we truly want fewer victims, we should put our money into solving crimes, preventing violence, treating addiction and mental illness, protecting families, and making communities safer.

Killing a prisoner strapped to a gurney does none of that.

We Pay More for the Right to Kill

Death penalty cases cost far more than cases that end in life imprisonment - often two and a half to five times more. (Death Penalty Information Center)

That money does not go to victims’ families. It does not pay for counseling, housing, food, funeral bills, or years of lost income. It goes into a long legal machine built around one goal: getting a human being into the death chamber.

Then states spend even more money finding execution drugs through secret suppliers because drug companies do not want their medicines used to kill people. Florida and Louisiana have passed laws shielding the identities of execution participants and drug suppliers from public disclosure.

We are told there is never enough money for schools, mental health care, public defenders, violence prevention, or help for victims. There is never money for school lunches or counselors.

But somehow there is always money for wars and always money to kill.

That should outrage every taxpayer in America.

An Execution Does Not Heal the Wound

I will never minimize murder. I committed a murder. I will never tell a grieving family how it should feel. Losing someone to violence tears a hole through a family that may never fully close.

Victims deserve to be remembered. Their families deserve truth, help, respect, and care. But an execution cannot bring anyone home or seat them at the supper table.

What it often brings is another family into the same circle of grief. It forces victims’ families through years or decades of hearings, appeals, reversals, warrants, and delays. The state holds out the word “closure” as if death can heal what death destroyed. DeSantis says his goal is to bring justice to victims’ families. But when Curtis Windom faced execution, members of all three victims’ families asked that his life be spared. If this is truly about victims, their voices must matter even when they ask for mercy.

DeSantis has publicly described executions as “justice for victims’ families,” while all three victims’ families in Windom’s case specifically said they wanted his life spared. (Associated Press, Death Penalty Information Center)

Executions also wound the prison workers ordered to carry them out. Former execution-team members and prison officials have described nightmares, panic attacks, substance abuse, guilt, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress. (Death Penalty Information Center)

Ronald McAndrew led Florida’s execution team from 1996 to 1998 and supervised three electric-chair executions: James Earl Bush, John Mills, and Pedro Medina. Medina’s 1997 execution went terribly wrong - smoke and flames came from beneath the headpiece while McAndrew stood only a few feet away. Altogether, he was involved in eight executions: three in Florida and five in Texas. (American Bar Association)

McAndrew, a self-described law-and-order conservative, now strongly opposes capital punishment. He calls executions “premeditated, ceremonial political killings” and says the memories still haunt him. In 2026, he publicly urged Florida corrections workers to refuse participation in further executions because of the lifelong trauma they can cause. (Death Penalty Focus)

The condemned person’s family suffers too. Mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, and grandchildren live under a sentence they did not receive for a crime they did not commit.

The death penalty does not contain trauma.

It spreads it and sets it loose to cause more trauma.

What Is It Doing to Our Souls?

I am not a deeply religious man. But Sister Helen Prejean is one of my heroes. Her book Dead Man Walking, together with my own experience, helped change the way I understood state killing.

She taught millions of people something simple: no human being is only the worst thing he or she has ever done.

That does not erase the victim.

It does not excuse the crime.

It means we refuse to surrender our own humanity while judging another person’s actions.

Every time the government kills a restrained and defenseless human being, something happens to us too. We train ourselves to look away. We let officials use soft words like “procedure,” “protocol,” and “sentence carried out.”

But a human being is alive.

Then a Governor signs a piece of paper.

Then government workers act.

Then that human being is dead.

We can bury it under all the legal language we want. It is still killing.

And every time we accept it without protest, a small piece of our collective soul dies with it.

Stop Calling It Justice

I do not trust any government with the power to make an irreversible mistake and then hide the killing behind prison walls.

This is the same government that loses evidence, hides evidence, lies and manipulates, tolerates misconduct, underfunds defense lawyers, uses junk science, and convicts innocent people.

Yet we are expected to believe it becomes perfect at the exact moment it decides who must die.

I do not believe that.

I cannot believe that.

The death penalty is arbitrary. It is racist. It is classist. It is expensive. It does not make us safer. It wounds victims’ families, prisoners’ families, and prison workers. And because the system makes mistakes, it always carries the risk of killing an innocent person.

That is not justice.

That is government killing, paid for with our money and carried out in our name.

We do not have to accept it.

We can speak. We can write. We can call governors and demand clemency. We can support defense teams and abolition groups. We can vote for prosecutors and lawmakers who refuse to feed the death machine. We can share the names and stories of the people the state would rather reduce to numbers.

Most of all, we can refuse to be silent.

The government may claim the authority to kill.

But it does not have the right to call our silence consent.

End the death penalty.

End it now.

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By the time that I finish and publish this article, Florida will have murdered William Silvia. His singular distinction is that he was the 13th prisoner executed since Florida began its new streak for 2026, following a record-setting 19 executions in 2025.

William Frances Silvia Jr. — quick profile

Personal details

• Born: March 25, 1965

• Age: 61

• Age at crime: 41

• Race: White

• County of conviction: Seminole County

• Death sentence imposed: January 28, 2009

• Time under sentence of death: Approximately 17½ years

• Current condition: Used a wheelchair

Slimmed-down case background

Silvia married Patricia Silvia in 2002. Patricia was his second wife and had four children from an earlier marriage. The couple separated in July 2006, after which Patricia and two of her minor children moved into her mother’s home.

On September 22, 2006, Silvia was fired from his job. He was already homeless, living principally in his truck and occasionally renting motel rooms. That afternoon, he bought a 12-gauge shotgun and ammunition.

That evening, he went to Patricia’s mother’s home during a family cookout and attempted to speak with Patricia about reconciling. After she walked away, Silvia returned to his truck, retrieved the shotgun and began firing. Patricia, 39, was killed by a shotgun blast to the head. Her mother, Betty Woodard, was shot in the face and seriously wounded. Several other relatives—including Patricia’s children—were in or near the line of fire. Silvia was arrested later at his motel and confessed during transport, according to the Florida Supreme Court’s account.

A jury convicted him in 2008 of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder. It recommended death by an 11–1 vote, meaning his death sentence was not unanimous.

Personal and psychological background

Silvia was the oldest child in a violent, unstable household. His father acknowledged that Silvia repeatedly witnessed physical and emotional violence between his parents. As a child, he was quiet, socially isolated and had few friends. He ran away several times as a teenager and was once hospitalized in a psychiatric unit following an attempted bank robbery with his brother.

His mother was killed by a drunk driver around 1999 or 2000. They had worked together in her screen business, and her death left him both emotionally affected and unemployed. His brother later died from a drug-related heart attack, and his sister experienced serious bipolar illness.

Silvia began using marijuana and alcohol during adolescence and eventually became alcohol-dependent. His documented history also includes multiple head injuries, depression, anxiety, paranoia, suicidal thoughts and serious personality dysfunction.

A defense psychologist diagnosed him with a delusional disorder and a personality disorder involving paranoid, schizoid and antisocial features. The prosecution’s psychiatrist disputed the full delusional-disorder diagnosis but agreed that Silvia had severe, longstanding personality pathology, paranoid thinking and alcohol dependence. The trial court recognized these conditions as mitigation but gave them insufficient weight to preclude death. The organization, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, FADP provides a fuller mitigation summary.

The legal issue that stands out

Silvia waived his initial postconviction proceedings in 2012. After Hurst v. Florida invalidated important parts of Florida’s death-sentencing system, a trial court granted him a new penalty phase. The Florida Supreme Court reversed, holding that his earlier waiver prevented him from benefiting from the later constitutional ruling.

The practical result is plain: William Silvia is being executed under an 11–1 death recommendation - even though a lower court once concluded that he should receive a new sentencing hearing.

Florida was the first state to rein­state the death penal­ty after Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 Supreme Court rul­ing which inval­i­dat­ed 40 state death penal­ty statutes. Florida was also the first state to car­ry out a non-vol­un­tary exe­cu­tion post-Furman, with the 1979 exe­cu­tion of John Spenkelink.

Since then, Florida has car­ried out 138 exe­cu­tions, putting it - along with Texas and Oklahoma - in the top three high­est exe­cut­ing states in the mod­ern death penal­ty era.

Top three executing states in the post-Gregg era

Counting state executions since the Supreme Court reinstated constitutional capital-punishment statutes in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), and including William Silvia:

Rank State Executions since 1976:

Florida’s total was 137 before Silvia and becomes 138 with his August 18 execution. Virginia - now an abolition state - is fourth with 113.

Sources: Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma state data from the Death Penalty Information Center.

Florida is one of two states that still allow non-unan­i­mous jury ver­dicts. State law requires only 8 of 12 (lowest threshold in the country) jurors agree to impose a sen­tence of death. After Florida’s death penal­ty statute came under pres­sure in 2016, a series of deci­sions by the Florida Supreme Court result­ed in new sen­tenc­ing hear­ings for 145 of the 386 pris­on­ers then on death row, the major­i­ty of which have end­ed in life sen­tences, as of the end of 2025.

No Florida gov­er­nor has grant­ed clemen­cy to a death row pris­on­er since 1976, when Governor Bob Graham granted six.

Florida has easily surpassed Texas as the “Execution Capital of America.” Last year’s (2025) total of 19 executions accounted for nearly 1/2 of the country’s execution total of 47 from 11 states.

JURISDICTIONS WITH HIGHEST DEATH ROW POPULATIONS

Florida currently has 2 more executions scheduled already for 2026, and sadly, we expect another warrant to be issued by Governor Ron DeSantis on or by Friday, August 21st.

So, the biggest question right now is:

Who’s the next “Batter Up” ?

Who will DeSantis be dragging screaming and struggling up to the plate?

Who is being moved to the Death Watch house next?

Prisoners ALREADY executed by Florida THIS year:

Florida’s death penalty is no longer merely “active” - it is accelerating. As of now, the state has already carried out thirteen executions in 2026.

Under Governor Ron DeSantis, executions have become a central feature of state power, with the signing of death warrants coming at a pace that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The comparison to last year is chilling. By this same point in 2025, Florida had carried out nine executions. The state then continued through the rest of the year until it reached nineteen - the highest number of executions in Florida’s modern history (post-Gregg), and more than double the state’s previous modern-era record. Now, in 2026, Florida is already ahead of that pace.

By August 18, 2025, Florida had executed nine people. Its tenth execution occurred the following day, August 19. Florida ultimately executed a record 19 people during 2025. (Thanks to Death Penalty Information Center)

Projection for 2026

A straight calendar projection based on 13 executions through August 18 produces approximately 21-23 executions for 2026:

However, Florida accelerated sharply during the final months of 2025, conducting ten additional executions after August 18. If the state repeats that pattern following William Silvia’s scheduled execution, Florida would finish 2026 with approximately 23 executions.

By August 18, 2025, Florida had executed nine people. By the same date in 2026, it was executing its thirteenth - an increase of more than 44.4 percent. At its present pace, Florida is projected to execute approximately 21 to 23 people in 2026, surpassing the record of 19 it established only one year earlier.

The state still has more than 250 people on death row, and many of them have been there for decades. In Florida, unlike in many other states, the governor holds extraordinary authority over the timing of executions. When the machinery moves this quickly, it is not an accident. It is a choice.

What we are watching is the normalization of a killing schedule. The danger is not only that Florida may surpass nineteen executions this year…

Last year was described as record-setting. This year appears poised to test whether that record was an “aberration” - or a benchmark.

***

WHILE I was working on this article, I received an email informing me (from Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty) - that Harold Lucas has waived all litigation: A new update reports that Harold Lucas, scheduled for execution in Florida on September 1, has waived all claims and further litigation ahead of his execution.

Another “volunteer” for execution is clearly indicative of the mental, emotional and psychological toll that death row takes on the residents.

***

NOTE: My sincerest appreciation to the Death Penalty Information Center (Robert Durham) and ( ), from where I draw much of my information and statistics on the death penalty, particularly in Florida. I’ve recently relocated to Louisiana, and begun working in collaboration with the Promise of Justice Initiative - Louisiana’s preeminent death penalty advocacy group - but have not abandoned my Floridian friends!

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Who possesses power

who is protected from it, and

whose suffering is considered important?

The country is arguing about presidential power, police power, military power, prosecutorial power, economic power and the power to control another person’s body. Race does not explain every controversy, and it should not be artificially inserted where the evidence does not support it. But whenever we examine who is stopped, jailed, executed, priced out, medically neglected, politically weakened or exposed to pollution, the racial disparities repeatedly reappear.

That may be the real state of America in 2026: we remain deeply divided over facts and policies, but beneath those disagreements lies an older question - whether justice means treating everyone identically on paper or ensuring that every person has a genuinely equal chance to be heard, protected and recognized as fully human.

Three parts of the same American machinery

I started out looking at three separate controversies.

Voting rights.

Mass incarceration.

The death penalty.

But the more I looked, the less separate they became. Because, voting decides who controls the government. Government decides who will be policed, who will be prosecuted and who will be imprisoned. Then, in a smaller number of cases, that same government decides who will be put to death.

They are not three different stories. They are three rooms inside the same house. And race keeps showing up in every room.

The ballot

The prison, and

The execution chamber.

First, the ballot

Let me begin with something simple.

Every eligible citizen should be able to vote. Every lawful vote should be counted. Fraud should be investigated and prosecuted when it actually occurs. I do not think most Americans disagree with any of that.

The disagreement begins when politicians use the fear of fraud to make voting harder - especially when they cannot show that the alleged fraud is happening on any meaningful scale.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March attempting to establish new controls over mail voting. Among other things, it called for federal voter lists and directed the Postal Service to restrict ballots from states that did not cooperate.

The administration called this “election security.”

Several federal judges called it an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power. At this point, the DOJ is 0-22 in challenged cases, largely thanks to the work of and Marc Elias.

The Constitution gives states the primary responsibility for conducting elections. Congress may change the rules governing federal elections. The president cannot simply take that power for himself because Congress refuses to give him the law he wants.

On August 11, a federal judge again blocked the administration’s attempt to involve the Postal Service in restricting mail ballots. The administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The Associated Press.

This is not a small disagreement over paperwork.

A poorly constructed voter list can exclude people because of a marriage, changed surname, a misspelled name, an old address or a government database that was never updated. Elderly citizens may not possess easy access to birth records. Naturalized citizens may be incorrectly flagged. Poor people may not have passports or the time and money needed to chase down documents.

The rule may not mention race at all. Its effects can still fall unevenly.

That is one of the oldest tricks in American politics: write a rule that appears neutral, then pretend not to notice who is being pushed out by it.

Louisiana and the disappearing Black vote

The Supreme Court made the problem even more serious in April when it decided Louisiana v. Callais.

Louisiana’s original congressional map contained only one majority-Black district. Black voters argued that their communities had been packed into that one district and divided among the other five.

A federal court agreed that they were likely to succeed under the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana eventually created a second district in which Black voters had a realistic opportunity to elect their preferred representative.

Then another group sued, arguing that Louisiana had considered race too much when it drew the new district. Louisiana was placed in a strange position.

First, it was told that it had failed to protect Black voting power. Then it was told that its attempt to protect that voting power was itself unconstitutional.

By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court struck down the second majority-Black district. The majority said the Voting Rights Act did not require that particular map and that Louisiana had relied too heavily upon race. Supreme Court ruling at Supreme Court opinion

The Court did not completely abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But it made the law much harder to use.

Justice Elena Kagan warned in her dissent that the decision could leave states free to split apart Black voting communities without providing any practical remedy. She reminded the Court that Congress strengthened Section 2 because discrimination rarely announces itself honestly.

Nobody has to say, “We do not want Black people voting.”

They can close polling places. Reject certain identification. Remove names from voter rolls. Divide Black neighborhoods among several districts. Or pack nearly all of their voting strength into a single district.

The ballot remains available.

Its power quietly disappears.

Why voting rights belong in an article about prisons

Some people may wonder what congressional maps have to do with prisons and executions.

Everything.

Voters choose governors, legislators, judges, sheriffs, prosecutors and attorneys general. Those officials decide what behavior will be

criminalized,

how police will operate,

whether prisons will be inspected and

when the death penalty will be pursued.

In many places, the district attorney who decides whether to seek death is an elected official. Many of the judges who review convictions and death sentences are also elected.

When the political strength of a Black community is weakened, that community loses influence over the very institutions that police, prosecute and punish it.

This is not theoretical. Look at what happened to in New Orleans.

Calvin spent nearly three decades imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. After his release and eventual exoneration, he was elected Clerk of Criminal District Court with 68 percent of the vote. I served many of my 47 years in Angola with Calvin, and indeed, he trained me when I was transferred as an Inmate Counsel to death row and the infirmary.

The people chose him. Then the Louisiana Legislature abolished the office he had just won.

Whatever legal language anyone places around it, the people of a majority-Black city watched the state government erase the result of their election. The message was difficult to miss: You may vote, but we may decide that your vote does not count after all.

Then comes the cage

America holds nearly two million people in prisons, jails and other places of confinement. Millions more live under probation, parole or some other form of correctional supervision.

Altogether, approximately 5.5 million people live under the direct control of the criminal legal system. Black Americans make up roughly 14 percent of the country, but approximately 42 percent of its combined prison-and-jail population. Prison Policy Initiative

Those numbers do not mean that every Black prisoner is innocent.

They do not mean that every police officer, prosecutor, judge or juror is personally racist.

They do mean that we cannot continue pretending that thousands of separate decisions somehow produce the same racial imbalance by accident.

The disparity begins long before prison. Some neighborhoods are policed far more heavily than others. More police contacts produce more stops, searches and arrests. Poor defendants cannot always afford bail. They depend upon public defenders carrying more cases than any lawyer should be expected to handle.

A person waiting in jail may lose his job, his home, his medication, his access to medical care and even custody of his children before he has been convicted of anything.

He may plead guilty simply to get out.

A wealthier defendant accused of the same offense may wait at home and help prepare his defense. One person has money. The other gets a cage.

And, yet, we call that “equal justice.”

Crime is falling. Fear is not.

The latest FBI figures show that violent crime fell by an estimated 9.3 percent in 2025. Homicide dropped 18.1 percent, reaching a rate not seen since the 1950s. Early figures suggest homicide has continued falling during 2026. FBI Statistics. But, who gets the credit?

That does not mean every neighborhood is safe. It does not mean we should ignore victims or minimize the pain of families who have lost someone to violence. But it does mean politicians should stop describing an imaginary national crime explosion as fact.

Fear allows a candidate to promise more police, more prisons and longer sentences without explaining whether any of it will prevent the next crime.

Anyone who asks for evidence is accused of being soft. But “severity” is not the same thing as “safety.”

A sentence can be extremely harsh without healing a victim, changing a life or preventing another act of violence.

Some people must be confined. I know that. I spent nearly 47 years inside Louisiana’s prison system. I lived among people who had caused terrible harm.

But I also watched people change. I watched young men become old men. I watched people confront what they had done, accept responsibility and become entirely different human beings from the frightened, angry or damaged young people who first entered prison.

Our system rarely knows what to do with change. It knows how to punish a person for who he was. It does not know how to recognize who he has become.

Punishment outside the prison walls

Probation and parole are called alternatives to incarceration. Too often, they become traps leading directly back to it.

At least 125,000 people are incarcerated for technical violations - missing an appointment, breaking curfew, failing a drug test or violating some other rule without committing a new crime.

We also use jails as poor substitutes for mental hospitals, addiction treatment and housing. People in crisis are arrested because the community has nowhere else to send them. Jail interrupts medication, increases trauma and makes employment and housing even harder to obtain.

We spend a fortune punishing the symptoms of problems we refused to treat when they rear their head.

Then we congratulate ourselves for being “tough on crime.”

The Promise of Justice Initiative

I have recently had several encouraging conversations with people at the Promise of Justice Initiative, or PJI, in New Orleans.

Their work matters because they understand the connections I am describing. PJI fights mass incarceration, racial inequality, extreme sentencing and the death penalty. It challenges the idea that putting more human beings in cages automatically makes the public safer. It also works with incarcerated people, families and survivors of violence rather than treating any one group as disposable. Promise of Justice Initiative

PJI has also challenged forced labor on Angola’s Farm Line, where mostly Black incarcerated men continue working under conditions rooted in Louisiana’s plantation history. This is not “ancient history,” and don’t let anybody tell you it is.

Louisiana’s former non-unanimous jury law was created during the Jim Crow era to weaken the voices of Black jurors and make convictions easier. I know that personally. I was convicted by a 10–2 verdict.

The Supreme Court finally declared those divided verdicts unconstitutional in Ramos v. Louisiana. But it later refused to make that ruling automatically retroactive. I was fortunate enough to regain my freedom under Ramos. I left over 1,000 men behind me, (Black and White) seemingly trapped forever because of a decades-old law that was designed to silence Black voices.

The Constitution now recognizes that the rule was wrong. Many of the people convicted under it remain imprisoned anyway. That is the American justice system in one sentence: We admit the rule was wrong, but we leave many of the people harmed by it exactly where they are.

Finally, the execution chamber

By August 13, the United States had carried out 22 executions during 2026.

Three men were executed on August 13 alone - one each in Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee. It was the first time three American executions occurred on the same day since 2010.

Florida conducted two executions on July 28, only hours apart.

Florida executed a record 19 people in 2025 and continued its extraordinary pace this year. The state permits a death recommendation when only eight of 12 jurors vote for it.

Four jurors can believe a person should live.

Florida can kill him anyway. Think about that for just a moment.

We require a unanimous jury to convict someone of an ordinary felony. But Florida does not require unanimity before the government takes a life, and can do it with only a 2/3 margin.

That is not a minor procedural difference. If four citizens remain convinced that death is not justified, their disagreement is a moral warning.

Florida treats it as an “inconvenience.”

Race and death

During the first six months of 2026, nine of the 16 people executed were Black.

That is 56 percent.

The race of the victim shows another deep inequality. Fourteen of the 22 victims connected to those executions were white. Five Black prisoners were executed for killing only white victims. No white prisoner was executed during that period for killing a Black victim.

Since 1976, approximately 75 percent of the victims in cases ending in execution have been white. Stats courtesy of Death Penalty Information Center

That does not mean the death of a white victim matters less. It means the death of a Black victim should matter just as much.

If punishment is supposed to express the value society places upon the person who was killed, these figures tell us something painful: our system has never valued every victim equally.

Race can enter a capital case through

police investigation,

prosecutorial choice,

jury selection,

defense funding and the

quality of mitigation.

No single decision has to look openly racist.

The discrimination can accumulate quietly until a human being is strapped to a table.

Jimmie Duncan: the system came close to killing an innocent man

Then there is Jimmie “Chris” Duncan.

I wrote about this case a number of times on this platform, and you can read all of them right here:

Jimmie spent 27 years on Louisiana’s death row for the death of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux. His conviction depended heavily upon a jailhouse informant and bite-mark evidence (“junk science”) that has since been thoroughly discredited.

A judge examined the new evidence and found Jimmie factually innocent. The judge vacated his conviction and death sentence. Jimmie was released on bail in November 2025.

On June 29, 2026, the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld that decision. The Court concluded that Jimmie had produced clear and convincing evidence showing that no rational juror would have convicted him if the new evidence had been presented at trial. Louisiana Supreme Court decision. I observed the oral arguments on that case.

That should have ended the nightmare. It has not. Ouachita Parish District Attorney Robert “Steve” Tew has said that he intends to prosecute Jimmie again, despite the factual-innocence ruling and despite the Louisiana Supreme Court’s decision. The Innocence Project

Jimmie is free today. His conviction and death sentence are gone. But as long as the prosecutor continues threatening another trial, complete and permanent justice remains unfinished.

His case should scare every person who supports capital punishment. Louisiana did not merely imprison an innocent man. It prepared to kill him. If the state had moved faster - if lawyers, investigators and advocates had stopped fighting - Jimmie could have been executed before the truth finally forced its way into court. If several prominent investigative journalists ( and others) had given up, Jimmie would not be free today.

An execution would not have proved the system was right. It would only have buried its mistake.

Public support is not the whole story

A recent Pew survey found that 66 percent of Americans support the death penalty for people convicted of murder.

But the same survey found that 59 percent do not believe it deters serious crime.

Seventy-three percent recognize some risk that an innocent person will be executed.

Only 25 percent believe the safeguards are adequate to prevent that from happening. Pew Research Center

That tells me many people support an idea called “the death penalty” while distrusting the system responsible for carrying it out. But we do not execute an idea.

We execute a human being selected by police, prosecutors, lawyers, judges and jurors - all of whom can be mistaken. The death penalty asks an imperfect system to make a perfect decision. It cannot.

These are not separate failures

Voting determines who has power. That power decides who will be watched, stopped and arrested. It decides who can afford freedom before trial and who must wait in jail. It decides who receives a second chance and who receives a life sentence.

And, finally, it decides who will be killed in our name.

Race appears differently at each stage. In voting, it appears through district lines and barriers to the ballot.

In mass incarceration, it appears through policing, bail, prosecution and sentence length.

In the death penalty, it appears through

jury selection

mitigation

geography and

the race of the victim.

None of this requires us to excuse violence. It does not require us to forget victims. It requires us to tell the truth. We can protect society without pretending that every person who committed a terrible act is permanently beyond change.

We can support victims without creating another grieving family. We can demand accountability without surrendering our humanity. And we can insist that a government powerful enough to take liberty - and life - must first prove itself fair.

Ours has not.

The ballot, the prison and the execution chamber are connected by the same question:

Until the answer is “everyone,” we have work left to do.

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I had been especially looking forward to this meeting for some time following a series of several ZOOM meetings with members of the staff over the past month, following which they extended an invitation to me. I am especially grateful to Sara Gozalo who initiated the entire series (the “storyteller”), and to Diedre Thomas, Hardell Ward, Josie Alexander and Michael Allen, and so many others. They were even such a blessing that they provided me with safe transportation to and from the event!

An AMAZING group of PJI Staffers!

The highlight of the evening was an over hour-long presentation by author Elizabeth (“Liz”) Vartkessian of the wonderful and eye-opening “The Deserving.” (I DID receive my own autographed copy!)

Liz is a great person! I was alerted to her presence by my Executive Director, Grace Ellen Hannah, of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, when I informed her of my pending meeting amd she immediately told me in an email that

Liz is what is known as a “mitigation specialist.” If you are part of the 85-90% of Americans who have no idea what that is, she is the specialist who assists criminal defense attorneys in the second half of the bifurcated process of capital sentencing trials. She has the absolute heart to do the heart-breaking work that she does. A brief explanation for you so that you have a better understanding of her role:

A mitigation specialist is part investigator, part social historian and part human storyteller. They dig deeply into a defendant’s life - examining childhood abuse, mental illness, intellectual disability, addiction, poverty, trauma and family history - to give the jury the complete human story before it decides whether someone should live or die. Mitigation does not excuse the crime. It explains the person. And in a capital courtroom, that distinction can literally mean the difference between life and death.

“My job is to help people look at my client as a human being,” Elizabeth Vartkessian, a leading mitigation specialist, told me, adding that her profession’s existence is itself a comment on how the system otherwise dehumanizes people. “The system shouldn’t even require it, because it shouldn’t be a question.”

The MARSHALL PROJECT, “The Mercy Workers”

She told us all of these same things - such as the more radical, hardlined individuals who cheer every single time an execution is carried out, every single time a life is snuffed out, give us their celebratory hurrahs! would call “platitudes,” - as we sat there transfixed upon her genuiness, her sincerity, her heart-felt humility and asked us to willingly assume the weight of her task. Indeed, her calling in life.

Liz was not my first exposure to a mitigation specialist. I had met several of them during my 47-year stay at Angola - Louisiana’s maximum security state penitentiary. As an Inmate Counsel (paralegal) assigned to Death Row, I had met and worked with several. The one I remember the most was when Louisiana executed my friend, Dobie Gillis Williams. You can read the account by clicking here.

I have had the pleasure of meeting many more over the last 25 years, but Liz was a character of a different color: she was real, live, in-the-flesh brutally honest about the difficulties involved in her work. She was also inspiring in her efforts to not only make us understand her work, but to entice us into joining in the value of her work. I was already sold, but enjoyed the adventure of watching others be swayed by it, watching minds be changed, and by watching semi-hesitant and questioning minds be changed.

We had a number of Southern University criminal justice and psychology students present with us Wednesday night, one of whom questioned her relentlessly, even after being told that the Q & A session had to come to an end. I will never forget the moment that I saw the light come on in his eyes.

It was like, “Ah! I see now!” And that meant that he got it.

Liz had done her job, albeit in a friendlier atmosphere than what she was undoubtedly accustomed to. A mitigation specialist walks into a prison carrying not a single weapon but patience, passing through locked gates, metal detectors and the cold suspicion of a place designed to thrust trust to the wayside. Across the table sits a frightened or hardened client who may have been betrayed, abused or ignored so often that sharing the most painful parts of his life feels dangerous. She may even be meeting an individual so mentally and emotionally scarred and wounded that she is butting her head against a brick wall. I used to call it “talking to a butt can,” or “talking to a billy goat and waiting on an answer.” When the meeting ends and the specialist walks back through those closing steel doors, the real work has only begun: turning fragments of trauma, silence and memory into the fuller human story that may help save a life.

Mitigation rests upon a very plain idea: No human life can be honestly understood by looking only at its worst act.

Elizabeth does something both simple and extraordinarily difficult: She searches for the rest of a person’s story. When someone is accused of a terrible crime, the public usually meets that person at the worst moment of his life. We see the police photograph. We hear the charges. We learn the painful details of what happened. In our minds, the accused can quickly become nothing more than the crime.

A mitigation specialist asks us to slow down.

Who was this person before that terrible day? What happened during his childhood? Was he abused, neglected or abandoned? Did he suffer from mental illness, brain damage or an intellectual disability? Was violence normal in his home? Did addiction run through the family? Did poverty, trauma and instability follow one generation into the next?

Those questions do not erase a crime. They do not lessen the suffering of the victim or the grief carried by the victim’s family. They do not ask us to pretend that terrible and seemingly irreparable harm was never done.

They simply ask us to look at the whole human being before deciding whether the government should take his life.

Elizabeth has been doing this work since the early 2000’s. She began in Houston, Texas, at a time when that city sat near the center of the epicenter of America’s “machinery of death.” Since then, she has spent countless hours gathering the life histories of people facing the harshest punishments our courts can impose.

She speaks with parents, siblings, teachers, neighbors and childhood friends. She searches and digs through school files, hospital records and family histories. She follows the trail of a life backward - sometimes across decades and generations - looking for facts that no one bothered to find before.

The work requires patience, because families do not always speak easily about their deepest wounds. Mine never had the chance to. Abuse may have been hidden for years. Mental illness may have gone untreated. Shame may have kept people silent. Important records may be scattered, forgotten or nearly impossible to obtain.

A lawyer may know the law inside and out. But a mitigation specialist learns the life - the part that really matters..

That slight difference matters.

Liz founded Advancing Real Change, a national nonprofit organization that conducts these investigations and teaches others how to do them properly. She also holds advanced degrees from Oxford University, including a doctorate in law. Yet what struck me most about her work is not the impressive résumé or the letters behind it: it is the humanity at the heart of it.

The belief does not require us to excuse violence. It requires us to understand that human beings do not appear out of nowhere, fully formed and untouched by everything that came before. We are all shaped by

• childhood,

• family,

• health,

• hardship,

• opportunity and

• the presence - or absence - of love.

Some people survive terrible childhoods and never hurt anyone. That is true, and it must be acknowledged. But it is also true that early trauma can leave deep injuries. Those injuries may affect the brain, the emotions and a person’s ability to move safely through the world. I wrote about that very fact in my article - published only weeks ago - “It Began At The Kitchen Table.” It has already reached thousands of views and comments.

And, then I woke up this morning to the first time in 16 years that states executed THREE men in a single day: So, the evening’s simple joys had dissolved into a morass of sadness and pain. I mourn this day. And, you should, too. Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma each executed a man today. All “Southern” states, all “Confederate” states…all “Bible Belt” states.

If they truly followed the teachings of the Bible and truly believe in the powers espoused by the followers of Jesus, they would believe in the power of second chances, in the power of redemption…and, isn’t that what it’s really all about: the belief in the redemption of the lost and the wounded?

Why didn’t we give them that chance?

Meeting Liz last night reminded me that some of the most important work in the death-penalty system happens quietly. It happens far away from television cameras and angry headlines, from grieving family members, from posturing district attorneys. It happens in family living rooms, old school offices, hospital archives and long conversations with people who may finally be telling the truth about their family for the first time.

A mitigation specialist gathers those pieces and places them before a judge or jury. Not to say, “This crime does not matter, ” but to say, “This life matters, too.”

And, I agree.

Liz, I return the words you so graciously surrendered to me last night:

“From my heart to yours…”

Goodnight, all….

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: I first wrote this article one year ago, on August 9, 2025. A friendly reminder popped up on my screen a few minutes ago. Made me realize that absolutely nothing has changed in Louisiana, so I figured the best way to get people to focus on that fact would be to simply republish this.

I was reading over a post that a good friend had made earlier today about what happened in his life when he exposed corruption in the Louisiana State Penitentiary and the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Paroles...the corruption reached all the way up into the Governor's office. Doing so reminded me that I needed to get back over here and finish this story.

It is, of course, the never-ending story in Louisiana. Corruption is endemic to Louisiana. It's something that we grow up with, and we always heard ,"Oh, yeah, cher'! It's a pie. But everybody gets a slice of the pie." They even have a peculiarly cute name for it: “lagniappe”.

"We picked up one excellent word – a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – 'Lagniappe.' They pronounce it lanny-yap ... When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying, – 'Give me something for lagniappe.' The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root; (nb...)": Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi(1883)

On a totally related note, the gentleman who once famously uttered that particular “pie”-phrase served some prison time himself, I suppose, for taking too large of a slice of that same pie

Edwin Edwards, the former governor of Louisiana, served eight years in prison. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2001 after being found guilty of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud. The charges stemmed from a scheme to manipulate riverboat casino licenses. Edwards began his sentence in October 2002 and was released from prison in January 2011 to a halfway house, before being released from the halfway house in January 2011, and starting three years of probation in July 2011. He was granted an early release from probation in February 2013.

“In 1986, my wife and I exposed the largest “pardons for sale” (as it was dubbed by the media) criminal scheme in Louisiana history. The federal and state investigations that ensued sent the pardon board chairman to a federal prison, got one of the state’s most powerful legislators indicted (later acquitted), forced three prison officials into bribery guilty pleas, led to the resignation of a prison warden and a number of lesser prison officials, and, as you can imagined, pissed off a whole lot of people inside and outside of the Louisiana prison system—including then Gov. Edwin Edwards who never met a bribe he did not like.” (Billy Sinclair, FaceBook post, 8/11/25)

Billy went on to tell about the devastating effect that the incident had on his present and on his future…it would be many more years before he would see his freedom. He was branded a “snitch” by all, and allegations that he had “tarnished the integrity of the prison newsmagazine (The ANGOLITE) and violated some kind of unwritten code of journalism ethics by cooperating with law enforcement.”

“Through the co-editor’s (at the time, Wilbert Rideau) insider influence with the editorial board of the New York Times, I became the only inmate in history to ever be rebuked in an editorial by this massive media conglomerate for exposing corruption over protecting the “integrity” of The Angolite.”

Now, you see, I know a little something about (1) lagniappe, (2) corruption, (3) prison and (4) the consequences of doing “the right thing,” particularly in Angola prison. First, because I served 47 calendar years in that hellhole and, second, because I personally witnessed corruption on a daily basis, and finally because I was on the receiving end of a media-spun retaliation effort by those who dealt in the corruption plague within.

Twice.

The first occasion occurred in 1995 not long after Cain’s appearance on the state scene with his involvement in a private-sector company, Louisiana Agri-Can. The owner, Charles Sullivan, Cain and others with “high-level access, including to the Governor’s office,” had opened a can relabeling plant in the old cannery building at Main Prison. The inmates who worked there labored for hours daily at a rate of between .04 and .20 cents per hour.

At the time, I was an Inmate Counsel on the Civil Litigation Team at Main Prison, and because of a few well-known court victories, was a favored counsel to prisoners seeking assistance. When a prisoner assigned to the plant came to me with his request for help and answers to his questions, I helped, having no idea that it was the beginning of a months-long adventure involving a trip to the dungeon, field work, threats on my life via a plan to “shoot me while attempting to escape,” an emergency removal by U.S. Marshalls, a stay in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, multiple hearings in federal court, secretive information provided to my attorneys by an Assistant Warden, and ultimately, a financial settlement with the Department of Corrections.

I, too, was labeled a snitch - but not by prisoners. By guards. A few days after I was released from the dungeon and reassigned to the West Yard field lines, a friend came to me and told me that there was talk circulating among the guards that I could be shot while trying to escape. Much later, after I was in federal protective custody, when I was on the witness stand I was being cross-examined by Burl Cain’s attorneys. They tried to get me to tell them who told me that the guards intended to shoot me. I risked everything by refusing and looking at the judge and asking, “Your Honor, look what has happened to me. If I tell them who told me, that person has a job and is trying to feed his family and is trying to protect me. If they’ll do this to me, what do you think they’ll do to him?”

The judge ruled that I did not have to answer the question and ordered the attorney to ask his next question.

“U.S. district judge Frank Polozola ruled that Louisiana Secretary of Corrections Richard Stalder and Angola Warden Burl Cain be held in contempt. He ordered them each to contribute $1,000 to a victim compensation fund. Stalder, Cain, other wardens, assistant wardens and assorted prisoncrats were all ordered by judge Polozola to take a "refresher course" on the U.S. Constitution, particularly the First Amendment right to free speech.

….

Kissinger wrote a letter to federal health officials that cans of evaporated milk and tomato paste with old expiration dates were being relabeled and shipped out of the prison. "The bottom line is that Kissinger, a convicted murderer, was taking actions to protect the public," judge Polozola said. "The DOC was taking actions that would hurt the public and protect the contract of friends."

After Kissinger wrote two letters to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in which he said the can relabeling operation was "shrouded in secrecy" and "stinks of impropriety," he was retaliated against by prisoncrats. Kissinger was transferred to a farm laborer job in a distant corner of the 18,000 acre Angola prison complex. He had been serving in the main prison as a legal advisor to other prisoners. Prison officials seized the computer Kissinger had used to assist other prisoners and to write the letters to the FDA. "Clearly this was retaliation," said Kissinger's attorney. "The inmate was transferred because of bad words. There is not an iron curtain between inmates and the First Amendment."

Polozola agreed that transferring the prisoner and seizing his computer amounted to harassment, in violation of an earlier order he had issued to prevent officials from retaliating against Kissinger.”

Source: Corrections Digest

To illustrate the dangers involved in “doing the right thing,” from both sides of the fence, a meeting had been held the day before this particular hearing at the Ranch House. Burl had put a dot in the middle of a chalkboard and said, “That’s you.” Then, a circle around the dot, and an X inside the circle. “The X is you. You’re good and you’re safe.” Now, an X outside the circle. He pointed at it and said, “If that’s you, your ass is grass, and I’m gonna’ be the lawn mower.”

The next day at this hearing, my attorneys brought this conversation up when examining a witness. Burl’s jaw dropped when the attorney asked, because he now knew that someone in his inner circle had given us the information - he didn’t know where to turn. And, there was nowhere left to turn. When he finally took the stand, he could only rant and finally admit that, yes, he had retaliated against me by locking me up and ordering my computer seized. Because - ya’ ready? ‘ I had used “bad words.” Words like “shrouded in secrecy” and “stinks of impropriety,” when it literally was.

The Second War

The second occasion was 20 years later when Burl was under an investigation by Maya Lau, an investigative reporter and her team for the Advocate in Baton Rouge. This time, also, was because of the written word. I have this terrible habit of doing the right thing. And granted, it doesn’t always work out in my favor. Maya reached out to me as a source for her current investigation after she unearthed data about my first encounter with Burl and the tangled web he wove.

So, we began a correspondence that began with a letter from her requesting to be placed on my visiting list. Because of my previous confrontation with “The Boss,” as he liked to be referred to as, the letter actually shook me up a bit. I carried the letter to my Camp Security Supervisor (a Colonel) who also, incidentally, happened to be my Camp F VETS Club sponsor. I felt naturally that I could trust him if no one else to guide me through this swath of uncharted waters.

As it happened Burl Cain was scheduled to attend a party at the David Knapps Training Academy located right next door that very afternoon. So, armed with the letter and my request for direction, the Colonel went next door to seek blessings for me. It turned out that Burl didn’t show up, but his trusted Deputy Warden was there. So, the Colonel showed him the letter and explained the situation and my concerns. The response? “Man, tell Kissinger he doesn’t have to worry about that stuff. That’s all water under the bridge.”

Except, it wasn’t. Or if it was, the waters were awfully deep and swirling rapidly. We continued our correspondence and suddenly a few weeks later I found myself stripped, jumpsuited, beaten, shackled and in the back of a van to an entirely different prison far away where I languished in solitary for weeks.

Because there was a Major there who I had helped a couple of years earlier with a discrimination lawsuit against DOC, I was finally able to get a phone call. I dialed a friend and told him to immediately record our conversation so he could play it back to Maya. I had a lot of information to get out there and get out there fast. I gave him Maya’s name and stated the specifics of my situation, and stressed the urgency of it all.

To her credit and the credit of the ADVOCATE, she immediately got the ball rolling. Now they weren’t so concerned about my 1st Amendment rights - they were concerned about their 1st Amendment right and access to information. In the end, though, they did the most important thing - they secured counsel for me. One day not long afterwards, a Sergeant came to my cell and flung the door open and said, “Lawyer visit…let’s go.” And that’s how I met Katie Schwartzmann, a tough and gritty bulldog of a lawyer and a staunch defender of the 1st Amendment. The Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center took my case.

It took some time and a few prison disciplinary hearings, a few “DENIED” Administrative Remedy Proceedings and about 6 months in an extended lockdown cell, before Katie finally filed my lawsuit against Burl Cain and Jimmy LeBlanc (Secretary of Corrections at the time) and about 16 other named defendants. Katie knew from the outset that it would be a difficult case, but she stuck with me and we proved that, for the second time, Louisiana had tried to silence me. It took literally two years to climb that hill. We won hands down. The single most important goal I had was getting back to Angola, back to my same dormitory and job assignment, and getting my property back. The settlement we reached accomplished all of my goals. And, hey, I didn’t forget her. Several years later after my release, I reconnected with her.

Yes, prison is tough and danger lurks around every corner. There are traps and pitfalls everywhere one looks and every time one sets their foot down. Fellow prisoners, guards - anybody - can hate you for doing the right thing. Sometimes it is very hard to do it. Sometimes you suffer. And very seldom do people appreciate what you’ve done that ended up helping them. My takeaway, though, is that when you do the right thing, well, right things happen for you. I’m just glad there were people willing to stand in that gap beside me.

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It is now known as “Camp 57,” one of those concentration camps as a part of the ICE detention centers (mostly operated by private prison operators like CoreCivic, GeoGroup, and others).

Camp J was shut down by LaDPSC in 2018 after years of litigation, violence, danger and turmoil within Angola and the Department. It was long the worst living space in Angola. Except for about 75 low-risk and trusted convicts who lived in a separate dormitory called “Bass,” who were employed as dorm orderlies. yard orderlies, kitchen workers and laundry workers, all of the rest of the guys were maximum custody. Every one of them was there for either serious disciplinary issues, escapes, or in a relatively few cases, serious protection concerns.

And, yes, before you ask, I have lived at Camp J three times during my 47 years in Angola. Once on a (false) disciplinary report and once as a cook in the kitchen. The third stay was for 14 days in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic when I tested positive for the virus. Needless to say, my stint as a cook was much more pleasant than my stay as a COVID-19 patient or as a cell-bound prisoner on a false and trumped-up DB charge. (BTW, I later won that case and was ordered released. I’ll tell you about it later in another post.)

Camp J was where I was living and working as a cook when I was notified that I had been approved and assigned to be an Inmate Counsel. [BTW, I worked with the man depicted in this video - ] Our Assistant warden was a jovial and basically fair man named Louie Calvert.

Back in the day, however, Camp J was a miserable place. Before its closure, Camp J was notoriously regarded as one of the most punitive environments in the American penal system.

• The Extended Lockdown Purpose: Unlike general population inmates who lived in open-air dormitories, Camp J was an “extended lockdown” and administrative segregation unit. It was strictly reserved for inmates who committed severe infractions inside Angola, such as escape, contraband, gangfights or attacking guards.

• Severe Isolation: Inmates spent 23 hours a day isolated in small cells. Air conditioning was non-existent for decades, creating sweltering, unsafe conditions in the Louisiana summer heat.

• Systemic Decay: By the mid-2010s, the physical infrastructure of Camp J was failing. A 2018 prison report highlighted malfunctioning cell locks, jammed doors, and high rates of self-harm and suicide attempts. The state permanently closed and abandoned the site in December 2018.

• Temporary Re-activation: The site sat completely empty until 2020, when the state briefly utilized a portion of it as an emergency isolation zone for inmates with mild cases of COVID-19. It was subsequently abandoned again until its 2025 fast-track conversion into an immigration lockup. [CoronaVirus Facility]

Truth be told, however, some of the “severe disciplinary cases” were, in fact, cases of “serious mental illness.” Inmates suffering from severe psychological disorders - such as schizophrenia or major clinical depression - were historically placed in extended lockdown (solitary confinement) such as Camp J. This prolonged 23-hour-a-day isolation heavily speeded up cognitive decline, hallucinations, and actually encouraged self-harm.

Angola depends heavily on transient, part-time contract psychiatrists and underqualified medical staff who regularly fail to recognize or properly document acute psychiatric decompensation. Inmates can wait months to receive basic medication changes or see a mental health counselor or even a social worker.

So, the team of Inmate Counsels at Camp J consisted of me and Patrick DeVille who lived at BASS dormitory, and 4-5 other Inmate Counsels who lived at Main Prison (“The Walk”) and were transported daily to and from Camp J. Usually, Patrick and I took turns representing convicts at DB courts, then made rounds on one of the units. “Making rounds” required us to visit each cell on each tier - average of 13x2x4 = 104 cells - and handle requests.

Requests might consist of pulling specific law books, court reports, typing self-prepared writs, researching specific issues, Shepardizing a case, or similar tasks. It was usually a harrowing experience due to the heat on the tiers, encounters with hateful convicts, lack of cooperation from guards, etc.

The unit I was assigned to was GAR (Shortened from ““Alligator Gar”) I actually enjoyed DB court as it was fun to challenge DB officers and Classification and whoever else was on the Board that day. The crew I usually confronted was made up of a “Randy” and a “Della.” They were goofy as hell and were a lot of fun to work with, and usually gave me a good “deal” to offer my client if he pleaded guilty. If I chose to fight a case, they were fair and firm. Everybody had the same goal: get it over with, and get out of there, and get on with our day.

So, on this particular day I had finished DB court, but one of the guys from Main Prison had a callout that morning and hadn’t shown up, so I was tasked to sub in for him and had to cover for him on CUDA, short for “Barracuda.” Already tired from DB court and my rounds on GAR, I went on down to CUDA and knocked on CUDA’s door. The beefy, tattooed and ridiculously redneck guard opened the door and let me in, and I stepped over to the desk to sign the logbook. Instantly, I was overwhelmed by the horrible odor coming from somewhere through the lobby. When I asked about it, I was met with a derisive laugh. “That’s that fuckin’ Bobby Freeman again.” Not quite the introduction one would want, particularly for a possibly new “client.”

When the same guard opened the gate, I ventured down the tier and headed for the most unusual interaction I had yet encountered. After a few cells, I “met” Bobby. Bobby Freeman. The odor was terrible. Bobby was standing in the middle of his cell, arms akimbo, stuck in a trance-like state, humming noisily to himself. I saw it instantly - Bobby was severely mentally troubled. Among many things I learned that day was that one of the most important things was that Bobby had been referred several times to the East Feliciana State Hospital, or Jackson, as it was known. Just as with Angola, Jackson had a terribly dark history of abuse, sexual assault and death. But - it was the only state institution capable of dealing with someone like Bobby.

I tried several times to engage Bobby, and finally succeeded when I began imitating his humming but at a much lower volume. He stopped suddenly and put his blank-eyed gaze on me…I had his attention. When he asked me what I wanted, I responded with, “I want to know who you are and what you need.”

“I’m my own Jesus!” he responded. “I own me…not Louisiana! Louisiana don’t own shit!”

Surprisingly - or not - I had to agree with him. Louisiana didn’t own ME either.

But Louisiana didn’t own him - Louisiana owned the right to care for him - care, custody and control, right? That’s what LaDPS&C claims. Their very own creed claims that right. So, why was this obviously mentally ill man still sitting in this cell, banned from showers and exercise and fresh air simply because guards didn’t want to deal with him?

It was a cycle of disillusionment that haunted me. After a few moments of interaction with Bobby, I went further down the tier, and eventually completed my rounds on CUDA. I went back to the office and immediately began a series of efforts (ARPSs and a civil lawsuit) aimed at getting him out of Angola and into Jackson. Bobby needed help, and needed it fast.

Over the next few weeks, I learned (YES, I went back again and still again) that Bobby had stuck an inkpen into his chest - directly into his heart - and a pencil into his urethra, forever damaging his manhood, his penis. Whether this was a statement on his manhood against Louisiana or not, I don’t know and cannot say now. (I’ve been free for 3-1/2 years as of today.)

And I went to bed that night wondering if I had done enough to help this man, this human being, this man who refused to allow Louisiana to take ownership over his soul, his essence. I constantly asked him why he did this. His response was quick and shaped out by the challenges I faced, and this was my personal Sysiphus.

Bobby angrily confronted me the next tine I saw him - we had become semi-good communicators by this time. “Why you writing about me sticking a pencil up me dick?!” he said. “Because I want to know why you did it, who you were trying to hurt, what you were really saying, and who you were saying it to,” I told him. This was when he stopped and looked at me, that haunted stare that pierced me and demanded that I look deeper into him.

He grabbed a cup off of the edge of his bunk - it was a white styrofoam cup and it was shriveling and deformed at the edges - and it was full of a foul and clumpy semi-liquid slab of butter. He began smearing it all over his body, starting at his neck and working downwards. He was a very black and wiry man with spindly, spike-like tufts of hair coming out of his head that looked like radio antennae.

The butter! That’s what was creating this horrid and sickening odor that permeated the entire building and seemed to settle onto your skin and claw its way deep into you. Stumbling backwards from the cell-door, I asked him, “Bobby, why the hell you smearing that stuff on you, man?!”

“Because it keeps them blue demons away from me! They’re fucking demons, don’t you understand that?!” The vehemence with which he threw this out there was a bit disarming, and I almost didn’t know how to respond. The smell was terrible and I had to get away from him, so I hurried away and out of the building before I threw up all over myself. The fat guard was chuckling as he let me out of the unit.

It was a week or so before I went back to see Bobby again. This time he shocked me even worse…instead of butter, he rubbed his own feces over his chest. He had already streaked it across the cell walls and now he was slathering it onto his body. I couldn’t even pretend to understand this and I turned and hurried away from his cell, leaving behind the cackling and hyena-like laughing he was giving out.

Some poor SOB was going to be called out from the dormitory and forced to clean this mess up, sh*t and all…they would be provided ZERO protective gear while they did it. At Camp J, you did what you were told to do and you did it, like it or not, or you would promptly go into one of their own cells.

And the ARP I had filed to try to help Bobby, to try to protect him? It had gone nowhere. It was ignored by everyone all along the chain-of-command. Everyone knew about Bobby, knew about his problems, knew the harm he was doing to himself, knew about the danger he posed to others, and did nothing to prevent it.

Did they also know about the harm they did to me? I think they did, and chose to do…nothing, just like they did to Bobby. The main problem with Camp J was staffing. It was a known and proven fact that was admitted by the Warden at the time that the closure was proposed to the Secretary of Corrections.

In July 2017, Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola Warden Darrel Vannoy wrote an internal letter to Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary James "Jimmy" LeBlanc advocating for the closure of the notorious Camp J isolation unit.

Camp J became infamous among officers and offenders alike, a spot where conditions were harsh and where severe mental health issues became commonplace. In a letter Angola Warden Darryl Vannoy wrote to LeBlanc in July 2017 advocating for its closure, Vannoy explained that within one year 85 corrections officers assigned to Camp J had resigned, retired or were terminated.

“The challenges staff encounter at Camp J are more complex than other areas of the institution,” Vannoy wrote in the letter, obtained by The Advocate in a public records request. “Numerous times upon an officer’s knowledge that they will be assigned to Camp J or ‘loaned’ to Camp J for work detail they will leave work sick, walk off the job, or report to Human Resources to resign.”

Completed in 1976, Camp J has four cell blocks each with eight tiers made up of 13 single-man cells. It was used to discipline offenders following grave infractions of prison rules, such as fighting with a weapon, or for behavioral issues, officials have said, with the opportunity for offenders to earn their way out after meeting certain conditions.

Vannoy wrote that the locks for the cells in Camp J had recently begun malfunctioning, sometimes opening on their own, and offenders had figured out ways to jam cell doors – often with toothpaste caps or buttons – circumventing security checks by making unlocked cells appear closed. Weapons use had been on the rise along with the security breaches, Vannoy wrote, with 44 weapons found at Camp J in the first seven months of 2017.

Because of staff shortages at the Camp, officers at Roll Calls around the farm were told that they had to report to Camp J. When told this, many refused, or reported to HR immediately that they would resign, or declared that they were “sick” and needed to go home. NO ONE wanted to work at Camp J. When Angola enforced anti-smoking bans, it created the perfect storm - guards were in the position where they had the ultimate upper hand: they could offer something of immense value that would make their jobs much easier. Then, they took it to another level: they started trading cigarettes for “yard” hours and shower times. They’d trade one or two cigarettes for a prisoner refusing his yard call or his “shower hour.”

Peace reigned for a while. But, not for long.

Were there escapes from Camp J? Not directly from Camp J, but there have been a number of escapes….many escapees who were recaptured spent time at Camp J. Roy McLaughlin was one of them. Camp J was a human disposal, and it was the nexus of many a conspiracy, some true and some false. Trust me, Angola had a culture of its’ own. B-Line especially…the common joke was that “shift change was coming up, and who knew who was jumping out of whose’ back window?”

There was no speculation that there were many extramarital/situationships being violated at Camp J’s population at Camp J.

That aside, Camp J had developed into its’ own little world.

Nothing mattered anymore. Absolutely nothing.

The federal ruling in Lewis v. Cain noted that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections entirely lacked the fundamental infrastructure to deliver adequate healthcare.

• Absence of Specialized Beds: Angola lacked a sufficient number of intermediate or acute psychiatric beds. Camp J’s disciplinary cells were systematically used as an overflow dump for individuals experiencing active psychotic episodes.

• Unqualified Security Staff: The guards managing the day-to-day operations at Camp J were not equipped with Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) or basic psychiatric care training. This frequently led to volatile escalations, structural neglect, and an inability to recognize severe psychiatric decompensation until a crisis or suicide occurred.

The systemic failure of this setup is what eventually led federal courts to rule that health and psychiatric management at Angola violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Bobby remained on my mind. His plight remained on my mind. How many more Bobby’s were there out there? How many more were there smearing feces on themselves, or on the walls of their cells? How many more were there crying out for help when there was none there?

This started me on my efforts on speaking out for mental health for the convicts at Camp J. Efforts never go in vain. You may not see the results in the form of what you want to achieve but it will certainly help you to achieve something else.

We often relate our efforts to our success. If we don’t succeed in doing something, we believe that everything we did was useless. We must remember that anything we do in life provides new skills to us. These skills are not necessarily professional skills but life skills such as patience, persistence and perseverance.

Your efforts always add worth to your life. If you see your progress, you will see it as your success.

Go with God, Bobby. Others may not see your humanity, but I DID,

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Today, I’m going to share more of it and wonder how many of my readers and other random strangers will understand it, dwell on it, and either abandon me or confess their own secrets. Huge question, there?

So, another memory that plagues me even to this day, was the time I went with my “parents” and my grandfather (remember, I was adopted?). “Grandpaw” was my maternal grandfather. He was a magical and intriguing character. He was the “wise old man” of our ‘family.’ I feared and respected and loved him at the same time. I felt so sorry for him because his wife, Thelma, had passed on of hepatitis - I think they called it “chirrosis of the liver” in later years.

I definitely remember the time I saw Jesus. I was 7 years old. At her burial ceremony, we were at the cemetery. and I had wandered off down the various red-clay paths that wandered through the cemetery. I was but a child in the moment, and was told to “dress up” in my best “Sunday clothes.” (My mother told me to do this.) I was standing there and saw - clearly - Jesus Christ standing at the junction of a path and some obscure adjoining trail. I remember clearly his white garments, and his face, and I just remember thinking, “My God! That’s Jesus!”

I know what they say about “repressed memories” and “hallucinations” and all that. But, this was real. I saw it clearly, and vividly and I still recall it today. Don’t even start to tell me I didn’t see it. I know what I saw. I immediately took off running back to the ceremony and grasped my “mother’s” hand. Her response was, “Don’t worry about it…you’re just seeing things. You’re imagining things because you’re sad about your Grandmaw.”

No. False. In fact, I cringed every time she tried to hug me or kiss me. She always smelled of stale, sour lavendar and bourbon. By the time she died, he caught her eating canned cat food several times as she started to lose her mind. They were both heavy drinkers. Every other summer, I was dumped off on one or the other sets of grandparents for a week so that my parents could have a week of alone time. I hated when I went to Longview, Texas. The countryside was beautiful - driving down the seemingly endless roads lined with stretches of red clay and bluebonnets. There was a large train switching yard at the base of the hill where the Knights of Columbus Hall was on Olive Street. I used to have to go with them on Wednesday nights when they went to play Bingo. All we had to do was walk across the street.

Every Wednesday it was the same routine. They’d be drinking all afternoon and taking two hours to get ready to walk across the street. When we arrived I would have to go sit in a little room where there was a tiny TV with a rabbit-ear antenna with little strips of foil hanging down, and other kids just like me. We were dropped off while the grownups drank and played bingo. We were like baggage and we felt it.

So, in 1964 the biggest thing going on anywhere was the World’s Fair in New York City. Grandpaw, flush with Grandmaw’s insurance payout and his retirement funds from Standard Oil, surprised us all with an all-expenses paid trip to New York and some kind of tickets that gained us admission every day for a week. We stayed at the Statler Hilton Hotel. I was fascinated and excited! So many “firsts!” First trip, first time on an airplane, first time going to a fair of any kind, first time in a hotel, first time eating from an Automat (a magical thing where you could put coins into a machine and receive in return an entire meal…everything was a first.

And every single day I returned to the hotel exhausted from all the walking and rides and gawking. I was 10 years old. There’s no way that I could repeat that today at 73!

I will never forget our lunch on a “slow day” when we went to Katz’s Deli! I had never even heard of pastrami, and certainly have never tasted anything quite so delicious since. And the Automat was a whole adventure in itself…it was an entire wall of windows, little glass-fronted cubicles with meals inside! Of course, I didn’t realize that there was an entire kitchen behind that wall with a staff furiously cooking and preparing those meals.

On the final night in The Statler Hilton, I fell asleep quickly. I was very tired - it had been our most strenuous day of all - and I knew that the next morning would be rushed and panicky, checking out, gathering our suitcases and rushing to the airport for that long flight back to Houston’s Hobby Airport.

I was sleeping soundly when I woke to something warm and wet and frantically thinking I might have wet the bed, thrust my hand down under the covers. I woke fully to realize that it was Grandpaw and he was trying to perform oral sex on me. I hadn’t even reached puberty yet, had no idea what an erection was and had never had “that talk” with anyone. It just had never even occurred to me that something like this was even possible. What was happening? I panicked and thrust him away from me and scrambled to my feet.

I was a tangle of emotions; I was scared, horrified, confused, embarassed…all of it and more. I scurried over to the couch away from him. He was now standing beside the bed, tears streaming down his face and a shameful look on his face. He begged me not to say anything to anybody, especially not to say anything to my mother. He tried to tell me that he missed Thelma so bad and that he was so lonely, and all I could do was sit there and cringe, not even look at him.

Within minutes, he went from crying and shameful to defiant and stern, forcefully telling me that I had “better not say anything to anybody,” then finally turned and went and got into bed. I spent the rest of the night sitting on that couch, trembling and staring out the window at all of the bright lights.

At dawn I hurried into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and washed my face; before he could awaken, found my suitcase and packed my clothes into it. A little over two hours later we were both downstairs waiting on my parents to finish checking out so we could cram into the cab that carried us to the airport.

It was a long flight back to Houston. Scared and shamed kids don’t usually have a lot to say. “I’m tired,” was my answer when anybody asked me what was wrong. That seemed a satisfactory and acceptable response and they all seemed happy with that, so I was able to lean my head against the window and feign sleep.

When we deplaned at Hobby, we took separate cabs home and I didn’t speak the entire time. Every time mother or daddy would ask me something like what was wrong or was I alright, I simply nodded and justified it with a yawn.

When we got home I grabbed my suitcase and almost ran into my room and closed the door. I was home, but I would never feel safe again. Not then, not when the events of my Kitchen Table essay happened.

I remain responsible for my actions. But what happens to a child can help explain some of the struggles experienced by the adult that child becomes. Maybe that is why I needed to see Jesus standing at the crossing of those cemetery paths.

Maybe the important question is not whether anyone else believes Jesus was actually there. Maybe the important question is why that frightened child needed him to be there.

Maybe I needed to believe that someone good was watching. Maybe I needed someone who could see what the adults around me could not see.

Someone who would believe me. Someone who would not hurt me.

I spent most of my life ashamed of what happened. But the shame did not belong to me. I was a child. Grandpaw was the adult.

I did not cause it. I did not invite it and I did not deserve it.

The shame was his, not mine. But, I’m the one who had to carry the weight of it with me for years and years.

My heart breaks at telling you this. I’m so ashamed of it! But, it is what it is. And, if I don’t tell you now, who will I tell, and when will I tell it?

Goodnight, all.

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Florida killed one man shortly after noon, cleaned the room, reset the equipment, and killed another before supper. James Aren Duckett was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. Dominick Anthony Occhicone was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m.

Less than five hours separated their deaths.

That is where Florida is now.

Two men. Two terrible crimes. Six hours.

James Duckett, 68, was convicted of the rape and murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee in 1987. He was a police officer at the time. The facts presented against him were horrible, and Teresa’s death was a monstrous thing. She was a child. She deserved to grow up. She deserved birthdays, scraped knees, first love, old age, and all the ordinary things that were stolen from her.

Dominick Occhicone, 80, was convicted of murdering Raymond and Martha Artzner, the parents of his former girlfriend, in 1986. They also deserved to live. Their family has carried that violence for nearly forty years.

Nothing I say here is meant to minimize those deaths. I will not dishonor the victims by treating them as props in an argument. Their lives mattered before the crimes, and they still matter now.

But here is the thing we refuse to confront:

Killing James Duckett did not bring Teresa McAbee back. Killing Dominick Occhicone did not return Raymond and Martha Artzner to their family.

Florida simply added two more dead bodies to the pile.

And then called it “justice.”

An assembly line of death

Today was the first time Florida carried out two executions on the same day since 1964. It was also the first time in nearly a decade that any state executed two people in one day. Duckett and Occhicone became Florida’s 11th and 12th executions of 2026. They were the 39th and 40th executions carried out under Governor Ron DeSantis.

Think about those numbers.

Forty executions under one governor. Thirty-one of them during his final two years in office. Nineteen last year - a Florida record - and twelve more before July has even ended this year. Another execution is already scheduled for August.

This is not simply the enforcement of old sentences. It is an acceleration. It is a campaign. It is the deliberate conversion of a death chamber into an assembly line.

The governor has not explained why these two executions were placed on the same day. Perhaps he does not believe an explanation is necessary anymore. Perhaps death has become so routine inside his administration that scheduling two human beings six hours apart looks like efficiency.

That should frighten us.

The state was not forced to do this. No emergency required it. Neither man was escaping. Neither man presented an immediate danger to the public. Duckett had spent almost four decades under a sentence of death. Occhicone had been on death row since 1987.

Florida had all the time in the world. Then, suddenly, it had no time at all.

A question the state chose not to answer

James Duckett maintained his innocence for decades.

His earlier execution date was stayed so modern DNA testing could be conducted. The testing did not identify him as the contributor - but it did not exclude him either. The result was inconclusive.

His expert said the available evidence was insufficient to determine whether Duckett was or was not a contributor to the DNA mixture. The biological sample was consumed during testing, eliminating any further opportunity to test it. Duckett sought an evidentiary hearing. The court refused. His stay was lifted, and less than a week later, Governor DeSantis placed him on today’s schedule.

Let us be painfully clear.

An inconclusive result is not proof of innocence.

But it is not proof of guilt either.

And when the punishment is death, uncertainty ought to matter.

We are constantly told that the courts reviewed the case, that the appeals were exhausted, and that the conviction remained valid. But courts do not possess some mystical ability to transform uncertainty into truth.

Courts make mistakes.

Prosecutors make mistakes.

Police make mistakes.

Laboratories make mistakes.

Witnesses lie.

Evidence disappears.

Evidence is destroyed.

And once a man is dead, the state’s mistake becomes permanent. Duckett made no final statement today. He had maintained his innocence for almost forty years. Florida killed him anyway.

What was accomplished by killing an 80-year-old man?

Then came Dominick Occhicone.

He was 80 years old - nearly 81 - and became the oldest person executed in modern Florida history. He suffered from chronic kidney and heart problems, poor vision, hearing impairment and other conditions associated with advanced age. He needed assistance from guards to negotiate stairs and use the shower.

Florida did not release him. Florida did not forgive him. Florida did not even have to pretend that he remained a physical threat to society.

It wheeled an old man into the execution chamber, strapped him to a gurney and injected him with three drugs until his heart stopped.

Occhicone had been sentenced to death after a jury recommendation of only 7–5. Five jurors voted to spare his life. Such a vote would not be enough to impose a death sentence under Florida law today. The sentencing court also found that he had acted under extreme mental or emotional disturbance. None of that saved him.

Before he died, Occhicone thanked the Christian men who had visited him over the years. He apologized to his own family and to the family of Raymond and Martha Artzner.

He said he was sorry for the hurt he had caused. Then Florida killed him.

What public-safety purpose was served? What threat was eliminated? What great moral victory was achieved by killing a sick, nearly 81-year-old man who had already spent almost half his life waiting to die?

There was none. There was only vengeance.

The cruelty is not an accident

Some people will read this and accuse me of caring more about those executed than those they killed.

That is dishonest. I can mourn Teresa McAbee without asking the state to imitate the person who killed her. I can grieve for Raymond and Martha Artzner without believing that another family should receive a phone call saying their father, brother, uncle or grandfather has been killed by government employees.

Compassion is not a bucket with a limited supply. Showing humanity toward one person does not steal humanity from another. The death-penalty supporter insists that we must choose. Victim or prisoner. Innocent or guilty. Them or us. Mercy or justice.

I reject that bargain.

Justice does not require us to become cold. It does not require us to celebrate death. It does not require us to build special rooms, train people to kill, purchase chemicals in secrecy, rehearse the procedure and then invite witnesses to watch a human being stop breathing.

And I have to say this plainly: I am disgusted by those who cheer this.

Not those who struggle with the issue. Not those whose pain makes mercy difficult. I understand pain. I understand anger. I understand the desire to strike back.

I am talking about those who enjoy it. Those who count executions like points on a scoreboard. Those who call for more, faster, louder. Those who mock the condemned man’s fear. Those who confuse cruelty with strength and bloodlust with concern for victims.

That is not justice. It is inhumanity.

And the fact that the killing is done by people wearing uniforms, following written procedures and standing beneath the authority of a governor does not make it more moral. It only makes the violence cleaner, quieter and easier for the public to ignore.

I know what it means to wait for death

I spent most of my life inside Louisiana’s Angola prison. I lived among men under death sentences. I represented incarcerated people. I watched warrants approach. I saw what the waiting did - not only to the condemned, but to families, wives, lawyers, officers, friends and everyone pulled into the orbit of a scheduled execution.

The public sees a date. The condemned man hears footsteps. The conden=mned man waits for the fib=nal message,

He watches meals arrive and wonders how many remain. He looks at the people around him and wonders which goodbye will be the last. His family measures the hours. His lawyers race through the courts. Prison employees prepare a man they may have known for decades to be killed by their colleagues.

Then the witnesses leave. The room is cleaned. The gurney waits for the next body. Today, Florida used it twice.

This is why I keep writing

I am not doing this work because it is easy. It is not easy to read about murdered children. It is not easy to study photographs of victims and the people who killed them. It is not easy to write about death over and over again and still believe that the public can be reached.

But silence is exactly what the machinery depends upon. It depends on people turning away.

It depends on executions becoming little notices buried beneath the day’s louder news. It depends on people accepting the language of “closure,” “procedure” and “lawful sentence” without looking too closely at the old man strapped to the table.

I refuse to look away. I will continue to write about the death penalty. I will continue to expose its cruelty, its racial unfairness, its errors, its politics and its terrible appetite for human life.

But I need people standing with me.

Follow this publication. Share these articles.

Send them to someone who still believes executions are harmless because they happen behind prison walls. Become a paid subscriber if you are able. Your support gives me the ability to continue researching, speaking and pushing against a system with enormous power and very little interest in examining itself.

I do not expect everyone to agree with me immediately. I only ask that they look. Look at what Florida did today.

One man dead at 1:19. Another dead at 6:13.

The room cleaned between them.

And somewhere tonight, another condemned man is listening for footsteps outside his door.

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But, there ARE good folks working there. I count to this day a couple of wardens, some colonels, some majors, some captains and a lot of sergeants that I’d be happy to go to dinner with. I also know a bunch that I’d love to see at WalMart running to get away from me.

What you know is what you know, and what you know is what you can talk about credibly.

So, let’s talk about COs. “Correctional Officers.” Now, I’ll be honest here…this experience is inspired by a piece that the Marshall Project just did on cops that were allowed to be hired by other jurisdictions after being exposed and fired in other jurisdictions for intentional cruelty or haphazard denials or even wose, homicides. They are known as “wandering cops” and you occasionally read about them in a newspaper or see them on the news.

But, wait....what about wandering COs? “COs” you might ask. But, they’re not cops, so what’s the big deal? Well, yes and no. Here’s a definition of a CO and their normal duties:

Core Duties and Responsibilities

• Maintain security: Patrol cell blocks, monitor facility perimeters, and prevent disturbances, fights, or escapes.

• Enforce rules: Ensure inmates follow facility regulations and conduct routine security checks or cell searches for contraband.

• Supervise movement: Oversee daily inmate movement during meals, recreation, work assignments, and court transport.

• Document behavior: Write incident reports and log daily activities regarding inmate conduct and progress.

Qualifications and Requirements

• Age: Must usually be at least 18 to 21 years old depending on the agency.

• Education: Typically requires a high school diploma or GED; federal or specialized roles may require college credits or a degree.

• Background: Must pass a thorough background check, physical fitness test, and drug screening.

• Training: Complete a designated corrections or police standards training academy.

So, there ya’ go. That’s what Webster and other sources tell you that COs do and what their job requirements are.

What do they really do? ALL kinds of shit! Now, I totally get it that they put up with all kinds of BS on a daily basis. Look at who you’re dealing with. Look at what you’re dealing with. So, I give some passes here and there.

POST Training, for one. And the thing is, when they undergo POST training, they’re taught about all of the things that, quite often, result in their firing, resignations or charges.

The David C. Knapps Training Academy is the new employee’s first stop. Whether he/she makes it out of there or not depends upon their abilities, their fitness and their willingness. I’ve personally seen some guys that actually shone during their training. I have ALSO seen a phone call made from a warden to the Training Academy to “no matter what, PASS this guy!” because “the guy” was related to a Parish President.

Years ago, a convict I knew used to actually teach a class on shakedown procedures at the Academy! I guess they figured that a convict who had been in the system a long time and knew almost everything about how it worked was the best one to teach how to conduct a proper and correct shakedown of a convict. WHAT?

Oh, I’ve got some doozies of stories about shakedowns! And, some doozies of stories about other stuff!

Louisiana produces plenty of reports when correctional officers are arrested, fired, suspended, or allowed to resign. What is much harder to find is where those employees go next. There is no easily searchable public record that follows a correctional employee from a state prison to a parish jail, from one sheriff’s office to another, or from a public institution into a private prison. Or, from a private prison to a state facility.

A “wandering officer” is usually understood as a police officer who leaves one department under a cloud - sometimes fired, sometimes permitted to resign before discipline is completed - and then turns up wearing another badge somewhere else.

The same thing can happen behind prison walls:

A correctional officer can resign while an investigation is still open, leave before misconduct is formally sustained, and apply elsewhere as an experienced officer rather than as someone who left the last job under investigation.

The uniform may change. The title may change from correctional officer to deputy, jailer, detention officer, juvenile specialist, transport officer, or facility administrator. But the power and authority over confined and helpless people remains.

Louisiana: the most useful articles I could find:

1. Fourteen Elayn Hunt employees arrested in 2026

WBRZ’s June 2026 investigation is the strongest current account of widespread employee misconduct at a Louisiana prison. By June 16, the station had documented 14 employee arrests connected to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center during 2026 alone.

Most of the female employees arrested were accused of communicating improperly with incarcerated men; two were accused of sexual relationships. Major Francis Smith was arrested for alleged malfeasance involving a relationship with an incarcerated man. A former employee told WBRZ that the relationship had been reported to management well before the arrest. The investigation reportedly began in 2025, but Smith was not arrested until after a new warden arrived in 2026. Another former officer, Juanaya Spiller, was accused of attempting to bring drug-soaked paper into the prison and having a loaded firearm in a vehicle.

Why it matters: This is not a wandering-officer case by itself. It is evidence of something that makes wandering possible: allegations can circulate inside an institution for months or longer - before producing formal action. During that period, an employee may resign, transfer, or begin looking elsewhere. The department is usually relieved to “close” an investigation.

It also undercuts the “one bad apple” defense. Fourteen arrests at one institution in approximately six months suggest a failure of supervision, reporting, screening, or institutional culture - not merely fourteen unrelated personal lapses. I can personally attest to the fact that it is definitely an institutional culture. During my 47 years of prison, I served about 4 years at Hunt. Neither of the 2 times I was there, was it fun!

2. Seven Angola employees resigned during a single investigation

In March 2019, seven Angola employees resigned after a Department of Corrections investigation into sexual relationships, improper communications, and contraband smuggling. Four were arrested, while the report said charges remained pending against three others.

Among them were correctional officers Sarah Veals and Precious Fitzgerald. Both reportedly admitted improper relationships with incarcerated men, resigned immediately, and had charges pending when the article was published. Six of the correctional officers involved held the rank of sergeant.

Why it matters: This article reveals the opening through which a wandering CO can escape scrutiny. The employee leaves immediately; the criminal and administrative processes continue - or sometimes quietly “stall” - after the employment relationship has ended.

The unanswered questions are precisely the ones should raise:

• Were their POST records flagged?

• Did the resignations become formal findings?

• Were nearby sheriff’s offices or private facilities notified?

• Were any of these employees later hired in another custodial position?

• Who was responsible for checking?

The published story tells us how they left Angola. It does not tell us where they went afterward or who opened the door and welcomed them in.

3. Supervisors beat a restrained Angola prisoner—and manufactured a cover story

Four former supervisory officers at Angola - Daniel Davis, Scotty Kennedy, John Sanders, and James Savoy Jr.—were sentenced in 2020 for participating in the beating of a handcuffed, shackled, nonresisting prisoner and conspiring to conceal it.

Federal prosecutors said Davis pulled the prisoner’s leg chains and caused him to fall face-first onto concrete. Officers then punched, kicked, and stomped him, causing broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a dislocated shoulder, and other injuries. The officers subsequently created a false explanation, falsified reports, tampered with witnesses, and lied under oath.

Why it matters: These were not inexperienced employees or cadets who briefly lost control. They were supervisors, and the wrongdoing extended beyond the violence itself and flooded into the institutional paperwork and the oblivion that it provides. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times I’ve seen “paperwork” cover BS up. That matters enormously to the wandering-CO question: a future employer depends upon the previous employer’s records. When officers and supervisors falsify those records, the misconduct can effectively disappear.

4. Louisiana once had to be ordered to prevent wandering juvenile officers

The most directly relevant Louisiana document I found is a federal settlement governing the state’s secure juvenile facilities.

Under that agreement, Louisiana was required to maintain a central registry and a Multiple Allegation Database recording complaints, investigation results, and discipline involving staff. Before hiring someone, facilities were required to consult facility records and the central registry. Facilities were prohibited from knowingly hiring someone whose substantiated abuse had resulted in termination or resignation to avoid being terminated.

The agreement also required Louisiana to retain allegation records for five years after the employee left and to review staff members who accumulated multiple allegations within a two-year period.

This agreement was limited to secure juvenile facilities and should not be presented as proof of how every adult prison or parish jail operates today. But it is enormously valuable to the argument because it shows that federal authorities recognized the precise danger we are talking about here:

An abusive employee must not be allowed to resign from one institution and quietly become someone else’s problem.

Louisiana has a mechanism—but is it being used?

Louisiana POST now recognizes Level 2 and Level 3 correctional-officer certifications. Its published rules say certification proceedings may address excessive force, dishonesty, neglect of duty, misuse of authority, termination for cause, and resignation while under investigation or in lieu of termination.

That is encouraging, but there is a catch. The POST process generally depends upon misconduct being formally investigated, documented, and referred. A resignation does not, by itself, produce a public career history explaining every unresolved complaint. An employee may also move among positions that are described differently by state prisons, sheriff-operated jails, juvenile facilities, contractors, and private prison companies.

So Louisiana appears to possess some of the machinery needed to put a STOP to “wandering officers.”

What the public cannot easily determine is whether every agency consistently feeds complete and timely information into that machinery. And, how much does the “old boy” network have to do with whether it gets in there or not?

A Louisiana example showing the same problem in policing

An Associated Press–Howard Center investigation found that Brandon Spillman was hired by the Avoyelles Parish Sheriff’s Office after previously being fired by the New Roads Police Department. Spillman later participated in a struggle during which he attempted to apply a chokehold to Armando Frank. Frank’s death was ruled a homicide caused by respiratory compromise, although the resulting civil case was dismissed after the court found that the officers had immunity.

Spillman was acting as a law-enforcement officer rather than a conventional prison CO, so I would not mislabel him. But his case demonstrates the Louisiana mechanism perfectly: one agency removes an officer, another agency hires him, and the earlier red flag does not prevent a later use-of-force death.

That institutional overlap matters in Louisiana because sheriff’s offices often operate the parish jails. The same agency may employ patrol deputies, jail deputies, transport officers, and correctional personnel. The line between a wandering cop and a wandering CO is not always as clear as officials might like the public to believe.

Alabama: much clearer evidence of a corrections pipeline

5. The CoreCivic-to-Alabama Department of Corrections pipeline

Investigative journalist (at Moth To Flame, on Substack) documented three senior officials who moved from the troubled, privately operated Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee into high-level positions with the deeply troubled Alabama Department of Corrections.

The most striking case is Jermaris Porter. (This is a must-read!) Alabama hired Porter in 2025 and placed him in a facility-administrator position. A pending civil lawsuit alleged that, while working for CoreCivic, Porter participated in a prison drug-smuggling operation, had gang connections, and had previously been dismissed for contraband before being reinstated. Porter’s former warden, Vince Vantell, who was also named in the lawsuit, was subsequently hired by Alabama. A federal judge had denied a motion to dismiss the claims, finding them sufficiently plausible to proceed, but they remained allegations in unresolved civil litigation - not proven criminal findings.

A third former Trousdale administrator, Keith Huggins, was hired by Alabama in April 2026 while named in separate litigation alleging that prison administrators allowed gang members to rape and extort an incarcerated man. Again, those are civil allegations and must be described as such.

The Justice Department had already opened a civil-rights investigation into Trousdale in August 2024, citing state audits, dangerous understaffing, violence, sexual abuse, drug trafficking concerns, and an extraordinary turnover rate. DOJ emphasized that it had not yet reached final conclusions, but the investigation was public before Alabama made at least some of these hires.

Why it matters: This is almost a textbook example of the wandering-CO argument -not cadets or sergeants quietly moving between neighboring jails, but senior private-prison officials moving into highly paid state positions while serious civil allegations and federal institutional investigations remained unresolved.

Alabama’s newly created “site administrator” classification made the pathway even more troubling. Shelburne reported that these administrators were exempt from the ordinary merit system and were not required by the statute to possess Alabama corrections or law-enforcement certification.

6. Walker County hired personnel without required certification

The Associated Press reported that Walker County Sheriff Nick Smith was indicted for allegedly hiring six people - one deputy, four armed school-resource officers, and one jailer - without required state certification or training.

One of the hired officers had previously had his Arizona certification suspended after admitting that he pointed a gun at a woman’s head during a traffic stop. He was hired provisionally in Alabama and allegedly made arrests and investigated deaths despite restrictions on what a provisional officer could do. The chief deputy was separately accused of giving false information to Alabama’s standards-and-training commission concerning the officer’s employment status. These were charges and allegations, not convictions.

7. Alabama employees leave before the official record catches up

Alabama Appleseed obtained records showing that the Department of Corrections fired 366 employees between January 2018 and November 2023. At least 19 had been charged with work-related crimes, but Appleseed stressed that the figure excluded employees who resigned before being fired. The Equal Justice Initiative had separately identified at least 89 Alabama corrections employees criminally charged or administratively sanctioned since 2019, including 30 supervisors.

The report also described officer Jesse Cobb, who remained employed in a non-contact position while facing a felony assault indictment in connection with the alleged beating of a 74-year-old incarcerated man with a broom handle. Court records showed earlier arrests and convictions involving intoxication and leaving an accident scene. The matter illustrates retention despite accumulated warning signs rather than movement to a new jurisdiction, but the institutional problem is the same: serious red flags do not necessarily end a correctional career.

A LOT of national evidence confirms the pattern

A national Associated Press investigation found that correctional employees accused of sexual abuse frequently resign or retire before internal investigations are completed. Without a sustained finding or accessible paper trail, some are transferred, hired by other prisons, or placed in positions involving juveniles and other vulnerable people.

One officer examined by the AP, James Widen, obtained a correctional position in West Virginia after resigning from an Ohio women’s prison following an internal investigation involving improper contact with an incarcerated woman. Widen disputed the implication of sexual misconduct and offered a different explanation for his resignation, but the case demonstrates how an unresolved history can follow an officer across state lines without necessarily barring the next job. He later settled the case.

Another national investigation found that Jerry Burns was hired as a Tennessee deputy after violating a “zero tolerance” policy while employed as a Kentucky jailer. Four months after his new hiring, he participated in a use-of-force incident in which a man’s head was slammed onto concrete; the death was classified as a homicide, and the family’s lawsuit was later settled.

The wandering-officer problem does not stop at the prison gate.

In fact, it may be harder to detect in corrections because the officer moves through a fragmented and broken network of state prisons, parish jails, sheriff’s departments, juvenile institutions, private contractors, and out-of-state facilities. A CO can leave under one title and return under another. A pending investigation can become separated from the personnel file. A resignation can occur before a finding is entered. A new employer desperate for experienced staff (almost all state prisons are short-staffed and overworked) may see prior service and experience - not the unresolved misconduct - as the most important qualification.

The strongest Louisiana finding is presently not a long, verified list of wandering COs. I could not responsibly and credibly produce such a list from published reporting alone. Instead, I found:

• repeated mass resignations and arrests;

• employees leaving while charges or investigations remained pending;

• proven violence and coordinated cover-ups;

• a historical federal order requiring Louisiana to create exactly the type of cross-facility registry needed to prevent wandering abusive staff;

• and a current certification system that can address resignation under investigation, but whose operation is difficult for the public to follow.

That absence of a traceable public employment history should not be mistaken for proof that wandering does not occur. It is evidence that Louisiana has made the movement exceedingly difficult to see, and to follow up on.

If you don’t know what to look for, how can you combat it?

And that’s one thing I always do, is combat it!

AP News

Prison work assignments used to lure and rape female inmates. Guards sometimes walk free

Oct 31, 2024

AP News

Alabama sheriff arrested for hiring uncertified officers, including one accused of violence

Jun 9, 2025

AP News

These police officers had red flags in their past, then used force in a case that ended in death

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Some of these men committed their crimes when they were barely more than boys. Florida kept them until their hair turned gray, their bodies weakened, and they became sick old men. Then it strapped them to a gurney and called the long, slow process “justice.”

Last year, Florida executed more people than it ever had in a single year. This year, the machinery is moving again - faster, louder, and with a ferocious appetite. One warrant follows another, a couple of weeks ago, just hours after executing one man, DeSantis signed another warrant.

The death watch house - the “row” - stays full. One old man dies, and another is already looking at the date circled on his calendar. Something dark is happening in Florida. And it is happening in plain sight.

As of Wednesday, July 22, 2026, Florida’s execution count is:

• 2026 so far: 10 executions

• 2025: 19 executions - Florida’s all-time annual record

The 2025 total surpassed the previous all-time state record of 11 executions in 1936. The previous record during the modern post-1976 death-penalty era had been eight executions in 2014.

By July 22, 2025, Florida had executed eight prisoners.

They were:

1. James Ford — February 13

2. Edward Thomas James — March 20

3. Michael Tanzi — April 9

4. Jeffrey Hutchinson — May 1

5. Glen Rogers — May 15

6. Anthony Wainwright — June 10

7. Thomas Gudinas — June 24

8. Michael Bell — July 15

Florida’s ninth execution of 2025—Edward Zakrzewski—did not occur until July 31. That one is personal (and I wrote about it here: ZAK’s Story.. It is appropriate to bring it up here as the anniversary of his execution by the state of Florida is very close. It seems that Ron DeSantis was on a personal mission to execute as many veterans as possible in as short a time as possible. I also spoke with other veterans at a press conference and major media event in Tallahassee around this same time, when it seemed that all he was killing were veterans.

By July 22 last year, Florida had executed eight people. By July 22 this year, it had executed ten - two more than at the same point in its record-breaking year.

It created quite the media stir, but in the end, Ron DeSantis did what he always does - he ignored our pleas. He continued to execute the least-deserving , most valiant of our citizens. And, that is what he continues to do. Ignore our pleas.

As of July 22, 2026, Florida has executed 11 military veterans since Ron DeSantis took office. That is 11 of the 38 people executed during his administration—nearly 29 percent.

They are:

• Bobby Joe Long — Army/Vietnam veteran, executed in 2019

• Duane Owen — Army veteran, executed in 2023

• Edward James — Army veteran, executed in 2025

• Jeffrey Hutchinson — Army Ranger and Gulf War veteran, executed in 2025

• Edward Zakrzewski — Air Force veteran, executed in 2025

• Kayle Bates — National Guard veteran, executed in 2025

• Norman Grim — Navy veteran, executed in 2025

• Bryan Jennings — Marine Corps veteran, executed in 2025

• Richard Randolph — Army veteran, executed in 2025

• Dusty Ray Spencer — Marine Corps veteran, executed June 25, 2026

• Dennis Sochor — Army paratrooper, executed July 14, 2026

Ron DeSantis, himself a Navy veteran and governor of what he calls the “most veteran-friendly state in America,” has now sent 11 fellow military veterans into Florida’s execution chamber.

Signed Florida death warrants still pending

As of July 21, Florida has three additional executions scheduled under signed warrants:

July 28, 2026

James Aren Duckett - 12:00 noon

Duckett’s execution had previously been scheduled for March 31 but was stayed to permit additional DNA testing. After the testing produced no conclusive result, the stay was lifted and the execution was rescheduled.

Dominick Anthony Occhicone Jr. - 6:00 p.m.

Occhicone is currently 80 years old. His underlying offense occurred in 1986, and he was sentenced to death in 1987.

If both executions proceed, Florida will conduct two executions on the same day - the first time it has done so since May 12, 1964, and the first double execution of Florida’s modern death-penalty era. They would become Florida’s 11th and 12th executions of 2026.

August 18, 2026

William Frances Silvia Jr. - 6:00 p.m.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed Silvia’s death warrant in July, setting his execution for August 18. If all three pending executions proceed, Florida will have carried out 13 executions by the middle of August 2026.

The bigger emerging picture

Florida executed 19 people during all of 2025. By August 18 of this year, it may already have executed 13 more. That would mean 32 executions in approximately 20 months - a pace that cannot reasonably be described as routine administration of a longstanding law. It represents a planned, organized and hastened in the state’s use of death warrants.

And speaking of acceleration in the process, at Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty (whose site I rely on for a great deal of my statistics and scheduling), sent an email out this morning and I took this attachment from it.

Florida has what is called a “30-day fire drill” where the attorneys are forced to go through the rushing insanity of briefing and arguing and litigating their case to save a - possibly innocent - life.

The phrase originated with former Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente. In the 2018 case of José Jimenez, the governor signed the warrant on July 18 and scheduled the execution only 27 days later, on August 14. Justice Pariente wrote that the short period had created a “fire drill approach” in which lawyers and courts were forced to race against the clock.

What happens when the warrant is signed

The signed warrant changes everything immediately.

Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.851 says that warrant litigation must take priority over every other case. Judges may cancel or reschedule other hearings and trials. Normal postconviction time limits essentially disappear, replaced by deadlines built backward from the execution date. A case-management conference must be held quickly, and the judge establishes a schedule for motions, hearings, rulings, transcripts and appellate review.

For the defense lawyers, the clock begins running at once. They must:

• meet repeatedly with the condemned prisoner;

• review decades of trial transcripts, appeals and prior postconviction litigation;

• identify anything earlier lawyers missed;

• search for newly discovered evidence or withheld records;

• locate witnesses who may have scattered, died or forgotten critical details;

• retain doctors, psychologists, neurologists, forensic specialists or execution-protocol experts;

• investigate the prisoner’s present physical and mental condition;

• prepare requests for public records;

• file motions for relief and stays of execution;

• and prepare simultaneously for proceedings in the circuit court, Florida Supreme Court and possibly the federal courts.

Some claims cannot properly be investigated until a warrant exists. Competency to be executed, for example, concerns the prisoner’s present mental condition. Challenges based on the specific execution protocol, drugs or medical risks may also become ripe only once an execution is imminent. Justice Pariente specifically warned that such warrant-based claims require time that Florida’s shortened schedule does not provide.

And with Florida’s unique veil of secrecy surrounding virtually everything surrounding their protocols, drugs and “means and measures,” challenging those things are made nearly impossible. They have been caught lying and withholding information such as improper inventorying of chemicals used in the process of executing a human being.

The lawyers are not being given a fresh opportunity to retry the case. Under Rule 3.851, every motion filed after the warrant is treated as a successive postconviction motion.

That means counsel must establish not only that a constitutional violation or serious factual problem exists, but also why it was not - and could not reasonably have been - raised before. Generally, the claim must involve:

• previously unknowable facts

• a newly established constitutional right made retroactive

• or qualifying neglect by prior postconviction counsel.

The principal successive motion is ordinarily limited to 25 pages, excluding attachments.

Public-records investigation is also restricted. Counsel must identify the missing records specifically, demonstrate a diligent prior search, explain their relevance and show that the request is not merely broad or burdensome. In certain older cases, requests for newly created or previously unproduced records must be initiated within ten days of the warrant.

So the lawyers are expected to find something new - but they are not allowed simply to go fishing for it.

Then the courts begin moving

The trial judge may deny the motion without an evidentiary hearing. When a hearing is allowed, witnesses and experts must be assembled quickly, evidence introduced, transcripts prepared and an order written almost immediately. The complete record is then transmitted directly to the Florida Supreme Court for expedited review.

If the Florida Supreme Court denies relief, counsel may have only hours to complete a petition and stay application for the United States Supreme Court. In Jeffrey Hutchinson’s 2025 case, the Florida Supreme Court denied relief just over 24 hours before his execution, forcing his lawyers to seek United States Supreme Court intervention on the day he was scheduled to die. His attorneys argued that Florida’s truncated schedule forced them to submit precisely the kind of last-minute pleadings courts ordinarily criticize.

Why “fire drill” is an accurate description

It means lawyers sleeping in their offices. It means living on fast food for days on end, getting a good, healthy prepared meal when the litigating team finally gathers for a meal to grieve the loss of their client. It means investigators working through the night. It means experts being asked to examine a mentally ill or medically fragile prisoner and produce defensible opinions within days. It means legal briefs being researched, written and filed while hearings are already being prepared and the next appeal is being drafted.

And now, with Florida signing warrants one after another, sometimes within hours of a preceding execution, it can mean one legal team handling several fires at the same time. That is precisely what is happening with Mr. Occhicone and Mr. Silvia (above).

The state spends decades keeping a man buried beneath a sentence of death. Then, when it finally chooses him, it suddenly declares that there is no time left. That is the real obscenity of the 30-day fire drill:

Now, in an even greater assault on humanity, he is executing two on the same day: July 28th, 2026. At noon, Florida will kill James Duckett and at 6:00pm, they will strap Dominick Occhicone to the same gurney and inject lethal poisons into him.

When will it end, and at what cost? At what expense to our humanity?

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Healing is not only for you - it is also for me, and my time grows short so I want to examine as much as I can before all the sand dribbles out into the bottom of the glass.

You have heard, have you not, that we all have an exact twin somewhere in the world? How about that there are parallel universes existing alongside our own? Is there any proof of these things? I think there may be - but it took me 55 years to discover it. And I discovered it not through sweaty, diligent and exhausting effort, but through the magnanimous gift of a friend.

I was in the midst of my 36th year of a LWOP sentence in one of the worst prisons in the country - Angola - and one which I had always believed I would never walk out of alive. 11 years later, howe…

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I read something the other day, and it really affected me. It had the affect of causing me to reconsider my own position and what I was hiding.

Here’s what I read: Credit to (I added the emphasis)

Repeat after me:

What happened to me explains some of my struggles.

It does not define the rest of my life.

My past gets a chapter.

It doesn’t get the final page.

Wow. So….after really thinking about this (for, something like 5 minutes!), I came to the conclusion that it was alright for me to finally talk about something(s) that I believe shaped my life. And those things need to come out and be examined…and to finally be talked about. This is one of those things, and one of those chapters. It is not the final page.

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The Supreme Court’s ruling was not a technicality.

On June 29, 2026, the Louisiana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the factual-innocence ruling issued by Judge Alvin Sharp of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish.

This was the court’s first major application of Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure Article 926.2.

That law does not allow relief merely because a trial was “imperfect” or a conviction has become questionable. It requires new, reliable and noncumulative evidence proving - clearly and convincingly - that no rational juror would convict if the new evidence were known.

Duncan met that burden. He was represented by a stellar team of attorneys: Naila Campbell of Mwalimu Center for Justice; C. Scott Greene (Ret.), Christian Bro…

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So, today I did the thing of today’s world where I just asked Google, and it promptly gave me the answer:

So, Google did that for me, but it did not get the ingredients out of the refrigerator for me, did not measure them out, did not grease the skillet, did not turn the burner knob, did not tell me when it was time to put the onions, tomatoes and cheese in, when to fold the eggs over, nor when to flip it. In short, it did not cook my breakfast. It did, however, let me know exactly ho…

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This is my 6th (and final!) article of my series on the relationship between Angola State Penitentiary (Louisiana) and the media, the press and the public. I’ll touch on a few of the topics covered in the first 5 articles, simply to give you a refresher or for those recent subscribers, an understanding of our topic. So, you’ll see some things that we’ve already covered. I hope that THIS article will give you a very clear and very real understanding of Angola and the curious love/hate affair that it has with the media.

It has been fun - and at times excruciatingly painful! - to develop this series, as it forced me to recall and encounter so many memories. However, it also reminded me of how many good friends I have out here and still in there, behind those fences, many of whom will never come home. Know that I pray for them all, every single day. I was blessed with a 2nd Chance, and they may never get that.

But, it is important that their voices are heard and that they are not forgotten.

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This was almost unheard of, so it can be used as a barometer for Wardens. The only comparable previous event that I can recall was that of Warden Duffy of San Quentin fame (I read his story decades ago, and the memory of it stuck with me, so I couldn’t help but bring him into this article) and of empathetic wardens.

Exit Whitley Stage Left and enter - the infamous Warden Burl Cain, Stage Right. It will be difficult for me to write this in a neutral sort of unbiased tone, and I think that’s what I’m supposed to do, correct? And the difficulty comes in the fact that we (h…

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The story of The Angolite cannot be told only as the story of prisoner-journalists, like Wooden Ear, Rideau, Sinclair, Myers and the string of Associate Editors.

It is also the story of Wardens.

That is one of the largest contradictions in Angola’s celebrated prison magazine. It called itself “uncensored.” It won national awards. It published hard reporting on rape, executions, life sentences, corruption, prison aging, and the human cost of permanent punishment. It gave men inside the largest maximum-security prison in America a platform to tell the public what life behind the fences really looked like.

But The Angolite was never free in the same way an outside newspaper is free.

Its office was inside the prison. Its writers were prisoners. Its equipment existed by permission. Its access depended on internal clearance. Its survival depended, always, on the disposition of the man at the top.

In the free…

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