This story is produced in collaboration with the Institute for Public Service Reporting.
In 2020, Tennessee suspended death row executions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then there were ongoing delays over lethal injection protocols.
But five years later, an execution is scheduled for May 22, depending upon legal challenges to lethal injection.
Experts say that while the punishment is becoming less common, its use particularly in southern states continues to raise questions about its historical roots.
In his book, “Death Row Welcomes You,” journalist Steven Hale examined the lives of men waiting to be executed, and the small group of regular visitors to Tennessee’s death row. He said that over the years, Tennessee has actually slowed the rate of executions, despite the number that are scheduled.
“It does seem possible to me that we’re in kind of the death throes of the death penalty,” Hale said, noting a diminishing public demand for it. “On a local level, fewer and fewer prosecutors are seeking death sentences, fewer juries are handing them out, and so, to put it bluntly, we’re not refilling the death rows around the country.”
For retired criminal justice professor Margaret Vandiver, the death penalty itself is a vestige of America’s fraught racial history. In her book “Lethal Punishment,” she noted historical correlations between mob lynchings and legal executions.
“There are a lot of mechanisms of how historic events can influence broad modern social patterns that we haven’t worked out," she said. "But this is really strongly suggestive that the legacy of lynching did not dissipate.”
Vandiver said that connections may remain between judicial punishments and growing phenomena such as hate crimes, housing segregation and white supremacist mobilization.
The Death Penalty Information Center lists 27 states that currently uphold the death penalty. Twelve of those are in the South -- states that also had the most lynchings recorded between 1882 and 1968. Hale says location matters – in both lynchings and executions.
“I mean, we have a situation where you can commit the same crime, the same murder in ten jurisdictions and maybe only two of them you're likely to get the prosecutor seeking the death penalty against you," he said. "So that’s a similarity, and also one of the big problems with the death penalty right now.”
From 1916 to when Tennessee banned the death penalty in 1960, a majority of those executed here were Black -- many for the crime of rape. The state revived the punishment in 2000. Since then, all but one of 13 convicted murderers were white.
But the Death Penalty Information Center reports that more than 200 death row inmates nationwide have been exonerated in the last fifty years, three from Tennessee. Hundreds more have had capital sentences overturned due to exonerations or prosecutorial misconduct.
Neither Hale nor Vandiver say the gravity of crimes should be discounted. But their work aims to show systemic flaws and to humanize the issue.
“I do think when I wrote this book the people that I met who are regular visitors to death row, what they all told me and what I ended up experiencing myself was that proximity makes all the difference," Hale said. "If you can get close to this issue or to the people on death row and their stories it changes people’s perspective.”
Hale says he’s come to view many death row inmates as people with troubled pasts -- more than the sum of the worst thing they’ve ever done.