Death Row Welcomes You

Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber

By: Steven Hale

Narrated by: Tim Fannon

In 2018, after nearly a decade's hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal.

In Death Row Welcomes You, Hale traces the lives of condemned prisoners at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution-and the people who come to visit them. What brought them-the visitors and convicted murderers alike-to death row? The visitors are, for the most part, not activists-or at least they did not start out that way. Nor are they the sort of killer-obsessed death row groupies such settings sometimes attract. In fact, in most cases they are average people whose lives, not to mention their views on the death penalty, were turned upside down by a face-to-face meeting with a death row prisoner.

Combining the fascinating topics of crime, death, and life inside prison, Hale writes with humanity, empathy, and insight earned by befriending death row prisoners . . . and standing witness to their final moments.

©2023 Steven Hale (P)2024 Tantor

Compelling and tragic.

Well written, thoughtful and empathetic. An indictment of the “Good Christian“ Bill Lee and the many other governors of Tennessee who allow this barbarity.

Deep dive on death penalty in Tennessee

Lots of short stories of people who ended up on death row, how they got their, their family life growing up; and their life now.