Nobody does this work alone. Nobody survives it alone either. What follows is my attempt to name the people who kept me standing while I wrote, and the people who keep me standing the rest of the time.
To my wife, Dr. Emily Hood: You have loved our family through every warrant, every sleepless night, every flight out to a state preparing to kill someone I had come to love. You let me go each time without any promise about who would come home. I have never been able to find language to describe the immensity of my love for you. Suffice to say, you are the backbone of everything I do.
To Jeff, Phillip, Quinley, Madeleine, and Lucas: You are being raised by a man who keeps vanishing into prisons and returning with portraits of the dead. You asked the hard questions out loud, and you never once let me answer them as anybody but your dad. When my confidence fails that this country will someday stop killing people, I look at the five of you and find it again. You are the reason I keep going.
To Kat Bodrie, my editor: I brought you grief and fury in roughly equal measure and you helped me build an argument out of it. There is not a paragraph here you did not sharpen. Whatever reads clearly, reads that way because of you.
To Ruth Longenecker, my publicist: You have worked to make sure these pages reach readers rather than a warehouse. Thank you for believing the argument was worth carrying into the open.
To Bishop James St. George, who has stood behind this ministry since the beginning: You blessed a calling that must have looked strange from the outside, and you have never once wavered since. Your pastoral care is the reason I can walk into those rooms and walk back out still myself. I do not think I would have lasted without you.
To the thirteen men I have walked with into the chamber — Scott Eizember, Arthur Brown, Anthony Sanchez, Casey McWhorter, Kenneth Smith, Michael Smith, David Hosier, Emmanuel Littlejohn, Steven Nelson, Anthony Wainwright, Anthony Boyd, Dusty Spencer, and Will Silvia: You let me stand beside you at the end, and you asked me to say afterward what I had seen. That request is the reason this book exists. I have kept it as faithfully as I know how, and I am not finished keeping it.
To the eight people on Idaho’s death row: While these pages were being written, you were waiting. Whatever comes next will land on eight particular human beings, not on a policy category. I have tried never to lose sight of that.
To Gary Gilmore, John Albert Taylor, Ronnie Lee Gardner, Brad Sigmon, Mikal Mahdi, and Stephen Corey Bryant, the six men this country has shot since 1977: I did not know any of you, and I stood in the room for none of your deaths. Nearly everything argued in these pages is built out of what was done to your bodies and what was recorded afterward. I have tried to write about you as men and not as evidence.
To the journalists and lawyers who pried loose autopsy reports the state had no intention of releasing: Most of what can be known about these deaths is known because you refused to let it go unrecorded. The evidence in this book is largely your doing.
To Krista Shaw, my operations director: You hold the machinery together so that I can do what I do. Very little would function without you. Thank you for your constant friendship and unflinching support.
To Michelle Lott, who directs my work in Florida, in the state that now executes more people than any other: You took on the hardest ground in the country and do not flinch.
To Ashley Randolph, my family liaison: You keep making sure that our connections are not just temporary.
To Michael Orr, my friend and a member of the Board of the Execution Intervention Project: You have given this ministry your judgment and your time, and you have given both without ever making me ask twice. Thank you for helping steer it well.
To Bishop Durrell Watkins, who serves on the Board of the Execution Intervention Project: You bring a pastor’s instincts to the governing table, which is exactly what an organization like this one needs. Thank you for your counsel and your steadiness.
To Wendy Ramage, my dear friend and dean of the Institute for Death Row Correspondence: You have built something that keeps people connected to the world outside when the world outside would rather forget them. Letters matter more than anyone on the outside understands.
To Rob Dunham, friend and teacher: Much of how I understand this system, I learned from you. Your rigor is a standard I keep trying to meet.
To Randy Gardner: Your brother Ronnie appears in these pages, shot by the state of Utah. Writing about him while knowing you has kept me honest about what a firing squad actually costs a family. Thank you for your friendship and for refusing to let Ronnie become a footnote.
To Sister Helen Prejean: You made this vocation visible long before I entered it. The path I walk was cleared by you.
To Bishop Robert Griffin, for your prayers and your presence in Florida: Thank you.
To Esther Brown, whose advocacy and friendship have carried this work through years when it might have stopped: Thank you for your stubbornness. I have known few greater friends than you.
To Greg Gardner, my attorney and my friend: You have fought for this ministry in rooms I could not enter and against opponents I could not have faced by myself.
To Alli Sullivan, who chairs the Board of the Execution Intervention Project and who is one of my dearest friends: You have carried the responsibility of leading this ministry and the harder, quieter work of being someone I can tell the truth to when I come home from these rooms. Both matter enormously. Thank you for the years you have given to this.
To Don Fulton, who has been my friend for a very long time: You knew me before any of this, and you have stayed through all of it. Company like that is not a small thing when the work is what it is.
To Grace Hanna, my friend and confidant: We go about this work differently, and we have never pretended otherwise. That difference is exactly what makes your counsel consistently worth having. Thank you.
To Stephanie Anderson, my friend: You have given me an ear through a great many hours that were hard to sit inside.
To Abraham Bonowitz: You have been organizing against this machine longer than most of us have been paying attention, and the scaffolding you built holds up everything the rest of us attempt. Thank you, brother.
To Joel Fendelman and James Sanchez: You have given these stories a form that reaches people prose cannot. Thank you for staying with it.
To the two anonymous donors who made this book possible, one of whom is also one of my dearest friends: You did not want your names here, so they are not. But you should know that your confidence in this project is the reason it became a book rather than a stack of notes, and that your friendship has meant as much to me as your generosity.
To everyone who gives to the Execution Intervention Project and everyone who sustains it with their labor: the volunteers, the letter writers, the people at the midnight vigils, the ones who send money every month without fail. This ministry has no single author. It runs on ordinary people deciding, over and over, that the condemned are worth showing up for.
And to the women and men held on death rows across this country, especially the ones who fill my days and whose names cannot appear here: The waiting has not made you invisible to me. You are still in my prayers, and the work goes on until it is finished.