Death Penalty News

The case of prison convert Will Speer shows the significance of ‘peers’ leading ministry behind bars. The first death row prisoner to help lead a death row ministry in Texas’s Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a state prison with maximum security units, is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, October 26. On Tuesday, Texas denied Will Speer ’s application for clemency, meaning his execution will go forward.

LIVINGSTON—If Texas Death Row inmate William Keith Speer is executed as scheduled Oct. 26, two men whose lives have been transformed by God will be present—one on the death chamber gurney and one in the adjacent viewing area. Speer is a convicted two-time killer who committed his life to Christ while in prison and was baptized in June 2022 after spending six months in the faith-based program at the Allan B. Polunksy Unit, a maximum-security facility near Livingston. Later, he was selected as inmate coordinator for the program and has mentored fellow prisoners on Death Row.

The German Baptist Church in Pforzheim has been the centre of controversy since it was discovered that they believe that gay people deserve the death penalty. Other churches distance themselves from the statements and call for criminal charges. “We believe that homosexuality is a sin and a shame that God punishes with the death penalty”, the website of the Baptists in Pforzheim reads. The believers base this view on several Bible texts, such as Leviticus 20,13, Romans 1,31, 2 Peter 2,6, and Jude 7. In a letter to Pforzheimer Zeitung, pastor Anselm Urban explains that Leviticus clearly says that men who lie together should be put to death. He points out that the illness of AIDS proves that God condemns gay people, as it is “almost exclusively transmitted by sodomites.” 

After Craig Baxley connected a plastic tube to vials of drugs to stop the heart of a condemned South Carolina inmate, he asked God to forgive him. In the bathroom near the execution room, Baxley sank to his knees and recited the Lord’s Prayer, praying, “Deliver us from evil.” “Yet something evil seemed to stick,” the State reports. “From that day on, Baxley felt like a different person. Nightmares replaced his previously sound sleep. Painful knots invaded his stomach. Anytime he became nervous, his hands started to drip with sweat like they did in the death chamber.” Baxley was a former Marine who had trained next to friends who died in the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing. He had seen men stabbed to death in prison after he began work for the South Carolina Department of Corrections. But his friends noticed a change after the execution. “A Southern Baptist who attended church every Sunday,” the State reported, “Baxley became convinced that killing others for the government had cond...

If you give a man in a Texas execution chamber the right to a prayer, is he entitled to two? Or three? Can he ask for candles? Or Communion? If the United States Supreme Court says a condemned man has the religious right to have his pastor touch his foot while the state injects a lethal dose of chemicals into his veins, then will the court also have to allow a pastor to touch a man’s hand, his head, or even the place where the needle pierces the skin? The justices quizzed attorney Seth Kretzer about the slippery slope of death penalty prayer on Tuesday morning, as they weighed whether the First Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), passed by Congress in 2000, give 37-year-old John Henry Ramirez the right to have his pastor lay hands on him and pray aloud when the state of Texas puts him to death. Ramirez committed a brutal murder in 2004. He stabbed a convenience store clerk 29 times and slashed his throat to steal $1.25 in a drug-related robb...

John Ramirez was scheduled to die Wednesday. His last request to the state had been to let his pastor hold on to him as he died, something the state denied. The high court wants to hear oral arguments on the matter later this year. Nearly three hours after John Ramirez was scheduled to die in a Texas prison Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court halted his execution. It's the third time since 2019 that the nation's high court has stopped a Texas execution over the state prison system's rules on how religious advisers can attend to condemned prisoners as they die. In a short order Wednesday night, the court asked that oral arguments be brought before the justices in October or November. Ramirez, 37, was convicted of capital murder in 2008 and sentenced to die for the 2004 murder and robbery of Pablo Castro, a convenience store clerk in Corpus Christi. Court records state Ramirez had stabbed Castro 29 times during a robbery spree to get drug money with two women. Castro had $1.25 ...

Q&A with SBC minister Dana Moore on the power of prayer in a state death chamber. Interview by Daniel Silliman. John Henry Ramirez is scheduled to die on September 8. The state of Texas will execute him by lethal injection for the 2004 murder of 45-year-old convenience store clerk Pablo Castro. Ramirez was convicted of stabbing Castro 29 times in the process of stealing $1.25 to buy drugs. Now, 17 years later, he will be put to death for his crime. When that happens, Ramirez would like to have his pastor lay hands on him. He filed suit in federal court last week claiming he has a religious right to have Dana Moore, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, Texas, touch him while he dies. According to Ramirez’s lawyer, Seth Kretzer, the prison’s current policy allows doctors and guards to touch an inmate during execution, but does not allow spiritual touch. Kretzer argues that this “burdens Mr. Ramirez’s free exercise of his Christian faith at his exact time of death...

Russell Moore was condemned to the electric chair in America for the brutal murder of a rich socialite. This is what he told us from there. Florida prison inmate number 083475, James Hudson Savage, Race Unknown, knew he’d never get out of his jail cell except in a body bag. In reality he was Russell Thomas Moore, a Yorta Yorta and Wemba Wemba Aboriginal from Murray River territory, who had been locked up on Florida’s death row. Incarcerated 16,000km from the home he never knew but had come to yearn for since being sentenced to die in Florida’s infamous electric chair, Russell feared he was doomed never to set foot on Australian soil again. In the end, he would instead be lowered into it, in a coffin surrounded by relatives who had never met him, but knew his tragic story. Even 20 years ago, in the cellblock of 1 of the 20 prisons he was shuttled between in the decades he spent in Florida’s prison system, Russell told me he didn’t expect to get out alive. At that point all hope had not ...

"The world looks at it like, there's Pastor Fritts, there's that lone wolf. There's Pastor Fritts, that one guy. That one Baptist pastor that's just a lunatic. That's just crazy. Guess what? There's a lot of people that believe exactly like I believe." (CNN) -- Authorities in Tennessee are reviewing all pending cases involving a Knox County Sheriff's Office detective after he gave a sermon at his church that called for the government to execute members of the LGBTQ community. "They are worthy of death," Grayson Fritts said in a June 2 sermon at All Scripture Baptist Church, a small church in Knoxville that he leads. The church posted the sermon online and then removed it, according to The Washington Post. The video was picked up by the Tennessee Holler, an independent liberal news outlet, and edited into a six-minute clip. "God has instilled the power of civil government to send the police in 2019 out to the LGBT f...