Voices: Who Deserves to Die? Not the 136 People Currently on Death Row in Raleigh.

I’m repeatedly struck by my friend Rodney Taylor’s need to put his voice out into the world. When he and I talk on the phone or exchange messages, he’ll tell me about the novel he’s working on—his third, this time providing social commentary along with the story—and the book of essays that’s gradually coming together. The podcast that started as a blog has been on hiatus for a few months, but he and his collaborators are planning a new set of episodes for 2025. 

And then there’s the youth program he launched around 2015—ostensibly about chess, but ultimately providing mentorship and life lessons to young people—that took place at a community center in New York, where he’s from. Taylor designed the initiative and helped direct it by phone from afar, until COVID put a lid on things. He’s hoping to get back to it eventually; recently he expanded the curriculum from 26 pages to over 200, and will be ready to start things up again when the time is right. 

When I ask Taylor why he’s so determined to have an impact, I can hear the shrug in his voice. “I guess I’ve tried to make the best of my situation, and figure out how can I use what I know to be productive,” he explains. 

I suppose that’s what many of us aim to do with our talents and time, but Taylor’s situation is unusual. Since 1998, he’s been incarcerated in Unit 3 in NC Central Prison in Raleigh: our state’s death row. Half a lifetime ago, 26-year old Taylor was caught up in the drug trade and killed a man in Wilmington while visiting from New York. He was sentenced to death and has been here ever since, waiting to be executed. I met him in 2016 when I began leading a meditation group on the unit, and we stayed in touch after it ended.

Taylor is, of course, far from alone. There are 134 men and two women on death row, all hovering in a kind of limbo. Since the last execution in 2006, North Carolina has been experiencing a de-facto death penalty moratorium: executions have been halted because of lawsuits related to the state’s lethal injection protocol and to racial justice issues around the men’s conviction and sentencing.

Now a group of advocates is pushing to convert that unofficial pause into something more permanent. The North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty is urging Governor Cooper to commute all 136 death sentences to prison terms before he leaves office on December 31. Their campaign has included demonstrations, petitions, op-eds, reports, billboards, and a 136-mile march from Winston-Salem to Raleigh. 

One of their key points is that the current situation could change at any time. 

“The status quo of executions being held at bay can’t last forever,” says Kristin Collins, director of public information at the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a coalition member. Once the lawsuits are resolved—and with Republicans controlling the state Supreme Court, the decisions may well be unfavorable for those on death row—the state could experience a flood of executions.  

And yet, says Collins, “These are people who wouldn’t be sentenced to death today. They’re really old sentences, under very different laws. There are lots of reforms that’ve happened since then.” 

More than a third of the men on Unit 3 are over 60 years old, and the majority were convicted in the 1990s, a distinctly different era in criminal justice and one in which the death penalty had much more public support. Back then, factors like trauma, age, and mental illness were given less weight, and far less attention was paid to issues of racial justice. According to the coalition, nearly half the people on death row were tried by juries that were wholly white or included only one person of color.  

Taylor knows these details: he and the other men are paying attention. Most, like Taylor himself, have filed petitions for clemency through their lawyers. No one’s particularly optimistic. “I’ve been hearing they’re going to get rid of the death penalty since before I got here,” says Taylor. “After 27 years, you’re like, ‘Man, it’s not going to happen.’”

He’s gradually found a way to make peace, some peace at least, with his circumstances. In his early years on “the row,” Taylor recognized that something had gone very wrong in his life for him to wind up there. In response, he says, “all I’ve done since I’ve been here is work on myself and try to be a better person.” In an effort to gain insight into himself and those around him, he writes every day, something he’s loved doing since he was 11. 

He’s not the only one who long ago turned introspective. During the almost three years that I led weekly meditation groups on the  unit, I met many sincere and heartfelt men. Most had been there for decades and had developed very close bonds with one another. Those relationships and their many years in confinement have gradually softened them and worn them smooth.

Taylor says that’s unsurprising. “It’s like a boxed-in life here, but human beings aren’t meant to be boxed in; we’re meant to spread out and explore the world. So when you’re locked inside, you explore your mind, you explore yourself.”

You might say they’re grasping for redemption. That’s an ancient word that comes with heavy religious overtones, but in this case it fits. Many of these men are now very different people than they were when they arrived years ago, without the hard and ugly edges that originally brought them there. Like Taylor, they’ve turned away from their bad deeds and are aiming to make something of themselves. 

To be clear, I don’t believe anyone should be killed as punishment, whether they’ve transformed or not. It’s not fair, just, or even logical. But I do wonder if Gov. Cooper has any sense of what the men on Unit 3 are like now: what they’ve gone through, how they’ve changed. I understand the governor might not be finished with his political career, and commuting more than 100 sentences could be a drag on that future, as well as on the state’s Democratic party writ large. But he’s a good person; I firmly believe that. And he’s the only one who can grant clemency—another ancient word—to the state’s death row residents. The people there have, in a very real sense, done their time. How could executing them now ever be the right thing to do?

Comment on this story at [email protected].