The Reverend Carroll Pickett, for­mer chap­lain on death row in Texas:

Ninety-five times, I per­son­al­ly walked a man who was sen­tenced to die to the death cham­ber in Texas. From the very first per­son exe­cut­ed by lethal injec­tion, through 16 years of walk­ing those eight steps from the hold­ing cell in the death house to the impec­ca­bly clean gur­ney in the death cham­ber, I led a man — some were old­er, some con­vict­ed in their teens, some men­tal­ly ill, some very hard­ened by life and, I ful­ly know, some who were innocent. 

Each one was dif­fer­ent. They were brought to my unit ear­ly in the morn­ing, usu­al­ly, to be held for death at mid­night, so I was with them for 18 hours, and in some cas­es even longer if their cas­es went to appel­late courts and stays were held until 3, 4 or 5am — or the lat­est which was 6.20am the next day. 

More than 200 men came to the death cham­ber in my time as chap­lain there, and of those, 95 were mur­dered by the state in the name of ​“jus­tice”, but in all real­i­ty, it was ​“retal­i­a­tion” or ​“pun­ish­ment” or sim­ply ​“mur­der by law”. 

During those many hours I spent talk­ing with, most­ly lis­ten­ing to, the men who would die after mid­night when nee­dles filled with three chem­i­cals were insert­ed into their bod­ies, there was one ques­tion that was asked by many of those wait­ing to die: ​“How can we say that killing is wrong if we con­tin­ue killing in the name of the state?” 

( Edinburgh Evening News, July 18, 2005, quot­ing The Reverend Carroll Pickett, author of Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain). 
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