The J-TAC

Issue date: 4/23/09 Section: Features

Media Credit: Nathan Bural After execution, some death row inmates are buried in graves similar to this one recently dug at a prison cemetery. If Derrick Johnson's appeals fail, he will become the 437th person to be executed in the modern era of capital punishmnet in the U.S.

While other girls my age were playing with dolls or dress up, I often was dusting caskets or vacuuming the parlor floor of the funeral home where my step dad was a mortician. Death, an awkward, squeamish topic for many, was the subject at dinner table discussions at my home in Vernon, Texas.

When my journalism class at Tarleton decided to collect and analyze the final statements of more than a thousand prisoners condemned to die, I decided I wanted to interview someone on death row and, if possible, witness an execution.

I set out with determination to identify prisoners with pending execution dates in Texas. More than three hundred prisoners are on Texas death row, the state that leads the nation in the number of executions. But only a few have an actual execution date at any given time.

Two of the men I contacted, Derrick Lamone Johnson and Jose Garcia Briseno, agreed to let me witness their executions. But when I tried to arrange interviews with them before their execution, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice threw a wrench in my plans.

TDC won't let someone selected by a condemned prisoner as a witness to his execution also interview him as a journalist - so I had to decide whether to talk to a man before his death or watch him as the state took his life.

The way things worked out, I wound up, on April 1, sitting three feet across from a man counting the days to his death. A sheet of Plexiglas was the only thing that separated the two of us. The glass was weathered with scratches, each with a death row story of its own.

Johnson, according to published reports, was condemned for the 1999 abduction and rape of a female security guard from Dallas. His victim, LaTausha Curry, was 25 when she died - just three years older than I was when I interviewed her killer. According to published reports, Johnson confessed to police that he and a 15-year-old accomplice raped and killed Curry, who had a 4-year-old child, and told officers where her body could be found. Johnson has spent the last ten years on death row waiting for his execution, which is now scheduled for April 30.

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