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A continuing moral dilemma faced by American society. Polls over the last decade reveal that Americans are all over the social and political map when it comes to the death penalty.

I know a thing or two about the death penalty. I was under a death sentence for six years before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 vacated it which was ultimately replaced with a life without parole sentence. The state of Louisiana did not carry out a single execution during that period of time.

I spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, compiling an impressive record of individual achievement and rehabilitation earning my parole release in 2006.

Renaldo Hudson knows more a thing or two about the death penalty as well. He spent 13 years on Illinois’ death row before his death sentence was also vacated and replaced with a life without parole sentence. The state of Illinois carried out twelve executions during his stay on death row.

Hudson spent 37 years in the Illinois prison system, also compiling an impressive record of individual achievement and rehabilitation earning his executive commutation release in 2020.

A Facebook friend recently sent me a link to an Op-Ed piece that Hudson published in Thruthout (an independent news outlet that focuses on injustices) on December 4, 2021 titled “I Survived Death Row, But I’ll Never Escape It.” The piece was well-written and amply stated the best case against the death penalty.

But there are two points from which I depart company with Hudson.

He said he felt “horror” as he watched twelve “friends” escorted from death row by “stolidly and indifferently” prison guards.

Four of those twelve friends were convicted of killing 41 people—28 of were children killed by the infamous “the Clown” serial killer John Wayne Gacy and 6 were killed execution style by Raymond Lee Stewart during a six-day crime spree because of his racial hatred of white people, for which he said he “deserved the death penalty.”

I could not, and would not, call John Wayne Gacy orRaymond Lee Stewart “friends” who were victims of a grave injustice by their executions.

I do not believe in the death penalty—even for the worst of the worst among us. That’s why I don’t think Gacy or Stewart should have been executed because no one should be executed, even the Adolph Eichmann’s among us. Those kinds of executions inflict more damage to the fundamental principle of individual salvation needed in a humane, decent society than the human horrors they inflicted upon society.

But don’t expect me to shed a tear about their execution.

The second point I take issue with in Hudson’s piece is the portrait he paints that guards and other people involved in the execution ritual are indifferent or callous. There have been, I am sure, indifferent and callous people involved in the more than 1500 executions carried out in the United States since 1976.

However, recurring news reports, books, and documentaries have revealed that almost everyone involved in these state-sanctioned executions—guards, chaplains, individuals who coordinate witnesses to the executions, and even the executioners themselves—have suffered some form of PTSD or other serious emotional/religious reservations about their involvement in the executions.

I am by no means a pro-prison guard advocate, but a responsibility to truth demands that what we say about a social issue as complex as the death penalty should be fact-based, not emotional-driven hyperbole.