Hill Country Authors Series with Lawrence Wright

Highlighted Book: ‘The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row’

One of the best narrative journalists in the business takes on the death penalty in his home state.

Wright is well known for his books on al Qaeda, Scientology, and other “closeted worlds.” This book looks into two of them: the women’s death row in a prison outside Waco, Texas, and a breakaway convent banned by the Vatican. A lay deacon had approached the nuns and asked that they minister to the convicts, which led to a crisis: The nuns were contemplatives, spending most of their time in silence. Finally, the nuns consented, although neither they nor the death-row inmates were quite sure what to do next—except talk. In doing so, they learned that the world of prison is in many ways similar to the monastic withdrawal from the world: “The women on the row were astonished that the nuns had chosen to live a life nearly as confined as their own, in rooms they, too, called cells.” Over the years, the women grew to trust and care for the others, with deepening spirituality on both sides and with plenty of advocates and prison reformers on their side. The author agrees with the late Kinky Friedman that he’s not opposed to the death penalty so much as he is putting the wrong people to death. Examining the cases of the inmates, he finds commonalities: sexual abuse, addiction, mental illness, and PTSD. Add to them, as Wright does, the elements of race, sexual orientation, and class, as well as inadequate legal representation, and you have a recipe for systemic injustice. In one instance, Wright, reporting while quietly advocating, suggests that at least one death-row resident is innocent. The judge who tried her has lately concurred, but, at this writing, Wright notes, she remains on death row, along with the other “doomed ladies [who] waited for the State of Texas to kill them, one by one.”

A deftly told story of crime, punishment, and hope.