“Ah, just, ah, sorry y’all. I . . . tried everything I could to get in touch with y’all to express how sorry I am. I, I never was right after that incident happened…I was raised by the California Youth Authority. I can’t really pinpoint where it started, what happened, but really believe that’s just the bottom line: what happened to me was in California. I was in their reformatory schools and penitentiary, but they create monsters in there. That’s it, I have nothing else to say.”

— David Long, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed December 8, 1999

Long was convicted of the 1986 murders of three Texas women, an act he later described as “satanic.” Two days before he was to be executed, Long attempted suicide and was admitted to intensive care. His public defenders claimed they were not granted adequate funding to fully assess Long’s mental condition during his trial, yet thengovernor George W. Bush funded a full medical team to fly with Long to his execution. Immediately before he received lethal injection, Long vomited the charcoal solution used to detoxify his body
of drugs.

“Good-bye all of you and God bless you . . . Mr. Woodard [the warden], don’t do this to me. Think of my boy. Can’t you think of my baby? Isn’t there anybody who will help me? Is nobody going to help me?”

— Anna Marie Hahn, convicted of murder, electric chair, Ohio.
Executed December 7, 1938

Hahn was convicted of poisoning four elderly people, prosecutors claimed, with the motive of stealing their money after a series of losses at the horse track. She had been found with crystallized poison in her possession, the same substance that crime scientists found in the stomach lining of all the victims. Authorities described Hahn as calm throughout her trial and incarceration, but she began to break down when led to the death chamber, collapsing and crying frantically for her life.

“I want to say I hold no grudges. I hate no one. I love my family. Tell everyone on death row to keep the faith and don’t give up.”

— Carlos de Luna, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed December 7, 1989

Although De Luna maintained his innocence in the murder of Wanda Lopez, a filling-station clerk in Corpus Christi, he did not use his final words to protest it. But De Luna maintained that the true murderer was actually Carlos Hernandez, a man who resembled him. Hernandez died in prison on another charge, and De Luna’s story was covered by Steve Mills and Maurice Possley in the Chicago Tribune.