“There are people all over the world who face things worse than death on a daily basis, and in that sense I consider myself lucky. I cannot find the words to express the sadness I feel for bringing this hurt and pain on my loved ones. I will not ask forgiveness for the decisions I have made in this judicial process, only acceptance. God bless you all.”

— Joe Gonzales, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed September 18, 1996

Gonzales shot and killed fifty-year-old William J. Veader and then made off with cash and other items. The single gunshot was orchestrated to look like a self-inflicted wound, so authorities at first assumed Veader’s death to be a suicide.

The day before his execution:
“They won’t hurt my feelings when they hang me. It is nothing to dread.”

— Eugene Weeks, convicted of robbery and murder, hanging, Iowa.
Executed September 15, 1922

On the morning of Weeks’s execution, he joked with the judge who sentenced him, and asked to be brought to the gallows early so he could address the crowd waiting to see him hang. Weeks spent that time telling the crowd that his accomplice in the murder was not guilty and should not also receive the death penalty. According to reports, Weeks was hung by the first ordained minister to carry out an execution.

“. . . Oh, I would like to say in closing, ‘What about those
Cowboys?’”

— William Prince Davis, convicted of robbery and murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed September 14, 1999

When Davis was twenty-one years old, he shot and killed Richard Lang, an employee of the Red Wing Ice Cream Company. Davis fled with a shotgun and $712. A week later, he returned to burglarize the business. He was convicted in a one-day capital murder trial. From childhood Davis had been in and out of reformatory institutions, and by the time he was executed at age forty-two, he had spent half of his life on death row.