“I bid you farewell, my sister, likewise to this
world of sin.
But ’tis hard, ’tis hard, my sister, to part from
friends and kin.
To be led like a brute to the slaughter, to die
by the hangman’s hand.
To perish like a guilty felon, condemned by
the laws of the land.”

— George Sherry, convicted of murder, hanging, Illinois.
Executed June 21, 1878

After a night of drink, slaughterhouse co-workers Sherry, age twenty-one, and accomplice Jeremiah Connolly, nineteen, assaulted four people before hitting a young girl, Rose McConville. When her uncle Hugh McConville intervened, the men attacked him. One stabbed him just beneath his heart, and the assailants proceeded to kick him. He died. Arrested two days later, each man blamed one another, and they were hanged together. The murder was called by the Chicago Tribune “the most cold-blooded in the criminal annals of Chicago.”

“I think it’s best for me to just say nothing at all.”

— Karl Hammond, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed June 21, 1995

Hammond had been released from prison but was under supervision due to a rape and burglary charge prior to the murder that put him on death row. During his release, he raped and stabbed to death an FBI secretary, Donna Lynn Vetter, in San Antonio. On March 30, in Bexar County Jail for capital murder, Hammond escaped when a jailer left open a door to a visitation area; however, police recaptured him. The negligence that allowed Hammond to escape led to the firings of two jailers and two sergeants.

After being carried into the execution chamber:
“I want everyone to know I did not walk to this because this is straight-up murder. I am not going to play a part in my own murder. No one should have to do that . . . I do not know all of your names and I don’t know how you feel about me. And whether you believe it or not, I did not kill them . . . You have to move past it. It is time to move on.”

— Lamont Reese, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed June 20, 2006

Admitted drug dealer Reese, twenty-eight, protested his own execution by not walking to the death chamber. He did say, however, that he was glad it was now instead of “10 or 20 years” in jail, according to the Associated Press. A triple murder charge had resulted in Reese’s death sentence. After he delivered his final words, he gasped.

At that moment, the AP reported, “his mother, Brenda Reese, began pounding with her fists on the chamber window and began screaming repeatedly, ‘They killed my baby.’ “She kicked two holes in the death chamber wall and eventually was removed from the chamber. She sobbed loudly as she walked from the prison and nearly collapsed as she reached the prison administration building across the street.”