“It has taken me some time, but I have learned that I’m a part of everyone, and everyone is a part of me. And that no matter where I go or how I go, everyone goes with me.”

— Richard Tucker, convicted of murder, electric chair, Georgia.
Executed May 22, 1987

Tucker’s statement was the briefest captured in a collection of subpoenaed Georgia execution tapes, later made into the audio documentary “The Execution Tapes.” He was convicted in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of retired nurse Edna Sandefur.

The ending of Bud Kimball’s six-stanza poem “Bud Kimball’s Philosophy”:

“I’ve been enmeshed and now I must pay
An unjust penalty in my ensnared despair
My eyes are blind by not my mind
Still my heart is kind”

— Earl Bud Kimball, convicted of murder, hanging, California.
Executed May 22, 1936

Kimball, age twenty-one, shot business partner James Kennett twice in the head with a rifle and caved in his skull with a pick after Kennett flashed a knife at him. He was convicted of murder and later admitted to killing twenty-five other men. Kimball later retracted his statement, saying: “I told them all of that stuff out to devilment to get more bananas and cigarettes.”

“An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight. When my innocence is proven I hope Americans will recognize the injustice of the death penalty as all other civilized nations have.”

— Roger K. Coleman, convicted of rape and murder, electric chair, Virginia.
Executed May 20, 1992

A media flurry, including an appearance on the TV talk show Donahue, fueled speculation that Coleman was innocent of killing his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy, despite evidence to the contrary and his failure of a polygraph test. Coleman’s supporters claimed that another man boasted of the killing and that he did not receive adequate counsel. His last meal included a pepperoni pizza, fudge cookies, and a 7-Up.

Posthumous DNA evidence did not exonerate him.