“I guess nobody is going to call, I guess nobody is going to call. . . . Let’s go with it, let’s go with it.”

— Edward Earl Johnson, convicted of murder, gas chamber, Mississippi.
Executed May 20, 1987

Thirty feet from the gas chamber, Johnson sat in his cell and read the Bible, sang hymns, and played chess with family. Although he had no prior criminal record, Johnson had been convicted of shooting town marshal Jake Trest five times. A key witness initially said Johnson was not the killer, then changed her story. Johnson claimed to have been intimidated into a false confession when, he contended, officers threatened him and his grandparents with violence. Johnson and his family maintained his innocence to the end. Until the last moment, he believed a telephone call would halt his execution.

Johnson’s execution and case were the basis of the documentary “Fourteen Days in May.”

“I want you to know that I did not kill your sister. If you want to know the truth, and you deserve to know the truth, hire your own investigators. That’s all I have to say.”

— Pedro Muniz, convicted of rape and murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed May 19, 1998

Muniz was twenty when he arrested for the 1976 rape and murder of nineteen-year-old Janis Carol Bickham, a Southwestern University student. He confessed but later said police had threatened him. Muniz spent twenty-one years on death row for the crime, and before his execution he gave the prison guards a prepared statement written half in English, half in Spanish. He told his friends, “Keep walking forward, because Chicanos like us do not have another alternative.”

“One mistake…13 years ago, and that’s a long time. Nothing is going to be accomplished. I have peace with myself…To the Cleveland family, they say it wasn’t for the revenge, but it’s hard for me to see, to understand. I hope they’re happy.”

— Dalton Prejean, convicted of murder, electric chair, Louisiana.
Executed May 18, 1990

At age fourteen, Prejean shot and killed a taxi driver, a crime for which he was sent to reform school for two and half years. Just six months after his release, he shot Louisiana state trooper Donald Cleveland in the face after the officer pulled him over for a broken tail light. Amnesty International claimed that Prejean, an African American, had not received a fair trial from an all-white jury.

Supporters said that he had suffered brain damage from an abusive aunt and had an IQ of 71.