This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter at nashvillebanner.com/newsletters.
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By the time Philip Workman was executed by lethal injection on May 9, 2007, Tennesseans across the state had seen his face and heard him speak for himself. During a years-long legal battle that saw him scheduled for execution six times, Workman — who was sentenced for the killing of a Memphis police officer during a shootout after a robbery — gave interviews to newspaper and television reporters on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. For most, he wore a black-and-purple baseball cap featuring a cross, the letters WWJD and a reference to the Bible verse Job 13:15.
“It’s an ever-looming feeling of are they going to get you this time,” Workman told Action News 5 reporter Janice Broach in an on-camera interview nine days before his execution. “It almost seems like at times it’d, I’d be better off in the grave because I’m tired.”
Several months later, days before his electrocution for the 1997 murders of his four children, Daryl Holton sat in shackles for an interview with Dan Barry of The New York Times.
But access to the men and women sentenced to die in Tennessee’s execution chamber has been all but eliminated in the years since. After reviving its death penalty in 2018, the state has killed 10 men on death row. Although some have answered written questions from journalists through their attorneys, none have been allowed to speak to the press directly.
Ever since a change to the Tennessee Department of Correction’s policies in 2015, official access to all incarcerated people in Tennessee, including those awaiting a death sentence, has been effectively cut off. Department officials would not even make a spokesperson available to be interviewed on the record for this story, limiting their response to an emailed statement restating the policy.
“Interviews with specified inmates are not permitted in person, on institutional phone lines or via the inmate’s TDOC-issued tablet, in consideration of crime victims and survivors,” department spokesperson Dorinda Carter wrote to the Nashville Banner. “Interviews with unspecified inmates are limited to TDOC programs or initiatives.”
Although interviews using prison phone lines are prohibited, department policy does allow incarcerated people to place individual media members on their list of approved phone contacts or to correspond with journalists by mail. But the prohibition of interviews in person or by phone means people facing execution by the state cannot be seen or heard by its citizens.
Tennessee’s media blackout sets it apart from some other notably aggressive death penalty states. In Texas, interviews with men and women on death row are allowed during a scheduled timeframe each week. Florida allows for a similar practice and death row inmates in Alabama have been able to give interviews in recent years as well.
When it comes to executions, states have largely kept the process shrouded in legal secrecy, keeping information like the source of lethal injection drugs and the identity of execution teams confidential. The Banner is one of several media plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last year with the goal of increasing access to executions in Tennessee. In January, Chancellor I’Ashea Myles ordered changes to the state’s execution protocols that would allow media witnesses to observe the condemned person entering the execution chamber and being prepared for either lethal injection or electrocution. That order was blocked in April by the Tennessee Supreme Court, restoring the previous protocols while the litigation continues.
The state is set to execute Tony Carruthers by lethal injection Thursday. He is one of four people scheduled for execution this year, a group that includes the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.
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This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.