Death Row Prisoners to Governor: Come Pray With Us

With another execution scheduled for next week, death row visitors and death penalty opponents are increasing pressure on Gov. Bill Lee to respond to an invitation from 32 death row prisoners. The condemned men want the governor to come pray with them. 

Dan Mann, who has been visiting death row with his wife since 2011, says the men first made the request after Don Johnson's execution in May but have gotten no response from the governor or his office. 

 The letter is short and simple.

"We understand you are a man of faith and we would like to ask you to please come pray with us."

With the Lee administration ignoring the death row prisoners, the people who visit them and others who oppose the death penalty are planning a march on Saturday from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution — which houses death row — to Legislative Plaza. Mann says they'll hold a vigil there until Monday morning, when they'll bring the letter to Lee's office. 

At a press conference Thursday afternoon, Rev. Kevin Riggs of Franklin Community Church — in Williamson County, where Lee is from — noted that one of the men who signed the letter, Kevin Burns, was ordained as a pastor by his church. 

Riggs said he was there "to ask my neighbor, my governor to honor this request. He's a man of faith and I believe that with all my heart. I admire his prison ministry, he's been involved in prison ministry most of his adult life."

On the campaign trail, Lee spoke often about his Christian faith and his work with the prison ministry Men of Valor. Nevertheless, he denied clemency for Johnson — himself a Christian and ordained elder in the Seventh Day Adventist Church — in May, clearing the way for the first execution during his tenure as governor. 

A visit to death row would not be unprecedented for a Tennessee governor. Gov. Frank Clement famously visited condemned inmates, and in 1965 he commuted the sentences of every man on death row.