John Henry Ramirez does not want to die alone. The Texas prisoner knows that at his execution, scheduled for Wednesday evening, he will be able to see witnesses through a pane of glass. A stoic prison officer will probably be standing near his head. But as a devout Protestant Christian, he wants his pastor to lay a hand on him as he dies.
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“It’s part of my faith – there’s so much about the power of touch,” Ramirez told the Marshall Project during an interview last week. “You bless someone at the time of their most spiritual need.”
The Texas department of criminal justice told Ramirez this was against the rules. Ramirez, who was convicted of stabbing to death a Corpus Christi convenience store worker named Pablo Castro during a robbery in 2004, sued, saying it violated the first amendment's guarantee of religious freedom. The agency declined to comment, citing the litigation, but has previously said in news reports and court filings that Ramirez's request could create a security risk.
The case is still winding through the court system.
Ramirez's lawsuit is the latest turn in a larger debate around the religious rights of men and women who face execution. It also highlights that most aspects of executions, from last meals to last words to witness choices, are based on historical traditions and bureaucratic decisions – not legal rights.
“There are certain things states are constitutionally required to do,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “You can't execute someone in a manner that is cruel and unusual. But everything else is up [to the states] to decide.”
Nine executions are scheduled through the rest of the year, and each brings its own legal and policy debates surrounding how they are carried out.
In 2010, an Oklahoma prisoner, Donald Wackerly, asked state officials to let his Buddhist spiritual adviser go inside the execution chamber with him. The officials refused, and Wackerly sued. The officials prevailed in court, but did allow the adviser to access Wackerly's body after his death and perform Buddhist funeral rites.
The legal battles shifted to Texas, which executes far more people than any other state. For years, the state allowed spiritual advisers in the death chamber, as long as they were prison system employees. But all the spiritual advisors who worked for the agency were Christian or Muslim. Then in 2019, Patrick Murphy argued that his Buddhist adviser should be allowed into the chamber, and the US supreme court halted his execution of him at the last minute, ruling that Texas could either let his adviser in, or ban all advisers in order to maintain parity. The state opted for the blanket ban, citing security concerns.