Will Speer is scheduled to be executed tomorrow. What a sentence to type. Bekah McNeel grapples with this reality as she talks to Speer, who has been in the Texas prison system since he was a teenager, after a life of abuse. She is compassionate in her reporting, and respectful of the work Speer carries out as one of the first-ever inmate faith-based coordinators on Texas’s death row. A piece that will make you troubled by what Thursday will likely bring.
He thinks about the people who lost their son, brother, and boyfriend long before this week. There are people no longer in his life because of his choices, he said. His dad died of cancer, and his mom was murdered by the stepfather who had abused him. They died without their son in their lives, and he feels sad for that. He also prays the “sinner’s prayer”—which evangelical Christians pray in committing their lives to Jesus—on behalf of his victims, because he feels sorry that he stole the opportunity from them to pray it for themselves. And he thinks about the family members of the men he murdered—especially Sammie Gail Martin.
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