Support for the death penalty is at its lowest in 50 years. And yet, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is overseeing a surge in executions “with no obvious overarching logic,” his rationale shielded by executive privilege. Pamela Colloff counters his silence with a vigilant chorus of execution opponents, a haunted former warden, and a Catholic priest whose ministry increasingly requires him to prepare others for sudden death. Alec Soth’s accompanying photos work in tandem with Colloff’s reporting to capture the fuller blast radius of capital punishment.
By the spring, he was ministering to the two men on death watch. As often as allowed, he came to see them, spending four hours on the road, round trip, to talk and pray with the men as they awaited execution. Some mornings he drove to Florida State Prison after only a few hours of sleep; and some days he returned to Joseph House so drained that the demands and small crises awaiting him there seemed strangely distant. At a spiritual retreat one afternoon, he suddenly became preoccupied with the idea that the priest who stood before him speaking was on the verge of collapse. Searching for an explanation, he told me he had become “hypervigilant of mortality — of other people dying, not me dying, but other people dying right in front of me.”
