LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker. And he's written extensively about al-Qaida, scientologists, and more recently, about two unlikely groups that came together in Texas.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT: This is a story about two groups of women. One is on death row, seven women on Texas death row. There's another group of women who live very similar lives.
FADEL: The other group is a Catholic order, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. Wright's new book about the two groups is called "Redemption: Faith, Justice, And Sisterhood On Death Row." He spoke with Steve Inskeep, who started by asking, what makes the lives of the nuns and the women on death row so similar?
WRIGHT: Well, start with the fact they both live in rooms that they call cells. Their daily schedule is almost identical. These nuns, although it's not a vow, they have a code of silence. They don't talk. They only have one meal together all week, on Sunday afternoon. And so, you know, I was really fortunate to persuade them that they could talk to me.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And so you wanted to get into the story of these religious women who spend time with women on death row. Hadn't some of the women, really all of them, been convicted of horrible crimes to get where they were?
WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. I mean, heinous crimes. And I knew that that was going to be the case. I knew, too, I was going to have to tell the reader all those stories. But when you say convicted, I also, in writing about these women and researching their backgrounds, I found out that there's some women on the row that don't belong there. So, you know, when you dive into this, it was, to me, shocking because I had always placed more faith than maybe I should have in the justice system in Texas.
INSKEEP: Well, this gets into the way the death penalty is practiced in America and particularly in your state. Isn't it very rare for women to be on death row at all?
WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. I mean, there are seven women on death row in Texas. There are like 150 men. And, you know, Texas is regularly executing them. It's harder to convict a woman of homicide, perhaps more so in Texas, because there's a sense that women aren't capable of such crimes. And in order to be convicted, the usual procedure for the district attorney is to defeminize them, to make them into monsters. And I saw that again and again in the court transcripts.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about these conversations between the nuns and the inmates. What did the inmates get out of those conversations and what did the nuns get out of them?
WRIGHT: Impulsively, they all fell into embracing each other. And it was a sorting process where the women on the row found kind of companion spirits. And also, the nuns had something to teach the imprisoned women, which is how to live in community. And this was profound. The women on the row began to practice these ancient monastic traditions that allowed them to live in community with each other.
INSKEEP: You use the word redemption in the title of your book. And I understand what that means in a general Christian sense, forgiveness of sins, saving souls, perhaps. But what does it mean in this specific case? What does it mean to redeem people who, rightly or wrongly, have been convicted of such crimes and have had such troubled lives?
WRIGHT: I saw people in prison that had been redeemed and changed by accepting, you know, the discipline of a religion. I didn't realize just how deep it went. I was at - they had one class I was attending where the nuns were talking about a piece of scripture and sort of parsed the scripture. And it was - the response was quite profound. The women really understood. You know, they spend a lot of time reading the Bible and so on. And they were very attached to the lessons. And I thought, what else could do that?
INSKEEP: Do you think these women on death row, the ones at least who are guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted, would you go so far as to say they are different people than they were five, 10, 20, 30 years ago, when they committed their crimes?
WRIGHT: I'm sure they are. Of course, you know, first of all, how do you evaluate, you know, behavior when women are confined in their own cells for decades? They're not out in society with free choice. But on the other hand, who are they? And I think I know them well enough now to believe that in most of these cases, these women have been transformed into being other people. And part of it is they were snatched out of their chaotic lives. Two of them have told me that they're grateful to be on death row because otherwise, they'd already be dead. And it gave them a chance to reform their personalities. And I'm affected by those stories. I think they're genuine.
INSKEEP: If they have changed that much, if they're different people, is there something morally wrong about executing them, even if they were guilty?
WRIGHT: Yeah, I don't - there's something grotesque to me about having people incarcerated for decades while they grow old and change, and then suddenly, arbitrarily, out of the blue comes an execution date for a woman who's now 60-something or 70-years-old or somebody who's been in prison for 20 years. And it's shocking when you start shining a light on each case individually. You most always find something grotesquely wrong about it, even in the best cases.
It seems unjust to execute someone who's paid the price. Most of these women have served life sentence, you know, what would be a life sentence already. There's many more murderers in our prisons in Texas that are not on death row. And I feel like there's an arbitrariness about who gets executed, that it undermines the sense of justice that we are all subject to the same law.
INSKEEP: The new book by Lawrence Wright is called "Redemption." Thank you so much.
WRIGHT: Thank you, Steve. I appreciate your help.
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