10 Years and 87 Days

A project on prisoners on death row, Texas, USA

Luisa Menazzi Moretti

Texas, a state where I lived for many years, has the highest number of executions of all democratic nations of the western world. My pictures are inspired by the letters and interviews that those sentenced to death have written on death row in Huntsville Prison.
After an average wait of ten years and eighty-seven days, the prisoners are executed. They live all this time alone and are permitted – only on good behaviour – a small radio and a few books. They are not always guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
My pictures are the result of their words; I took them thinking of those who remain, of the families of those who were executed, of the cruelty or absence of cruelty the crimes reveal. I ask myself what feelings and reasons can justify a practice as archaic as lethal execution in the twenty-first century. Many nations enforce this barbaric sentence. No citizen should feel represented by a nation that uses its power to kill a man or a woman, whether guilty or innocent. L. M. Moretti