REDEMPTION: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row, by Lawrence Wright
Here’s a cheery subject for a book: What happens when a covey of purposely silent nuns minister to hope-exhausted women on death row in Texas? The condemned are sentenced to die for crimes that defy reason and test the bounds of sympathy — soul-crushing and banal in the way of inexplicable evil. But somehow, in the hands of Lawrence Wright, this tale is oddly compelling, even, dare I say, uplifting.
At first glance, it’s hard to muster more than a kernel of care for the seven women at the heart of Wright’s latest master class in narrative nonfiction. Meet Linda Carty, sentenced to death for stealing a newborn baby and killing the mother; Melissa Lucio, convicted of murdering her toddler daughter, one of her 12 children; Kimberly Cargill, a former cheerleader, issued a death sentence for setting her mentally disabled babysitter on fire. And on and on, as Wright rummages around the darkest corners of humanity.
After years in prison, most of these women have found Jesus, following a well-trod path known to any penitentiary. Many of them share, as well, lives of poverty, drug abuse, terrible parents, awful luck and sexual predation at the hands of relatives. None of that excuses their crimes, as Wright notes, nor does it explain them. The world is full of fine people who came from similar backgrounds.
What elevates “Redemption,” a quiet tale of the bad and good things you didn’t think people were capable of, is the nuance behind the notoriety of those waiting to be executed by the State of Texas. To accomplish this, Wright tracks the efforts of a handful of contemplative nuns, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, to bring life to death row.
As contemplatives, the nuns place quiet prayer at the center of their waking hours. They don’t do a lot of proselytizing, or much of anything to persuade the doomed to seek a better way of being. The inmates are unlikely to ever see another day of freedom; the nuns have vowed to lead lives of chastity, poverty and minimal socializing in cells of their choosing at a convent near Waco. But once these women are brought together, something happens: They share meals and stories, they laugh, they listen to one another.
“I suppose the moral polarity intrigued me — the saintly nuns and the condemned murderers, as I initially conceived it,” the author writes in his afterword. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright is a veteran chronicler of sinister secrets and real-life plot twists, in books ranging from “The Looming Tower,” a 9/11 origin story for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, to “Going Clear,” about the creepy mysteries of Scientology.
For this book, he fleshes out the thematic question of whether people who commit the most horrid crimes imaginable are capable of redemption. A second issue is “whether society itself can be redeemed,” in Wright’s words, when justice in Texas is “practiced so casually, with so much prejudice and so little compassion for people such as Melissa.”
About Melissa, the aforementioned convicted killer of her 2-year-old child: As it turns out, she’s more than plausibly innocent of the crime for which Texas plans to kill her. Evidence that the child died because of a stumble down the stairs, rather than physical abuse by her mother, was suppressed at the trial. A documentary film on the incident noted other glaring inconsistencies. In 2024, the district judge who presided over her case, Arturo Nelson, made the extraordinary statement that she was “actually innocent,” and recommended that her conviction be overturned. And yet, with her most recent appeal denied, she remains on death row in the Lone Star State.
As Wright begins to churn through his views on capital punishment, he cites Kinky Friedman, the late Texas writer, singer and provocateur. “I’m not anti-death penalty,” he once said, repeating a favorite adage, “I’m just anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed.” Friedman, whose best-known songs include “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” eventually came to oppose the death penalty. About 2,000 people, including 45 women, are on death row in the United States, the only Western democracy that actively carries out state-sanctioned executions.
But it’s not just that women in Texas could be killed by the state for crimes they did not commit that animates this story. It’s the question of executing a person who has changed for the better through years in prison. These prisoners are a long way from their younger, more depraved selves; they’re kindly and devout grandmothers, having found a community of caring people that eluded them outside prison.
The cons are greatly moved by the nuns, who are from diverse backgrounds and come across as fun-loving, authentically humane and selfless. “They have showed us how to approach each other with more humility and grace simply by being an example of this themselves,” says Brittany Holberg, a former prostitute convicted of killing an 80-year-old man. Her case is another that is full of holes, though her appeals are mostly exhausted.
And while the tale of unlikely new friends is fascinating, this is also a personal book, very much about Wright’s evolving views on faith. In his youth, he aspired to be a minister, though he has long since struggled with institutional Christianity, at one point seeing organized religion as a sham — “we were pathetic dupes to have believed any of it,” he says.
The joy brought to the convicts by the sisters has made him more open to the healing power of faith. And while Wright remains a skeptic, he highlights the work of Mark Osler, a former Texas prosecutor turned law professor, who regularly deconstructed the state execution of Christ to shame deeply Christian fellow Texans into reconsidering their death mill.
The book runs out of momentum in two diversions that read like filler. One goes into the suicidal Jim Jones cult. The other recounts the troubled backstory of this order of nuns, who broke away from the Community of St. John after a sex abuse scandal.
What’s most intriguing about the Sisters of Mary Morning Star is the very fact of their existence in a society saturated by show-off social media and superficial concerns. The nuns are intelligent and creative. And yet they lead lives that are spartan in the extreme. But they are not without power, and, as Wright shows in “Redemption,” it’s a power that may elude people with far more money and influence.
REDEMPTION: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row | By Lawrence Wright | Knopf | 249 pp. | $35
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