On June 22, 2000, Thomas Loden Jr., a 35-year-old Marine recruiter, kidnapped a 16-year-old girl named Leesa Marie Gray from the side of a road in Itawamba County, Mississippi. Loden raped and sexually battered Gray for four hours. Then he strangled her to death. When police found him, they discovered that he had carved the words I’m sorry into his chest.
Loden pleaded guilty to capital murder. I first met him 21 years after the killing, on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which is better known as Parchman Farm.
Loden told me conspiratorial tales about the murder and spoke mainly in non sequiturs. Unlike some men on death row, who either are honestly transformed or at least put on a convincing performance of penitence, Loden seemed to me to be an unreconstructed killer. But he asked me to read documents about his case, and I agreed. In the year that followed, Loden sent me handwritten letters, some 20 pages in length, that did nothing to aid the cause of exculpation.
When he told me that he was soon scheduled to be executed, I volunteered to be a media witness. I had a specific reason to do so; I wanted to experience firsthand what one of our staff writers, Elizabeth Bruenig, has chosen as her vocation. In my job, I send people to dangerous places, and I try to do so carefully. America’s death chambers are worthy of sustained journalistic coverage, but there are hazards involved—not the sort one associates with war reporting, but psychological and spiritual hazards. Witnessing clinical barbarism is not good for one’s soul, or one’s sleep.
What you will learn when you read Liz’s new cover story—among the very best and most important that The Atlantic has ever published—is that she possesses an almost-otherworldly toughness that has allowed her to witness, again and again, the unnatural act of state-sanctioned killing. I cannot do her story justice in a few lines, but I will say that she does not flinch from any of the ugliness of capital punishment, and, crucially, she does not flinch from the appalling crimes committed by so many of the men on death row.
Liz’s motivations for pursuing this specific journalistic practice are several: Like many writers, she’s drawn to outsiders, victims, and life’s losers. She’s drawn to this work because she sees injustice and has a pen. And she pursues these stories because, she told me, Jesus said, “I was in prison and you visited me.”
The state of Alabama has banned Liz from its prisons; her reporting has repeatedly embarrassed its corrections department. But she is continuing her work in other states, and on the federal government’s death row.
I support her in her pursuit, but I worry. I’ve seen people die in horrible ways—in terrorist attacks and minefields and artillery strikes. Watching Thomas Loden die because the state of Mississippi injected him with lethal chemicals was a very different thing—coldly medieval and arrogant. My sympathy is with the family of Leesa Marie Gray, but Loden’s killing was a reminder that humans have a great capacity for vengeance. It was also a reminder that our continued use of the death penalty places the United States in a category that includes such countries as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and China. No democracy should be in this club.
For understandable reasons, people turn away from the subject of capital punishment. But Liz has done a remarkable thing here—she has written a propulsive narrative about redemption and sin and invested her story with humanity and grace. I’ve told her that she should stop witnessing executions whenever she feels it is enough. But she remains committed to bearing witness, for all of us.
This editor’s note appears in the July 2025 print edition.
