He spent months visiting death row inmates and witnessed three executions. Here’s what he’s learned

Journalist Steven Hale spent several years meeting with condemned prisoners at a maximum security prison in Tennessee and interviewing the people who visit and befriend them. Hale talks to CNN about his encounters with convicted murderers and what brings their visitors to death row.

On August 9, 2018, Steven Hale stood outside a Tennessee prison as a convicted murderer inside awaited a lethal dose of a three-drug cocktail. It was the first execution of a death row inmate in the state in nearly a decade. Hale was one of seven reporters selected by a grim lottery to witness Billy Ray Irick’s execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He’d written stories about Irick’s horrific rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl more than three decades earlier. But nothing prepared him for that night in 2018. Not far away, in an area reserved for death penalty supporters, a man blared AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” from a loudspeaker. And as a chaperone led Hale and other journalists to the execution chamber, Hale saw another small group of people huddled in a field outside the prison. They were there to show their love for Irick. One man told Hale he had called the prison earlier and pleaded with officials to let him sit in the death chamber so Irick would see a friendly face just before he died. The man sobbed when a prison official said no, Hale says.