On May 15, Florida carried out its fifth execution of 2025, the most of any state so far this year. On that date, it put Glen Rogers to death by lethal injection.
Rogers was executed for murdering Tina Marie Cribbs in 1995. Cribbs was, as USA Today reports, “one of four single mothers in their 30s with reddish hair who fell victim to the so-called ‘Casanova Killer.’” He was called that because of “his good looks and ability to charm his future victims.”
That Rogers loved the limelight explains why, soon after he was arrested for killing Cribbs, Rogers claimed that he, not O.J. Simpson, killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in June 1994 and insisted that he had murdered a total of seventy people during his career as a serial killer. Still, his execution might have gone off with little notoriety, but for what he said when given the chance to utter last words in the minutes before he died.
He began in a rather conventional way by expressing his love and gratitude to his wife, before telling the family members of his victims, “I know there’s a lot of questions that you need answers to. I promise you, in the near future the questions will be answered and I hope in some way will bring you closure.”
And then in a truly bizarre twist on the ritual of last words, Rogers said: “President Trump, keep making America great. I’m ready to go.”
Those words made headlines across the country and around the world.
They are a reminder of just how strange it is that in the minutes before the state executes someone, it offers them an opportunity to address the witnesses to the proceeding and the world beyond the execution chamber. The ritual of the last words is a vestige of another time, and it serves to sanctify the unholy practice of capital punishment by offering what appears to be a humane gesture.
It is time to stop asking condemned people to take advantage of that gesture and satisfy the public’s morbid fascination with what people like Rogers say before they meet their maker. That fascination is easily documented.
The internet is full of sites that list the last words of people who are about to die. Let me offer a few examples here.
In March 2024, People.com posted a story under the alluring headline: “The Last Words of Infamous American Killers.” It begins, “For generations, the American public has been fascinated by the stories of killers, with their crimes often splashed across endless headlines and immortalized in numerous films and TV shows. Those intrigued hang onto every update, from the moment they’re caught until their very last breath.”
“As many of these criminals face the ultimate punishment via the death penalty,” People continues, “the public experiences a…morbid curiosity about their final moments. Through their official last statements—whether poetic reflections, crude comments, or ominous one-liners—we’ve gained some insight into their minds.”
Insight, not so much. The last words of publicity-seeking people like Rogers are performances, revealing more about their desire to shock and leave the public wondering about what they said and why they said it than an understanding of what made them tick.
Take what Robert Alton Harris, who abducted and killed 16-year-old boys in California, said before dying in San Quentin State Prison’s gas chamber in 1992: “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper.”
Seems straightforward enough, but it was hardly a revelation of why he had done what he did or his innermost thoughts.
Fast forward to 2001 when Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of the deadliest domestic terrorist act in U.S. history, the bombing of Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, said before his execution. Quoting from William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus,” McVeigh provided the following dying declaration: “It matters not how strait the gate/How charged with punishments the scroll/I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”
All over the country, commentators offered their own speculations about what McVeigh meant.
Or, one year later, another celebrity killer, Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker who murdered six of her “clients,” said “I’d just like to say, I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus, June 6th. Like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back,” before being put to death in Florida.
In a way, she did come back when, in 2004, a documentary was released entitled “Aileen – Life and Death of a Serial Killer.” It featured her last words along with thoughts about how Wuornos’s obsession with films explained them.
We can be sure that when and if People updates its story, what Rogers said last week will be featured prominently.
And for people whose curiosity about the last words of less notorious killers, the state of Texas offers a website featuring what everyone executed there since 1982 had to say. It was last updated on April 29, after it put Moises Mendoza to death for a 2004 murder.
“To Mark, Pam, Austin, Uncle Troy, and Jose,” Mendoza said, “I am sorry for having robbed you of Rachelle’s life. To Avery, who I know is not here, I robbed you of a mother. I’m sorry for that.”
He continued, “I know nothing that I could ever say or do would ever make up for that. I want you to know I am sincere, I apologize. Thank you for being here today. To all my loved ones, I love you. I am with you, I’m well and at peace you know that I’m well and everything is love. (Spanish) Don’t kill them with kindness heal them with kindness and love. Always love, love, love. Thank you, Warden.”
Mendoza’s was the kind of “gallows confession“ that, for a long time, has helped to lend legitimacy to state killing. As law professor Linda Meyer notes, “Last words…have been aspects of executions for as long as human history records” and have been part of executions in the Anglo-American world since 1388.
My own research on newspaper coverage of late 19th-century public executions in the United States suggests that they followed a strict formula that placed the condemned at the center of their stories. News reports typically described the lead-up to the execution and offered detailed accounts of the prisoner’s gallows speech.
Today, any story of an execution that omits whatever the condemned said would seem odd. The public wants to know, and the government wants to tell them.
But enough is enough.
We don’t need to know the condemned’s last words. There is also, Meyer rightly observes, “a subtle form of torture …inherent in requiring or expecting meaningful speech from one facing death.”
Their professions of love, confessions of guilt, pleas for forgiveness, or, as in Rogers’s case, final political commentaries, serve only, as Meyer notes, “to justify the state’s killing” and make the inhuman act of cold-blooded killing seem a touch more humane. That is why it is time to put an end to the practice of asking for, recording, and disseminating the last words of people the state puts to death.
