“I was haunted by Russ before I even knew him. I tried to wrap my mind around what it was like to sit across from a human being and communicate and interact with them knowing that in a few hours, they’re going to have 2200 volts of electricity shot through them,” says Todd Peppers.
“Russ” is the Reverend Russ Ford, the former head chaplain on Virginia’s death row. (Virginia abolished its death penalty in 2021, the first Southern state to do so.) In his 15 years in that position, Ford accompanied 28 men to the death house, providing them with “a loving face” in the last hours of their lives. His book, Crossing the River Styx: The Memoir of a Death Row Chaplain, is a searing account of those 15 years, during which he counseled, prayed, and stood by in the death chamber as men he knew and loved were killed.
“I don’t know if I could do what he did,” says Peppers, who, with his son, Charles Peppers, co-wrote the book with Ford. “But we all have the spark of the divine in us. We all have the capacity for love and compassion. And he is a profoundly loving man who, at the end of the day, wanted to at least give these men a loving face at the end. He wanted the men to be fully alive at the end. And help them in any way he could to, in some instances, accept responsibility.”
Peppers says the book doesn’t try “to underplay what these men did. Some of them did terrible things. But Russ saw the same patterns again and again and again. They were men whose mothers drank excessively during their pregnancy, who were physically abused, who had intellectual disabilities, mental health issues. As Sister Helen [Prejean] says, ‘It’s easy to kill a monster, hard to kill a human being.’ This book should make people queasy because you see that they’re human beings.”
“The message is the death penalty is barbaric. It hurts whoever comes in contact with it,” Peppers says. “The collateral damage is everywhere. The toll state killing takes extends beyond the spiritual advisors. It extends to the corrections staff, the execution team, the other prisoners, the victims’ families, and the prisoners’ families. There’s no money, fame, or glory in the vortex of death, just pain and lifelong scarring. Russ bears those scars today. These memories still haunt Russ, are still with Russ. Even the most banal details make this clear. How would you like to go home and try to get the smell of burning flesh out of your clothes?
“I firmly believe that most people who support capital punishment have no idea of the moral, economic, and human cost of state-sanctioned death,” he says.
Ford powerfully conveys the terrible cost. The hope is that he won’t just be preaching to the choir; that those who support state killing will read this book and begin to understand the inhumanity of this punishment.
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness,” wrote Elie Wiesel. Russ Ford did bear witness and has written this book for those who haven’t and should.
