Death Row Diaries

In November 1999, Sound Portraits producers David Isay and Stacy Abramson traveled to Huntsville, Texas, to interview two men living in the Ellis Unit of Huntsville's death row. The inmates' oral histories appear in "The Lives They Lived," a special issue of the New York Times Magazine featuring profiles of people who died in the previous year, and are part of an ongoing project in which death row inmates talk about the days leading up to their executions.

John Micheal Lamb and Sammie Felder Jr. had been on death row for 17 and 24 years respectively. They were interviewed on November 10, 1999, and were executed shortly thereafter.

DOB: 08/23/45
EXECUTED: 12/15/99

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My life of crime started when I was 14 years old. It seems that I just turned bad. Not bad in the sense of someone who is constantly walking around thinking about evil deeds. Not like this. Bad in the sense that I just started doing wrong, started stealing. I was burglarizing people's houses, I was robbing peoples, I was just a common thief.

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DOB: 07/24/57
EXECUTED: 11/17/99

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I left home when I was fifteen-and-a-half and stayed on my own until I was twenty-five, when I was arrested for this crime. I shot a man and killed him in Greenville, Texas, off Interstate 30. I've never denied it. I had just gotten out of jail in Arkansas--one hundred days for receiving stolen property. Detective in Arkansas drove me to the county line told me to get out and don't come back.

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