Texas women on death row walk the road to ‘Redemption’ with a community of nuns

New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright’s latest nonfiction narrative, “Redemption,” begins with an intriguing, real-life premise: an unlikely series of encounters between seven female convicts on Texas’ death row and a convent of nuns.

A Catholic prison deacon, Ronnie Lastovica, orchestrated the meetings because he saw commonalities between the two groups. Both were leading unconventional, isolated lives and relied on faith for solace, even joy.

The results of these encounters were surprising. “They ministered to us,” the initially reluctant nuns told Lastovica. The benefits were mutual. Before the arrival of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, the death row inmates had been plagued by petty infighting. The nuns modeled how to create a sustaining, supportive community.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Wright (“The Looming Tower,” “Going Clear”) gained extraordinary access to the Gatesville, Texas, prison, its residents and the visiting nuns, based near Waco, for a 2025 New Yorker article. But in expanding that lengthy article into a book, he sometimes loses the thread, indulging in digressions that detract from his study of transformation and redemption.

The digressions include the author’s own struggles with religious faith, references to the siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco and the mass suicide of Jim Jones’ followers at Jonestown, and an exploration of the case of a Methodist minister accused of strangling his wife. Often we don’t know quite where Wright’s narrative is going, or why.

To illuminate the plight of the condemned women, Wright explores not just their gruesome crimes but their horrific backstories. Most were themselves victims of repeated violence and sexual abuse. They succumbed to (sometimes inherited) drug addiction and often lived in poverty. One, Brittany Holberg, supported herself and her child as a sex worker.

After such ordeals, the women seem lucky to be alive. Even with execution dates looming, their death row confinement offers a relatively peaceful oasis. Free from drugs and violence, and with treatment for mental illness, they discover spirituality and their creative capacities.

One important aspect of “Redemption” is Wright’s investigation of the women’s culpability and the inadequate lawyering they received. “I have lost faith,” he writes, “in the presumption that Texas, or any state, has a system of justice that is sufficiently reliable, fair, or just to assume the power to take a life.”

Too frequently, he finds, evidence of the trauma and abuse that contributed to the crimes never made it into the record. If it had, it might at the least have affected sentencing. Even more disturbing is the possibility that one or more of the women was wrongfully convicted.

Melissa Lucio presents the most troubling example. Her confession to murdering her 2-year-old daughter was coerced, and the district attorney who prosecuted her case was later convicted of bribery, extortion and other crimes. A 2020 documentary, Sabrina Van Tassel’s “The State of Texas vs. Melissa,” made the case for her innocence. The original trial judge agreed, several jurors recanted their guilty verdict, and Texas politicians rallied to her defense. But Lucio, after receiving a stay of execution, remains on death row.

Another narrative strand involves the unusual history of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. The founders of this contemplative order, Wright discovers, split from the Community of St. John, in France, which had been dominated by priests and afflicted by widespread sexual abuse.

Those circumstances suggest an unexpected connection to the death row inmates. But the breakaway nuns always denied that they had been abuse victims. And when Wright profiles the sisters involved in the prison meetings, he finds women who had grown up in “safe and predictable” circumstances, “buffered by love.”

Wandering further afield, Wright recounts the case of Walker Railey, a Methodist minister accused of strangling his wife and leaving her in a vegetative state. Six years after the assault, Railey was tried and found not guilty. Wright had attended Railey’s church; he reported on the crime for Texas Monthly and interviewed Railey, whom he believed to be guilty. The verdict, Wright says, shattered his belief in both the judicial system and religion.

In a chapter titled “Jesus in the Dock,” Wright analogizes the legal forces marshaled against Jesus to the highly imperfect Texas criminal justice system. Jesus’ crucifixion, in Wright’s telling, becomes yet another instance of justice gone awry.

For all its narrative quirks, “Redemption” does function as what Wright calls “an appeal to conscience.” In its pages, he asks a series of penetrating questions: Does faith retain value even if the stories underlying it are human inventions? How can Christians, who both grieve and celebrate the sacrifice of Jesus, support a flawed justice system that inevitably executes innocents?

Wright also interrogates the boundary between severe mental illness and evil, and wonders whether, even in extreme cases, redemption might be possible. If these death row inmates are utterly changed — no longer dangerous, and hopeful of contributing to society — what purpose does it serve for the state to execute them? That urgent question is the book’s ultimate contribution to the fraught death-penalty debate.

Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

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