Hours before Kelly Gissendaner took her last breath early Wednesday, Quinn Hudson talked about the moment he met her and, well, what could’ve been.
Gissendaner, he said, could have made a difference in so many more women’s lives but will never get the chance.
The state of Georgia saw to that.
After a last-ditch effort by her children and other supporters to save her life, the state administered a lethal dose of pentobarbital into Gissendaner's vein. She died at 12:21 a.m. singing "Amazing Grace," that popular hymn written by a former slave trader who renounced the practice after his conversion to Christianity.
Before her own conversion, Gissendaner conspired with her then-lover, Greg Owen, to kill her husband. Owen, who actually carried out the murder, negotiated a plea deal and was granted a life sentence with possibility of parole after 25 years.
That was nearly 20 years ago. Gissendaner turned down the deal, tried her case before a jury and lost. The jury gave her the death penalty and you know the rest.
Up until 7 p.m., when the state carried out the execution, her defenders, including her three children, argued her jailhouse conversion and counseling of other prisoners had earned her clemency. Others, though, believed no amount of good works could cancel her death sentence. Both state and federal courts upheld that opinion.
Not even a letter from Pope Francis, who called for an end to capital punishment last week before Congress, made a difference.
What a shame we don’t believe in redemption.
Quinn Hudson does.
He's a member of the Decatur First United Methodist Church, vice chairman of the nonprofit Georgia Prison Ministries Advisory Board and a member of the Committee of 100, an advisory group to Emory University's Candler School of Theology.
Hudson met Gissendaner four years ago at a reception for inmates who’d graduated from a certification program run by the school of theology and was immediately struck by her gentle spirit.
“She had been on death row a dozen years, and yet she was very much at peace with her situation,” he said. “There was a deep sense of spiritual contentment and purpose.”
Hudson never forgot the speech Gissendaner delivered that day at the graduation ceremony in which she talked about grace, God’s unmerited favor.
More often than not, that grace is showered upon us in our darkest moment. Gissendaner knew that perhaps better than anyone. Once spiritually dead and living according to her own selfish interests, she was led from darkness to light through faith. Forgiven.
“It was one of the most moving presentations of the grace found in suffering I’d ever heard,” he said.
Kelly Gissendaner is dead now, but there are some 4,000 women in Georgia prisons, including 1,700 at the Arrendale State Prison, where Gissendaner was once housed and where she and Hudson met.
Hudson will have to make peace with Gissendaner’s execution like the rest of us who oppose the death penalty, but he hopes her death isn’t in vain, that her legacy for helping fellow inmates will live on long after this week, this month, this year.
“At least let Kelly’s legacy be a change agent,” he said. “It would be an enormous human tragedy for Kelly to have died and the system not change, especially for the women she tried to help.”
Unlike their male counterparts, the vast majority of female inmates are nonviolent offenders serving time for things like shoplifting, drugs, and writing bad checks. More than two-thirds of them have children.
Hudson has spent the past four years trying to address the various needs they face. Those can be as simple as being able to afford sanitary pads or as complicated as having a place to meet with and interact with their children.
In addition to collecting toiletries for the women at Arrendale, his ministry provides transportation and meals to children who want to visit their moms and has even helped create a children’s center where inmates can visit their children, but more needs to be done.
There are other issues, but the children are, perhaps, the biggest losers of all. If a woman is unlucky enough to deliver during a stint in prison, their child is taken from them within 24 hours of giving birth.
I don’t have to tell you where that’ll get us.
One study showed that 33 percent of moms who’d been separated from their babies wound up back in prison, compared to the less than 10 percent of moms who were able to keep their babies and didn’t return to prison.
Quinn Hudson has been around long enough to know helping these women is a hard sale. Most people believe they made this bed, they just as soon lie in it, that they’re simply paying off a debt owed to society. Hudson gets that.
But we shouldn’t lose sight of the children, he said. “They deserve our compassion and a chance at a better life.”
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