Pastor Dana Moore, pastor of Second Baptist Church, Texas, as an opponent of the death penalty, tells CNN that he loves him
Once a month, Pastor Dana Moore gets into his car and drives 300 miles across Texas to Livingston, where he walks into a state prison, takes off his belt and shoes and is ushered through a metal detector before stepping through metal gates that clang shut behind him.
Moore came to the position of opposed to the death penalty after he graduated from college. And while he recognizes being present at Ramirez’s execution makes him “involved” in it in a way, he believes everyone in Texas is involved.
We always try to pray. Moore told CNN that he always tells him he loves him, and that is a bit unusual. Moore does not usually tell the people at Second Baptist Church that he loves them. Moore said that Ramirez is different. He wants that love.
Ramirez’s case was ruled in his favor, thanks to the court that has weighed religious liberty and prison security policies. And if all goes according to Texas’ plan, Moore will lay his hand on Ramirez’s chest in the execution chamber this week while he’s put to death by lethal injection. They’ve been together for five years, but have never made physical contact.
That responsibility for Moore extends to the execution chamber when Ramirez is put to death. He wants to be able to give this member of his flock some comfort in the last moments of his life.
He anticipates his thinking as the moment approaches, and says that he is the pastor. I have my calling to fulfill, I have got my vocation.
“And he’s been giving me a desire to do it ever since,” Moore said. He started leading a Bible study while an undergraduate student at Baylor University and was ordained in 1983. He started his first church at the age of 20.
He prayed that God would allow him to become a minister if it were his will, citing 1 Timothy 3, when he said that the seed was put in and it started growing.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/us/john-ramirez-dana-moore-texas-execution/index.html
Moore Visited Death Row with Pablo Castro, a Christian Physicist from the Central Valley of Honduras, Texas
Their visits have not stopped since. Moore said that it was like visiting any other church member. They get snacks from a vending machine and spend two hours discussing life – what’s going on on death row and what’s new with Moore’s family. They used to talk about Scripture They don’t know as much anymore because they know how much the other knows.
The first time, “I just prayed and prayed and prayed before I went in,” Trujillo said. “Because this man stabbed somebody 29 times, and I just didn’t know what to say to him. So, I said, ‘God, you’re going to have to be the one to talk to him.’”
According to court records, Ramirez was sentenced to death for the murder of Pablo Castro in July 2004, after Ramirez and two women decided to rob someone to get money to buy drugs.
When they encountered Castro, who worked the night shift at a Corpus Christi convenience store, Ramirez repeatedly stabbed him. Castro was bleeding out on the pavement, and they left with $1.25.
According to court records, Ramirez and the two women went after two other people and were eventually caught by the police. The women were arrested, but Ramirez escaped and fled to Mexico, where he managed to evade authorities for more than three years before he was caught near the border in February 2008.
When he first visited Ramirez several years later, he was open with her about his crime but also about his love for poetry and his favorite teacher who encouraged him to write, she said. “After the first time, I realized he was just a person just like me.”
Trujillo and Ramirez communicate with one another through writing and through the use of inmate communication service JPay, which was used for many years to communicate between visits.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/us/john-ramirez-dana-moore-texas-execution/index.html
John Ramirez and the Livingston church: Initiates, blesses, but denies his request for an execution in a case of human touch
Moore was open to the idea, but the church is “old-fashioned,” he said. Prospective members usually must approach the altar at the end of Sunday’s service in order to join.
It was a couple years later, as Trujillo and her sister kept up their visits to Ramirez, that the monthly trips to Livingston began to wear on them. Moore said that they might need a break.
“We all face death, but they’re going to be told when they’re going to die … John knows the exact time of day and date that he’s going to be executed unless the courts stop it,” Moore said, describing the knowledge as a “constant pressure.”
No one is going to love him and care about him. … I want to be there and let him know, I’m here for you,” he said. “And part of that is love.”
Ramirez asked Moore to lay hands on him and bless him, and he said that these rituals were important to the observance of his faith. Texas denied the request, and Ramirez appealed, then sued as his execution neared, arguing the department’s denial would violate his rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The case was later expanded to include Ramirez’s desire that Moore be allowed to pray audibly after corrections officials denied that request.
“Human touch has significance and power,” Moore wrote in an affidavit in support of Ramirez’s complaint. He was referring to Matthew’s eighth chapter in which Jesus heals a man’sLeprosy using just the touch of his hand.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/us/john-ramirez-dana-moore-texas-execution/index.html
A witness to the death of a prisoner and its father, John Moore, and the rulings of the Texas Supreme Court in the homicide case
Moore explains his role in the case as only about 20 minutes were spent writing the affidavit. If he’d known his name and statement would be enshrined in a Supreme Court ruling, he jokes, that he might have spent more time on it.
But of the ruling’s significance, he’s sober, not just related to Ramirez, whom he will be with – and touch – at the time of death but for other death row inmates seeking similar comfort by spiritual advisors.
It means that the condemned still have rights despite being the least of these in our society. “And we treat them with dignity still.”
It was strange to watch someone being executed and then his life was taken away from him. “And we’re all just standing there, and the whole state of Texas is like, ‘OK.’”
He said that there was nothing he could do to stop it. “And so, the focus then becomes for me, as a minister, to make sure John has got care and comfort, as much as I can give to him.
The Murder of a Drug Dealer, and a Family of Men: Mr. Gonzales and Ms. Chanthakoummane
Mr. Gonzales murdered Ms. Townsend when he was just a few months past his 18th birthday, after a childhood marked by sexual abuse, parental abandonment and grief. He left school when he was 16 and started using drugs after the death of a beloved aunt. Ms. Townsend was his drug dealer’s girlfriend, and she had caught him trying to steal from the dealer’s home. He confessed to the murder after a year and a half. Mr. Gonzalez told me that he’s tried to apologize to Ms. Townsend’s family but that “they don’t want to hear it,” a fact he accepts. “Obviously, of course, I can’t really articulate my remorse,” he said. I think I is the reason someone can hate with such passion, and hate can actually affect the soul. He was, he said, depriving the Townsend family of “fulfillment.”
He was on the death row when he was scared. The men on the unit were able to talk to him through the cell walls and begin sending him gifts, unbidden: clothes, stationery, stamps. Regardless of whether you accept it or not, we just want you to know that you are part of the community now. We’re all here to fight for our life,’” he said.
Hearing about the camaraderie and creativity of the death-row community reminded me of a unit of men I used to take care of on Rikers. Many had been trapped together in pretrial detention for years. In November they would decorate their dismal cinder block space for holidays with bits of toilet paper and fabric and magazine photos and coloring book pages ferreted away from art therapy sessions. Jail makes magpies of everyone, and everyone is always collecting and hiding and hoarding, but from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day, people would share their treasures, and the dorm would be tinseled with the best stuff. It was very sweet and festive and very painful.
Mr. Gonzalez said that Mr. Chanthakoummane was an artist. After we spoke, I found some of his art on the internet, and his drawings are, indeed, extraordinary: intricate illustrations that are conceptual, political, evocative. Mr. Gonzales does an excellent job of drawing. I have seen portraits he made with a ballpoint pen that are so vivid and detailed that they look like photographs. And then, the day that I visited the prison, I happened to see another death-row prisoner show a piece he had made to a television crew that had come to interview him. It was a perfectly constructed papier-mâché globe made from toilet paper rolls, with a clasp at the center, that, when unlatched, opened to reveal a papier-mâché crucifix, complete with a small papier-mâché Jesus. The contraption was very clever. I couldn’t make sense of so much talent concentrated in such a small group of men, men who had discovered they could make art this way while ostensibly cut off from everything beautiful. What inner resources had they found that weren’t available to them before?