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Tonight Alabama hopes to execute Willie B. Smith III. It looks like right now a court has stayed his execution. As we've found tracking executions for the last five and a half years, it may still move forward. https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2021/02/stay-granted-for-alabama-death-row-inmate-thursday-execution-temporarily-halted.html 1/TK
This is the first scheduled execution in the U.S. since @thenexttodie began that we won't be monitoring. I'm mulling a lot of thoughts now at the end. 2/TK
When we started @marshallproj over 6 years ago, capital punishment was an important part of our coverage of the criminal justice system. Our first major stories were on the death penalty. @gabrieldance was really keen to do something data-driven and visual on it. I was too. 3/TK
We wanted to raise the general public’s awareness of executions and give a sense of urgency. @gabrieldance's original idea was to make a simple clock that counted down the time until the next execution, but we couldn't find a data source detailed enough. It didn't exist. 4/TK
There were groups collecting calendars of executions, but we needed minute-by-minute information. We didn’t want this to be abstract. People were being put to death today, and it felt like no one really paid much attention. 5/TK
The important theme was time: The minutes until someone was facing the executioner, he days since someone was killed. Pegging it to the fleeting, and universal, nature of time would make people pay attention, we hoped. 6/TK
If we were going to pull this off, we decided, we had to make our own data. 7/TK
So @gabrieldance and I started planning how we could tackle this. We didn't have expertise in these disparate parts of the country where the executions were happening. But we knew people who did: local reporters covering the courts and prisons. 8/TK
Largely through @IRE_NICAR connections, we pieced together a network of journalists around the country. @mlh_holmes in Alabama. @LiseDigger in Houston. @caryaspinwall and @ZivaBranstetter in Oklahoma. @adamplayford in Tampa. And others. 9/TK
With these journalists, we could make the data we needed up to the minute, and also provide more detailed background on each case, all in one place: https://www.themarshallproject.org/next-to-die 10/TK
What began as @gabrieldance's idea for a simple, jarring graphic evolved into a full-fledged news app. 11/TK
To make all this doable by a small team, we wrote thousands of lines of code to automate much of the production work, to redraw graphics and to power @thenexttodie Twitter bot. 12/TK
The site itself was built around the idea of time slipping away, and @gabrieldance and @andyrossback's designs tied it together to a T. https://www.themarshallproject.org/next-to-die 13/TK
With help from @ivarvong, we launched publicly in September of 2015, days before Oklahoma wanted to execute Richard Glossip. (They didn't, though they likely will try again.) 14/TK
Cases were happening that we could help to shine a light on, and our partners were great. More and more reporters got involved. At various points, more than 40 people at 11 news outlets contributed to @thenexttodie. 15/TK
Among our most prolific were @mauricechammah and @keribla, who started with us when she was at the Houston Chronicle. 16/TK
More states started seriously planning executions. And then came the feds. We began with 9 states and grew to cover 15 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons. 17/TK
But we never really planned for an ending. 18/TK
The executions kept coming, and coming. Even after @gabrieldance went back to the @nytimes, and many of our reporting partners left their papers for new jobs, executions kept happening. 19/TK
Hundreds of people were given death dates and scores executed.
Even as the death penalty is in steep decline, it's not dead and gone yet. And it isn't going be in the near future. 20/TK
Even as the death penalty is in steep decline, it's not dead and gone yet. And it isn't going be in the near future. 20/TK
I started scheming with @mauricechammah and @keri about new ways we could write about capital punishment at @marshallproj and how we could tell larger stories that would get more people's attention. That led to our new series, Death Sentences. https://www.themarshallproject.org/tag/death-sentences 21/TK
With Death Sentences gaining steam, it felt like a good time to wind down The Next to Die. 22/TK
Five and a half years is a long time to do any project, particularly one as voluminous, and traumatic, as monitoring every single execution, writing about the people facing death and the people who lost their lives in crimes. 23/TK
To end @thenexttodie, we looked back at the data we’d collected and found trends that raise questions about how fairly and how well the criminal justice dispenses punishment. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/02/10/what-120-executions-tell-us-about-criminal-justice-in-america 24/TK
Another amazing of group of @marshallproject colleagues— @andrewcalderon, @katiepark, @elankiderman, @gabeisman, @davideads and more—helped me tell the story with this haunting and stark design. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/02/10/what-120-executions-tell-us-about-criminal-justice-in-america 25/TK
