Of the 527 executions between December 1982 and June 2015 regarded in our study,
119 of the inmates had declined to make a last statement or had no transcribed last statement (Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 2017a). Of the 407 executed prisoners (404 male, 3 female) with spoken last words, 178 were described as White or Caucasian, 150 as Black, 77 as Hispanic, and two as having another ethnicity. Their mean age at execution was 39.01 (SD = 8.2) years, and they had been on death row for an average of 10.96 (SD = 4.4) years. Death row inmates' statements contained a total of 42,328 words and an average of 104 words per inmate (ranging from 1 to 1,268 words) of which, on average, 92% were categorized by the internal LIWC dictionary. It is interesting that the final statements included, on average, a higher percentage of positive emotion words (9.64%) than negative emotions words (2.65%), with over 80% of death row inmates speaking more positive than negative emotion words. The proportion of positive emotion words was significantly related to death row inmates' greater use of first-person singular self-references, words reflecting social orientation including words referring to friends, and present-tense verbs, as well as to less use of words indicating cognitive processes, past-tense verbs, and death-related words.
Please note that the words most commonly used in English (i.e., stopwords) were not included in the word cloud, which was created using the R package “wordcloud” (Fellows, 2015).
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