The Final Words of Inmates on Death Row
Note: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in which they share their work and thought process. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
As a part of my data journalism class I was in the search for a dataset to present in class for our data festival. I was also in search for a tutorial to learn SQL and learn better ways to manage data for stories that I was working on.
My search led me to the far and wide corners of the internet with no signs of hope but I finally found a dataset published by the The Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The dataset: The final words of inmates on death row before they were executed in Texas.
This dataset fascinated me because I am not only interested in the death row laws but I wanted to put a face on it. I found the CSV file on this SQLstar tutorial by Zi Chong Kao, which by the way is a great resource to learn SQL from the ground up.
Once I had my CSV file, the first order of business was to convert into an XLS format as the CSV file does not save other sheets so if you happen to work on it and close it, you would end up losing all of your work (that would be devastating). So with the surety that I won’t lose my work, I dived head first into the data set.
I am in no shape or form defending the inmates in this dataset nor am I making a statement on the death row laws but it is jarring to read a person’s last words before they are put to death
The dataset was not that massive, only 554 rows of the last words the inmates said before they were executed. It had the all the essentials of a dataset with name, race, age, gender, highest level of education etc, but it also had the last words spoken by the inmates, for example: “ First and foremost I’d like to say, “Justice has never advanced by taking a life” by Coretta Scott King. Lastly, to my wife and to my kids, I love y’all forever and always. That’s it.”
Now, I am in no shape or form defending the inmates in this dataset nor am I making a statement on the death row laws but it is jarring to read a person’s last words before they are put to death.
With that in mind, I ventured more into cleaning the data set to see if there are any patterns. I created a raw file for my original dataset and then copied the raw data into a new working sheet so that I am in no way hindering on the purity of my original data set. Once I did that I started sorting things out my filtering the rows, where I found an interesting pattern. I had quotes from the inmates so I decided to see how many times the words innocent, God, love, sorry, thank you and I am ready were used.
My next step was to use the filter tool and type in all the words individually and copy paste the results into different sheets. This allowed me to get a count of how many times each person said those words with all their other information including race and age.
To further narrow my search, I wanted to see inmates of which races said those words and I created a pivot table for each sheet based on race to find out. The results were interesting: I found that in almost all the sheets of the words, inmates with from the white race were the most vocal ones with the exception of the word ‘thank you’ which was said by all races equal number of the times.
This data set taught me that patterns do not emerge by looking at a data set in itself. You have to interview it and it can be a great source if you are willing to sit down with it and understand what is it trying to tell you.
