Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on the execution of seven Tennessee inmates after that state, in 2018 — following 10 years of not carrying out executions — restarted an execution spree that was brought to a temporary halt by the onset of the covid pandemic.

In his book, “Death Row Welcomes You,” Hale traces the lives of death-row inmates at Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and their families and friends who visit them — when they have visitors, which many inmates don’t have.

Hale, who is currently a criminal defense investigator in Nashville, describes the lives of the people he encountered in the execution chamber and the prison visiting areas — and what brought them there.

In his Introduction to “Death Row Welcomes You,” Hale explains that “the people, experiences and research that make up this book have changed my life. I hope that by preserving them here I can contribute in some small way to the idea that we are, all of us, capable of terrible and beautiful things, that people are so often harmed before they harm others, and that, as the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson says, each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

The book also is a story about how Hale went from writing about the inmates on Tennessee’s death row to becoming friends with one of them, Terry King. In June 2013, King received a lengthy letter from a woman whose first........

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