Criminal · Vox Media Podcast Network

Sister Helen

December 26, 2025·44 min·3 clips

Sister Helen vomited after watching a man be deliberately executed, realizing she witnessed a hidden state ritual.

January 2021 starts quietly, inside a hard day. Phoebe checks in, and the guest answers from New Orleans with the news that her little brother died after getting COVID yesterday. New Orleans is still New Orleans, she says. The exchange is small, but it sets the tone: regular speech trying to carry grief before the main subject even arrives. From there, the episode moves toward execution. The guest talks about what it means to be given a date, brought near death, sent back to a cell, and called again. She calls that anticipation torture. Her point is blunt. A conscious person, defenseless and waiting, suffers under the knowledge that guards will eventually come. She has accompanied six people to execution, and that changes the way she speaks. This is not theory. It comes from cells, lawyers, and the last hours. Brandon Bernard's death becomes the sharpest example. On December 10, Human Rights Day, she says she stopped what she was doing and prayed as he waited at Terre Haute. Six o'clock passed and the guards did not come. Then 6:20 came, then 7:20, and nobody knew whether the delay meant a stay or something worse. The uncertainty becomes part of the punishment. At eight something, the guards came, said it was time to go, and took him away to be killed. The episode stays restrained. It lets the timing, the waiting, and the repeated act of being taken from a cell do the work. What remains is a grave conversation about power, fear, and what happens when human systems turn death into procedure.

As heard by us

A somber, close-range conversation about death row, execution stays, and the terror built into waiting to die.

Sister Helen is a grave conversation about capital punishment, framed through the terror of waiting for the state to decide when a person will die.

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Why you'd press play

Hear a death penalty witness describe accompanying six people to execution, and why the waiting itself becomes part of the cruelty.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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