Dads of Death Row

“Daddy when are you coming home?” DeAndre Hurst remembers asking his father. 

“I’m never coming home,” Jason Hurst told him. “I killed somebody.”

DeAndre, then about 5 years old, remembers breaking into confused tears. When his father was convicted in 2004, he had been told he was going to jail for “doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing at work.” When he learned that his father had been convicted of murder and given a death sentence, he felt like he’d been lied to.

DeAndre spent weekends with his grandmother and lived primarily with his mother in Greensboro, until she went to rehab when he was 15. He then went to live with his grandfather, but ran away and wasn’t accepted back once police found him. He spent time in a group home and then in foster care, but was kicked out of that, too, after running away and smoking weed. He said he started “gang banging” at around 16, bragging about having a father on death row as a way to show he was tough. 

For Jason, it was difficult to watch his son go through those challenges without support while he was behind bars. Now 27, DeAndre was recently diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and is waiting on disability status. 

“Here’s this child that was fatherless because of my actions,” said the elder Hurst.

While Jason said he feels responsible for some of his son’s trials, DeAndre says he has never held these things against him. 

“Many times, if it wasn’t for my sons, I wouldn’t react in a positive way in the environment I’m in,” Hurst said. “So, in a lot of ways they’ve helped me now more than I’ve ever helped them, just by being who they are, being my sons.”

At North Carolina’s Central Prison in Raleigh, where all men given a death sentence in the state are housed and where Hurst has been on death row for 20 years, relationships like this are not uncommon. Warden Jamel James estimates that about 70 of the 136 men held on death row are fathers. 

Researchers say having a parent in prison leads to worse outcomes for children, ranging from poor grades to health problems. Growing up with a parent on death row is much less common, and less well-studied. It takes a situation that already involves intense parent-child separation and adds the looming fear, stress, and tension of impending death. 

In interviews, fathers on death row in North Carolina and their children said they struggle to maintain relationships, battle feelings of detachment, and grapple with uncertainty about when, or if, they’ll be executed. 

A Family Sentence

North Carolina has not carried out an execution since 2006. A series of lawsuits challenging capital punishment created a de facto moratorium, and in 2009, the state enacted a law that let people sentenced to die spend life in prison instead if they could prove race played a significant role in their case. 

Virtually everyone on death row in the state filed claims under the law before the General Assembly repealed it in 2013, and the more than 100 pending claims have been allowed to go forward. 

When executions were active, it took 10 to 12 years to get through the appeals process and see a sentence carried out, said Kristin Collins, director of public information at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Now, people essentially live on death row indefinitely, and the vast majority of them have been there for 20 to 25 years, she said. Most people on death row are middle-aged or older, and one-third are at least 60 years old, according to Collins. All but two in North Carolina are men.

“It’s really kind of torturous to have it drag out for many decades,” Collins said.

Department of Adult Corrections data show that the number of death sentences handed out in North Carolina peaked in the 1990s and has been declining ever since. 

A 2023 review of numerous studies of children with incarcerated parents found evidence of a range of outcomes, from poorer physical health and academic performance in early childhood to a higher presence of risk behaviors in adolescence.

Outside groups have tried to create programs to help families. At Central Prison—a maximum-security facility where incarcerated people can speak to visitors through glass partitions but can’t make physical contact—some incarcerated fathers have access to the nonprofit faith-based program Proverbs 226. The program allows men to meet with their kids occasionally and facilitates structured activities like board games as well as hugging them, holding them—even standing back-to-back to see how much taller their children have grown. 

However, fathers on death row like Jason Hurst cannot participate in that program. While they have similar phone and visitation access as others at Central Prison, some programs offered elsewhere in the prison aren’t available for people sentenced to death.

Noel Nickle, the executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said that allowing in-person visits would help bridge some of the gaps death row creates for families. Her group has also asked Gov. Roy Cooper to commute all death sentences before he leaves office in January 2025, which would allow some to move to prisons closer to their families. 

Fatherless Lives

When Terry Robinson was convicted of first-degree murder, his three kids were all 10 years old or younger. 

Before 2016, men on death row at Central Prison could only make calls at Christmas. But even after daily calls were introduced, Robinson said, he had an easier time connecting with his two sons than his daughter.

“I don’t think either one of us was ready to engage the resentment that was there,” Robinson said. “There was no pacifying it no matter how hard I tried.”

Robinson, a 50-year old Wilson native, says he didn’t commit the murder for which he was convicted of 25 years ago, an attempted robbery at a Pizza Inn that ended with the manager being shot in the head. 

Both of his sons have a legal history as well and have spent time in prison. While talking on the phone helped, Robinson said he and his older son, Alexander Harris, still felt like strangers. 

“All we had was these labels, ‘father and son,’ but I didn’t know how to be the father that he needed,” Robinson said. “I couldn’t be the conventional father, the traditional father, because of my absence.”

Harris is now 35, and he said that his father’s dedication to getting out of prison and being around his family again taught him to consider the impacts of his own incarceration on his children. He said he appreciated the creative methods his dad used to stay in touch, including writing letters.

“You have to know how to communicate with your loved ones, especially when you think that every day you wake up they’re gonna kill you,” Harris said “Like, that’s a feeling that nobody knows until you’re on death row.” 

Jason Hurst said he carries the guilt of leaving his children—he has another adult son in addition to DeAndre—without a stable father figure. One struggled with drug addiction, another with homelessness. Reconnecting with DeAndre when they received phone access was both painful and eye-opening, but they now talk weekly. Jason Hurst said he felt that he was able to show his son more love on a phone call than the younger man was receiving from others close to him on the outside.

“Definitely the trauma that they’ve been through in life was partially because of me not being there for them,” Jason Hurst said of his two sons. “Reflecting on that is hell sometimes.”

Jason Hurst, Terry Robinson, and their sons all say they are frustrated about a lack of resources for families of people on death row. However, they have both published blog posts with Walk in Those Shoes, a non-profit publication that encourages incarcerated people to write, and Robinson is also working on a podcast about daily life in death row for the same group.

“Sometimes I wish they would just get it over with,” Robinson wrote in a post in 2014. “The heartache and pain from missing my family is unbearable—death has to be better than this.”

Robinson, who beams with pride when talking about his kids, also points to a class he attended at Central Prison that helped build his relationship with his family. The “Father Accountability Workshop” offered to men on death row showed them how to create and maintain connections with their children and grandchildren. 

In a class attended by a reporter, the leader from the prison programs department sat in the front of the room, a classroom by the commissary of the row, and walked the men through a workbook on being nurturing fathers while in prison. The men sat in a U-shape around her, talking through various questions.

Robinson said participants were encouraged to reflect on their paternal relationships, which helped him see how his father had not been present in practical ways like helping with homework or cheering for him at sporting events. He yearns to give his kids quality time, despite his circumstances. 

“Death row is a bill that family has to pay,” Robinson said.

Harris said he recognized his father’s dedication to the family and always felt loved. “It’s nothing he won’t do to get back out here with us,” Harris said. “He’ll give anything to be with his kids.” 

Hurst said he still wants to create some sort of legacy for his children from inside of prison. “I’m more so motivated by the knowledge that I have two sons back there,” Hurst said. 

Waverly McIver is a recent graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked at the Daily Tar Heel. She is originally from Sumter, South Carolina and completed this reporting for her thesis.