Editor’s Note: This story includes mention of sexual violence. Resources are available here.
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Roy Lee Ward, 53, died at 12:33 a.m. Oct. 10 at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. Stacy Payne, 15, died at 4:18 p.m. July 11, 2001, at the University of Louisville Hospital in Kentucky. Twenty-four years ago, Ward raped and murdered Payne after he knocked on her door and told her he was looking for his lost dog. This month, he was killed by lethal injection, becoming the third person Indiana has executed since resuming capital punishment last year.
Ward was preceded by Joseph Corcoran, 49, and Benjamin Ritchie, 45. In December 2024, Corcoran was the first person executed by the state after a 15-year hiatus. He murdered his brother, James, 30, his sister’s fiancé, Robert Turner, 32, and two family friends, Timothy Bricker, 30, and Douglas Stillwell, 30, in 1997. He was accused of murdering his parents five years earlier. In May 2025, Ritchie was executed for murdering Beech Grove, Indiana, police officer Bill Toney, 31, in 2000.
Toney, Stillwell, Bricker, Turner and Payne should still be alive.
So should Corcoran, Ritchie and Ward.
It's easy to argue against capital punishment in cases like Robert Roberson’s in Texas. In 2003, Roberson was convicted of murdering his 2-year-old daughter after doctors determined she died of shaken baby syndrome, a brain injury caused by forceful shaking. Since this conviction, new evidence suggests Roberson’s daughter might have died of complications related to pneumonia.
After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt Roberson’s execution Oct. 17, 2024, Texas state legislators subpoenaed him to testify at a date later, effectively halting his execution. In this instance, the death penalty threatened to kill a possibly innocent man before additional evidence could be considered. This year, Roberson’s Oct. 16 execution was stayed for a possible retrial.
Arguing against the death penalty is more difficult in Indiana's cases. Unlike Roberson, Ritchie did not maintain his innocence.
“I've ruined my life and other people's lives,” he said during a parole hearing in May. “I'm so sorry for that night.”
Yet economic considerations drove lawmakers in Indianapolis to discuss ending capital punishment in January. Pentobarbital, the drug used for lethal injection in Indiana, is expensive.
“It costs close to a quarter million (dollars) for one dose,” Dr. John Feczko, a pathologist who performed the state’s autopsies on Corcoran, Ritchie and Ward, said in an interview with the Indiana Daily Student. “Then it’s only good for 90 days.”
Pentobarbital’s high cost and short lifespan result in a high burden on taxpayers, especially when the governor pardons or extends death row after the prison orders the injection. Often, pardons or extensions come in the final days before an execution. Thus, Indiana executed only one person in 2024 but spent $900,000 on pentobarbital.
By contrast, imprisoning one person for a year costs Indiana less than $20,000.
The bill that would have ended capital punishment in Indiana died in committee, but there are other reasons to oppose the death penalty. As a Catholic, I see it as a tragic end to tragic stories.
Killing criminals means reconciliation becomes impossible. From the mass and confession to the Church’s political and economic teachings, reconciliation lies at the heart of everything Catholic. That’s because we believe it formed the core of Jesus’ mission and message.
“Punishment ... as far as possible ... must contribute to the correction of the guilty,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church, inspired by this principle, reads. Despite the religious source, this wisdom would serve states, including Indiana, well. What is more important than unity, which reconciliation produces through correction, to society’s smooth functioning?
Instead, by perpetuating a cycle of death, the state quashes any chance at redemption for the guilty and reconciliation with society.
“Violence often begets more violence, whether criminal or regulated,” Archbishop Charles Thompson of Indianapolis told Today's Catholic before Corcoran’s execution. The stories of Maria Goretti and Pope John Paul II, two Catholic saints, offer examples of the peace that can arise only when the state disrupts the cycle of death.
Goretti, born to a rural Italian family on a farm also worked by their neighbors, was 11 when Alessandro Serenelli, 20, a neighbor's son, stabbed her after attempting to rape her.
“I forgive (Alessandro), and I want him with me in heaven,” Goretti said in the hospital before she died. Because of Serenelli’s age, Italian law did not permit him to receive the death penalty. Instead, he was sentenced to prison.
While serving this sentence, Serenelli had a dream in which Goretti handed him flowers and committed his life to her memory upon waking. Then when he was released, Serenelli took religious vows and lived like a son to Goretti’s mother.
John Paul II, pope from 1978 to 2005, was shot in 1981 by Ali Ağca, a hitman with one known murder. He likewise forgave his assailant, then successfully campaigned the Italian government not to sentence him to death.
“We met as fellow human beings and as brothers,” John Paul II said after visiting Ağca in prison. When Ağca was released in 2010, he returned to the site where he shot the pope to pray.
Despite their crimes, both Serenelli and Ağca were able to be reintegrated into society as reformed individuals because they were not killed. Yet reconciliation remains a tough ideal when you remind yourself of the crimes they — and Ward, Corcoran and Ritchie — committed to arrive or nearly arrive at death row.
It’s not difficult to imagine why Gov. Mike Braun rejected Ward’s clemency request or why Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said it was “past time for (Ritchie) to pay his debt to society.”
It’s not difficult to imagine why the widow of Ritchie’s victim said, “I feel like that justice just needs to be served, and this is the justice that should be given to Bill (Toney).”
It's not difficult to imagine because a death for a death means justice can be done.
For me, the hope Goretti and the pope held is more difficult to imagine, but more powerful: that the just can be made, even from the guiltiest. While the death penalty serves justice, it cannot make the guilty just. In fact, it leaves their mark on society forever unjust.
In an age when it’s not only more expensive for the state to kill someone, but also not any safer, it’s time for Indiana to join almost half the country in abolishing the death penalty. Through hope alone, we can shape our society into one that doesn’t only seek justice but does so by letting the guilty become just.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science. He currently serves as a member of Indiana University Student Government.
