USA - Tennessee. Kevin Burns, the death row inmate who celebrates mass on death row

USA - Kevin Burns (TN)

14 February 2025 :

February 10, 2025 - Tennessee. Kevin Burns, the death row inmate who celebrates mass on death row
Burns is an evangelical pastor
The Prisoner Who Planted a Church on Death Row
Every week, behind a half dozen security doors that lead to Unit 2—Tennessee’s death row—Kevin Burns holds a worship service. He leads Communion, prayer, liturgy, and a sermon with men who share his sentence.
Burns, 55, has been on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for 30 years, convicted of felony murder in two young men’s deaths in 1992. A group that included Burns robbed another group and shot Damond Dawson, 17, and Tracey Johnson, 20. This particular murder charge, felony murder, applies to those present during an inherently dangerous crime even if they did not kill. Burns maintains his innocence in their killing.
For years, Burns has led Bible studies and prayed with other men on death row, going on to become an ordained minister in 2018 and start The Church of Life within prison walls.
“It is so wonderful what God is doing here,” Burns said in a phone interview. “I never, never could have imagined being on death row and having an actual church service. It’s a church for us, led by us.”
Franklin Community Church pastor Kevin Riggs, whose church ordained Burns and helped plant the Church of Life, thinks this is the only church in the US led by people on death row. Texas has a program to allow prisoners to take seminary classes and become de facto prison chaplains, but death row prisoners there are in solitary confinement most of the day.
Burns is in the part of death row that holds about two dozen other men with good disciplinary records and time accumulated, and they have more mobility in the day. The rest of the men on death row must remain in their cells 23 hours a day.
A church on death row struggles with membership. The church has about five regular members out of the 45 men on death row in Tennessee. Another ten or so come sporadically.
In Burns’s time behind bars, Tennessee has executed 13 men in Unit 2. Burns can name them all. He prayed with nine of the men before their executions and has led memorial services for them afterward.
He prays he’s not next.
President Donald Trump is pushing states to carry out more executions. In his first term, Trump oversaw 13 executions, the most by any president in 120 years. But this time, former president Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 people on federal death row before leaving office—they are now serving life sentences without parole. The three remaining prisoners on federal death row all still have the ability to file more appeals.
Trump is left with the state prisoners. In one of his first executive orders, Trump directed the Justice Department to help states acquire a supply of drugs for lethal injection, a key holdup for states trying to carry out the death penalty.
The companies that make the drugs won’t sell them to prisons for executions, and they say they have distribution controls in place to prevent that. Execution drugs are typically among the tightest-controlled substances, so they’re not easily obtainable.
But some states have performed executions with lethal drugs of unknown origins. Alabama has executed two people with nitrogen gas, but states use lethal injection for the vast majority of executions. Texas executed a man by lethal injection last week.
Opponents of the death penalty believe the federal supply of pentobarbital is exhausted, so the US government would not have access to the drug. It’s unclear how the federal government could get any lethal drugs to states.
Tennessee paused executions in 2022, after a scheduled execution was halted over an unknown problem with the drug protocol. The governor ordered a review of the state’s three-drug protocol, and at the end of 2024, the state announced it would now be using a single-drug protocol, pentobarbital. Now the state could resume issuing execution dates anytime if it can acquire the drug.
Church of Life’s lone deacon, Pervis Payne, was scheduled to be executed in 2020, but COVID-19 gave him a reprieve.
Then the Innocence Project took on Payne’s case. Shortly after, Tennessee passed a law in line with Supreme Court precedent blocking the execution of those with intellectual disabilities—which includes Payne. Since then, a Tennessee court reduced Payne’s sentence to two life sentences, served concurrently, which means he could be up for parole in a few years.
Burns didn’t lose his deacon to execution, but now he could lose him to parole—which would be a welcome development for Payne. But it underscores the complexity of maintaining a death row church.
The church meets in an empty section of cells on death row, where some cages are available for prisoners under tighter security to sit and hear the services.
Burns remembered one man, Robert Glen Coe, refused to leave his cell and remained there 24 hours a day. Leading up to Coe’s execution in 2000, Burns went to talk to him and looked through the slit in the door. He noticed that the man had worn a path in the concrete from the door to the small window in his cell from walking back and forth. Burns couldn’t help but cry.
“We are human beings,” Burns said. “We’re not animals. When Cain killed Abel, it didn’t mean that he stopped feeling. It didn’t mean that he stopped being a human being. We see his emotion. We saw his feelings. When God pronounced his punishment, he said, ‘Lord, my punishment is more than I can bear.’ And we saw the mercy that God had on him.”
Burns grew up in the Church of God in Christ, the son of a pastor. He regrets joining a group of friends on the day of the murders in 1992. Though Burns was only convicted of being present for the murders, which he acknowledges, at the sentencing phase prosecutors brought evidence that he shot one of the victims—Dawson. The jury gave him the death penalty based on that evidence.
He admitted he and the others in the group had guns, but he said he didn’t shoot anyone. He didn’t know the young men in the other group and had no motive for attacking them. No one else out of the six in that attacking group received the death sentence.
The US Supreme Court denied his final appeal in April 2023, but with a dissent from justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor wrote for the dissenters that Burns’s attorneys failed to introduce “evidence that Burns did not shoot Dawson” at his sentencing.
“Burns now faces execution despite a very robust possibility that he did not shoot Dawson but that the jurors, acting on incomplete information, sentenced him to death because they thought he had,” she wrote, adding that “the indefensible decision below will be the last for Burns.”
Burns’s only hope now is for a commutation or pardon from the Tennessee governor. He does not have an execution date while executions are paused, and he ministers in the meantime.
After his arrest in 1992 and incarceration at “the 201,” a notorious county jail in Memphis, he started leading Bible studies in his cell. People have called him KB since he was a kid, but at the 201, one of the prisoners told him that nickname meant “Know the Bible.” Burns remembered he joined a choir started by a prison captain, where they would sing Kirk Franklin’s “He’s Able.”
In Nashville, he’s been the chaplain’s assistant on state death row since 2015.
Ordination took years. Riggs, who had been visiting Burns on death row, talked to his elders about the idea in 2016. They were behind it, but they didn’t want it to be an empty gesture. They wanted Burns to go through a legitimate ordination process.
Burns doesn’t have a seminary degree, but he has done his own studies for years. Riggs brought him books, and the church administered an exam asking questions about his faith, his calling to be a minister, theology, and social issues.
To the question about his faith, Burns wrote in part, “How do I know I’m saved? … The Lord says in Scripture, ‘For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knowest all things.’”
He was able to have an ordination service on death row in 2018, with his parents and sister from Arkansas present along with Riggs and others. Riverbend, he said, bent over backward to make the service happen. Everyone sang hymns and prayed. Riggs gave an ordination charge, and then Burns preached and served Communion.
“Ordination is not man approving a person,” Riggs said in his charge. “Rather, ordination is a public confirmation, or affirmation, of the Holy Spirit’s calling on an individual’s life.”
Burns said it was the most moving day of his life, but he also has a mantra that every day is “the best day of my life.”
Now Burns leads The Church of Life worship services with a taped-together Bible he has had since his first days in lockup in the early ’90s, a gift from a pastor-mentor in a different correctional facility.
Prison policies require volunteers at the death row church services, and a few Franklin Community Church members attend every week—Riggs’s church in Franklin, Tennessee, is a short drive from the maximum-security facility in Nashville.
But the prisoners run the service. The Franklin volunteers go to keep the church prisoner-led and to keep it from being taken over by other well-meaning charitable programs—or, as Burns dreaded, becoming another small group.
The church inside the prison has influenced its parent church, Franklin Community Church. Before Riggs preaches to his congregation, he sometimes shares that he visited death row that week and the men need prayer over tension in the unit or anxiety about the drug protocol. Sometimes, Franklin Community can arrange for Burns to call in from Riverbend to preach.
Riggs noted with a laugh that his congregation likes when Burns preaches; they know it’ll be limited to 30 minutes because that’s how much time Burns has on the phone before it cuts off. Riggs sometimes talks a little longer.
Church members visiting death row have been transformed by it too, in seeing how the men live their faith in such a context.
The prisoners helped change the diapers of another prisoner dying of cancer and helped another with intellectual disabilities, Riggs recalled. Burns ministered to Riggs and his wife after their son was killed in a car crash in 2023.
One member, Eric Boucher, who consistently visits death row as a volunteer and has become friends with Burns, said he supported the death penalty before visiting the men there.
Boucher said he had thought, They’re animals. They did something; they’ve had all their appeals. … If they die, that’s just. But now that he’s been in proximity to the “systemic issues with the death penalty,” he believes it is impossible to carry out justly.
Most Americans still support capital punishment, although that support is declining. But in surveys, white evangelicals have had the highest level of support for the death penalty.
When the pandemic prevented all volunteers from coming into the prison for 15 months, Church of Life could keep holding services—although they weren’t allowed to sing to prevent viral spread. They’re back to singing now.
One member of Church of Life, Donny, whose last name is withheld because of sensitivity around his case, wrote about what it meant to him: “I have been incarcerated for 38 years. All of which has been without family or friends. What Church of Life means to me is that while those that I called family have written me off, God has not. It means that in this place of darkness there is a light of hope. There is a way beyond the path I have walked.”
Burns said it’s meaningful to have a prisoner as a pastor to other prisoners because he knows what it’s like to be in lockdown, to have his cell shaken down, to not be able to touch grass.
“Some would consider us to be the worst of the worst,” he said. “If God can be all that he is in me and I’m one of you, then God can do it for you. … They can’t say to me, ‘You go home to your family.’ I’m here with you.”

A handwritten prayer by Kevin Burns from death row, recorded in the book he cowrote with Kevin Riggs:
Today! The Best Day of My Life.
O Lord God, even the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus, the Christ.
Lord God, you are holy and righteous; Gracious and altogether true.
Your mercies are everlasting, and they are renewed every morning.
O Lord God, unto thee do I lift up my soul.
And unto thee do I cry in despair.
Have mercy on me, Lord, I pray, and deliver me.
Deliver me from those who are too strong for me: And deliver me from certain death.
You said in your word, that you looked down from the height of your sanctuary;
From heaven you beheld the earth; to hear the groaning of the prisoners;
To loose those that are appointed to death.
Behold, I am in prison, and they have appointed my soul for death.
But unto you O Lord my God, do I make my appeal.
For you are that God that took me from my mother’s bosom,
And declared your love for me, and made your covenant with me,
And told me that you will never leave me nor forsake me.
But that you will be with me always, even until the end of the world:
And caused me to hope in you.
And now, O Lord my God, in thee do I put my trust.
Let me not be brought to shame.
Neither let any that trust in your holy name be brought to shame.
But bring me out of this prison swiftly, I pray;
And deliver me by a strong hand, O lover of my soul.