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I’ve been going to Holman for years now, but you never actually see the prison. There’s a gate, and behind it a row of pine trees, tall now, hiding everything behind them. I remember when those trees were saplings. That’s how long I’ve had a history with this place, with this state, with what it does in the name of justice.

Last month I stood in a field outside Holman for the execution of Jeremy Williams. There was no crowd. One van carried the witnesses, including Williams’s mother, along with members of the media. A reporter and a cameraman from Columbus News were also there. And SueZann Bosler and Abe Bonowitz from Death Penalty Action, who had already spent that day at another execution hours away in Nashville, still got in the truck and drove down, because I’d told them I was going and they didn’t want me to be out there alone.

Compare that to the turnout for Jeffery Lee’s execution this week: vigils, advocates, cameras, a public conversation happening in real time. Jeremy Williams got a handful of people in a field.

I think about why that is. This crime started in Georgia, in Columbus, where I’d lived for years before I moved. Kristy Siple, the mother of the child Williams killed, Kamarie Holland, sold her daughter to him for $2,500. That happened in Georgia. She was sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking, and yet she’s serving that sentence in an Alabama prison, not a Georgia one. The sale happened in one state. The punishment is being served in another. I don’t have a tidy answer for why the geography worked out that way. It’s strange, and it’s stuck with me since I learned it.

Williams pleaded guilty to the murder, but Alabama required a jury trial anyway, because a guilty plea alone can’t produce a death sentence there. The jury convicted him. The judge sentenced him to die. He was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m.

I remember the timing of his crime because it happened just days after I was diagnosed with cancer. Grief and fear have a way of anchoring dates in your memory that would otherwise blur together. So when his execution date came, I went. Not because his case was drawing headlines. It wasn’t. But because somebody needed to be there who wasn’t there for the spectacle.

That’s the thing about this work that doesn’t always make it into the advocacy narrative. Some cases draw a crowd, and some cases draw a field. Both deserve one. The child Williams killed deserved better than the failures that put her in his path in the first place. A trafficking mother, a system that didn’t catch it soon enough. And the machinery that killed Williams doesn’t become more or less broken depending on how many people show up to watch it happen.

I didn’t step out into the middle of the field. I stayed close to the edge, just far enough in, and got on my knees there. Maybe that’s the image people need. Not the crowd, not the cameras. Just somebody at the edge of the field, praying for a man most of the world had already stopped thinking about.