Yusef Nur is a business professor at Indiana University. Having never even visited a prison before, he nonetheless answered a call put forth by Bill Breeden for a Muslim to serve as a spiritual advisor for federal death row prisoner Orlando Hall, who was to be executed by the federal government in Terre Haute, Indiana on November 19, 2020. Yusef contracted COVID during the execution from the executioners in the closed space of the death chamber, as they were not wearing masks. The prisoner who was to become the last of the 13 federal death row inmates that Donald Trump ordered to be executed, Dustin Higgs, was also Muslim and requested that Yusef Nur also serve as his spiritual advisor. Yusef had walked out of the death chamber after Orlando Hall was executed feeling so traumatized that he said he never again wanted to serve as a witness to an execution, yet he said that he could not refuse the call by Dustin Higgs to witness his execution on January 15, 2021 because did not want Dustin to die alone, without someone there to support him. I sat down with him in his home in Bloomington, Indiana to interview him about the impact of witnessing two federal executions.
In the above video link, you hear Yusef Nur sharing his thoughts about serving as a witness to two executions as a guest for the podcast called The Experiment.
Go to the links below to learn more about Yusef's experience as a witness to two federal executions. Bill Breeden and Sister Barbara Battista are also mentioned in the CNN article below. Read more about Bill Breeden and Sister Barbara Battista in the blog posts that I have created, as I also interviewed these two individuals for my research study.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/10/us/federal-death-penalty-spiritual-advisers/index.html
https://www.aclu.org/news/capital-punishment/weve-had-enough-death-in-2020-why-add-more