In 1993, when he was nineteen years old, Alim Braxton killed two men during a robbery in Raleigh for which he was indicted on two counts of first degree murder. Four years later he was sent to Death Row after killing a fellow inmate who was threatening him. He has accepted his guilt long ago. In Rap and Redemption on Death Row, the book that he co-authored with University of North Carolina music professor Mark Katz, he says “there is no justification for what I did. I am truly ashamed of this. I was a murderer and a liar, and the jury justifiably sentenced me to die. I’m living with the consequences of my actions, having spent more than thirty years in prison, a quarter century on Death Row.”
Alim was born Michael Jerome Braxton, but took the name Alim when he converted to Islam in prison. His rap name is Rrome Alone. His mother is white, and his father black. He identified as black his entire life, but often felt that he didn’t truly belong to either race or fit in in Raleigh, North Carolina where he grew up. In his neighbourhood drinking, fighting, stealing and hip hop music were a way of life for urban teenagers. Alim began rapping when he was thirteen years old, and his love of writing songs has been the one constant throughout his life.
As he writes in his book, “writing rhymes has always been a form of therapy for me, In prison, you are stripped of all your worldly possessions. Very little belongs to you. But my rhymes are mine, and I carry them with me. When the mood strikes and I want to write, it’s the greatest escape. The joy I feel after crafting a song nothing can replace. Nobody else might like it. Hell, nobody else might even hear it, but it’s mine and it’s dope. Besides, it’s one of the few things that I can do now that I used to do on the other side of the wall.”
“Mercy on My Soul” is the first album ever recorded live from Death Row via prison telephone. Through music, friendship and faith, Alim maintains hope and ambition in a place where time has long ago ceased to exist.
According to the Death Penalty Information Centre (DPIC), 1591 men and women have been executed in the United States in the past five decades although the number of executions has declined in the last 20 years. Many states have instituted governor-imposed moratoriums on capital punishment due to fear of executing an innocent person, botched executions and concern about the methods in which death sentences are being carried out. A shortage of the barbiturate sodium thiopental, one of the drugs administered in lethal injections, has also posed a big problem for states since the European Commission restricted the export of drugs used to carry out lethal injections in 2011. All 27 European Union member states oppose the death penalty and call for its abolition nationwide. In 2016, the largest American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, also banned the sale of its drugs for lethal injections which forced states to delay executions and look into substitute drugs and alternate execution methods such as nitrogen gas and firing squads. In January 2024, the nation’s first execution by nitrogen gas was carried out in the state of Alabama.
Capital punishment, which is applied almost exclusively for the crime of murder, is currently authorised by 27 states, the federal government and the U.S. military. The states that still maintain the death penalty are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
There are currently 2,241 people on Death Row in various state prisons across the U.S. 98% of them are men. Half of them were age 20 to 29 at the time of arrest; 10.5% were age 19 or younger; and 1% were age 55 or older. Inmates’ average education level is 12th grade. Since US capital punishment resumption in 1976, Texas has led the U.S. in executions, putting 588 people to death since 1982. The oldest known person to be executed was Walter Moody, who was 83 at the time of his execution by lethal injection in the state of Alabama on April 19, 2018. The youngest was fourteen year old George Stinney Jr who was arrested, despite a lack of evidence or witnesses, for the murder of two white girls and executed by electric chair on March 24, 1944 in Columbia, South Carolina. He was exonerated 70 years later when a judge ruled that he had been denied due process. Nine inmates have been executed in five states in the US in 2024.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Death Row prisoners spend on average 20.2 years behind bars. According to DPIC, “they are generally isolated from other prisoners, excluded from prison educational and employment programs, and sharply restricted in terms of visitation and exercise, spending as many as 23 hours a day alone in their cells. The years it takes to carry out a death sentence exact a huge toll- on taxpayers, victims’ families, and the prisoners themselves.” In the past, inmates would automatically be placed in windowless solitary confinement, get served three meals a day, which they would eat in their cells, and be allowed only one hour of exercise daily. After numerous inmates across states filed federal lawsuits arguing that keeping them in solitary confinement is inhumane and unconstitutional, several states lifted restrictions on death row inmates. According to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organisation that covers the U.S. criminal justice system, “in recent years, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia have allowed condemned inmates to have more time out of their cells and, in some cases, eat meals and exercise with other inmates and hold jobs.”
“Inmates on Death Row in North Carolina were never locked in our cells for 23 hours a day. We are allowed to come out of our cells each morning at 7:00 am and, with exceptions of count times, we can stay out until 10:45 each night,” Alim clarifies. “It’s hard to describe a typical day. I have some routine things that I do personally every day such as prayer, reading my Qur’an, showering and exercise. For the most part I am confined to a pod the entire day with 23 other inmates and so occasionally we socialise, watch TV or spend time reading, writing and studying. That’s a typical day for me.”
The exorbitant cost of maintaining capital punishment has been debated for years, a cost which is borne primarily by increasing taxes, despite the fact that the majority of imposed executions are never carried out. Death penalty cases are expensive for judicial systems because they require extensive procedural precautions to reduce the risk of executing an innocent person. Due to the fact that a life is at stake, capital cases also require more witnesses, lawyers, clerks, prosecutors and experts than life imprisonment. Once sentencing has been completed, a case will enter the appellate system. The complexity and length of the appeals process dictates that there is an average wait of 20 years between conviction and execution, during which time a Death Row inmate needs to be housed in a segregated cell in a maximum security facility, which is much more costly than regular housing. According to Interrogating Justice, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on failures of the criminal justice system, “the average federal prisoner costs about $37,500 per year compared to a death row prisoner, which would cost about $60,000 to $70,000 per year.”
A 2009 study in North Carolina, “Potential Savings from Abolition of the Death Penalty in North Carolina,” that examined cases from 2005 and 2006, concluded that “repealing the death penalty could have saved the state 22 million in those two years.” There last execution that was carried out in NC was in 2006 at the Central Prison in Raleigh.
Rather than facing imminent execution, inmates at Central Prison have been living on Death Row indefinitely. Most of them are middle- aged and have been there between 20-25 years. Until 2016 when a telephone was installed in the dayroom of each prison pod, they were denied any connection with the outside world.
“Not a lot has changed on Death Row over the years. Progress is a very slow thing here,” says Alim. “Our living conditions have remained the same. The biggest change is having access to tablets, which is a privilege that all prisoners in NC were granted in 2022 and it has improved my ability to stay in contact with friends and family on the outside through phone calls and text, although it can be very expensive. Whereas prior to 2016 when we were only allowed one phone call a year, now I can use the phone as often as I like from 8:30 am to 10:30 pm each day for a fee of 10 cents per minute and i can also text for 2 cents per minute.”
The story of how Alim Braxton came to record a rap album on Death Row began one fateful day in 2019 when he mailed a handwritten letter to music professor Mark Katz at UNC asking for assistance in a project that seemed impossible with no technology, no studio, no producer and no recording equipment. He had only his voice, his words and a prison telephone, but he had read an article in a local newspaper about a hip hop program that Katz had founded and wanted to know if the professor could help him. After some deliberation, Katz wrote back that he would try to find a producer who would be willing to work with him.
Nick Neutronz, a hip hop producer, scratch DJ and Audio Engineer, who lives in New York, explains that he began working with Alim purely by chance. “I applied to be part of Mark Katz’s cultural diplomacy program, Next Level Hip Hop Exchange, that sends teaching artists in hip hop all over the world, and I was sent to Algeria and Tunisia in 2017. I met Mark Katz in Washington DC at our orientation and I was very surprised and impressed. I had no idea that someone in academia, and one who is very oriented towards rules and formalities, could be subversive, revolutionary and very hip hop, which mark Katz absolutely is. A few years after that residency, Mark asked his Facebook contacts if anyone would be interested in producing for Alim, and I answered the call. From the lyrics I heard on Soundcloud, recorded by documentarian Michael Betts II, I was impressed and engrossed. His voice and words felt so familiar to me. It was like the music I grew up on, and it was at the highest level.”
Alim’s rhymes vividly describe his personal struggles. One Life tells the story of his best friend, Stacey Sabur Tyler, who was wrongfully convicted of the first-degree murder of his girlfriend and has spent almost 30 years on Death Row for a crime he did not commit. One of Alim’s greatest motivations in writing songs is to help those who have been wrongfully incarcerated, a pressing issue in the American criminal justice system especially for Black Americans. More than 3,400 people have been exonerated since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
“It is definitely one of my goals and hopes for this music and the message to reach the attention of powerful people. One of the main things I’m focusing on is advocacy for innocent people on Death Row,” he explains. “Since I’ve been here there have been at least six innocent people that have been exonerated, and there are still others here who are innocent but don’t have the means to get their cases heard or brought to public awareness. My friend Stacey Sabur Tyler has been on Death Row 30 years for a crime he did not commit and Elrico Fowler has been on Death Row for 27 years. Both of these guys are innocent and it’s my hope that, through my music, my book and advocacy, that some powerful person will take interest in their plight and render them assistance.”
The song Mercy on my Soul showcases the moment in the courtroom when a judge issues a murder conviction and a death sentence, and Alim’s feeling that the judge is looking at him with smug condescension while his mother and sister are his only emotional support in the world. “Last thing I heard was the judge’s words, “May God have mercy on your soul.”
Welcome to Death Row is a song that uses dark humour to describe in detail the prison wing where Death Row inmates are housed: the doors, sergeants, cameras, control panels, guards, cells. “And to our left here is an alcove for therapeutic and medicinal health/ To help you cope with the loss of your hope for the next twenty years as you/Wait for your death.”
Alim writes rhymes about love, about his wife, his mother, the neighbourhood he grew up in, gangster life, injustice and about the pain and rejection he felt growing up biracial.
“I think my personal favourite song that we’ve worked on together is Ready 4 War, which is a 1 minute and 25 second intro to his EP The Convict Code,” says Nick. “I made the beat in 2007 or so in the studio internship that would determine the trajectory of my working life, and Alim wrote this song when he was spending YEARS in solitary confinement after he killed an inmate. The lyrics have so much agitation, so much visceral prison and American historical imagery that it gives me chills every time I hear it. His brother, Chris Braxton, heard it for the first time at the one man show in March 2024 and immediately asked me to identify it and send it to him, and that confirmed to me that it was personal, effective and powerful.”
“I made the Live on Death Row video in 2021. I was inspired to do this by my friend Wordsmith who gave me a distribution and licensing deal to record music here on Death Row. He believed in my vision and told me that I should think real hard on what I wanted my first single to look like. Since I knew that my music and image had the potential to represent more than just myself, I wanted to do a song that gave dozens of audio snapshots of what it looks like here on Death Row. I came up with the title based on the book Live From Death Row by Mumia Abu Jamal, who was once the most well-known Death Row prisoner in the world. I had an idea for the song to look like like a reporter who is reporting from the eye of a storm with chaos erupting all around. My producer Nick Neutronz made an amazing track that was the perfect soundscape for the lyrics and Wordsmith took the video treatment I wrote and found an animator to give it life. it was epic! We were able to get local news coverage about the song and video and people viewed it around the world.”
Nick explains that there were many challenges on the path to recording and releasing Alim’s songs, a process which began in January 2020. “Sometimes Alim’s vision for his project is out of sync with the way I see things. There are subtleties about social media, the state of music, the sheer volume of songs that are released all the time. The internet’s fickle algorithms bury the work that you spend years on, while sometimes supporting and platforming things you’ve thrown together in minutes. It’s hard to explain the depth and magnitude of how we’ve all been trained to understand what constitutes entertainment and how to best deliver our art.” He goes on to explain that there are also numerous technical challenges that plague them on a daily basis such as audio dropouts due to poor phone technology in prison that ruin amazing vocal takes and poor audio quality that denies Alim the ability to hear the beats that he’s rapping on properly. “There is also the problem of the average listener’s reluctance to accept
Alim’s voice, recorded via telephone, as a vehicle for his poetry, his raps. People complain about the quality and ask “can’t something be done about this?” There is so much that people in prison are meant to have by law that they are denied. It’s always annoying when people think that I can just walk into Central Prison with my computer and a condenser microphone!”
“Some of the other inmates are pretty proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish,” Alim says. “It’s unheard of for someone on Death Row to get any attention for something other than our crimes, so to be portrayed in a positive and productive light is a good reflection on everyone else. Others are rooting for me because they hope that if I’m successful that success will trickle down to benefit everyone else and provide them with opportunities too. Some of the guards have also been impressed. A few have listened to my music and read my book and encourage me to keep doing what I’m doing.”
In the five years that they have been working together, Alim has become one of Nick Neutronz’s best friends, though their respective realities are worlds apart. Nick explains that their friendship is a mix of artistic collaboration, philosophical and political debate, emotional support and humour. “The fact that we are so different is, at this point, very well-known territory as we’ve both shared a lot about the lives and traumas we had growing up. I often play him music that he doesn’t have access to. As this whole Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar rap battle was playing out, I would play him the music over the phone as it released. If I am stressed or in an emotional spot, I know that I can confide in him, and this is really interesting: he listens to me and says, “I hear you. I am going to take some time to think on it.” And sometime later he comes back and offers wisdom from his own personal experiences or from the Islamic faith. I have never had a friend who considered my pain and struggle so carefully and thoughtfully”
Decades on Death Row can seem endless and hope elusive. Alim acknowledges that his faith and his goals are what sustain him. “My time has become a lot fuller since I’ve been recording music and writing. It gives me more to do and occupies a lot more of my energy and focus and keeps me positive and busy,” he says. “Our work is constant, “ Nick adds. “We have about four songs we’re working on right now and there are dozens of songs in various states of completion which we’ll resume releasing in a few weeks.”
“Hope is a difficult topic on Death Row and it’s obviously very different for each person. My hope is faith-based. I can’t even imagine life without my faith and my faith gives me hope that by believing in Allah and trying to do good deeds that help other people that I might be helped in return,” Alim explains. “This makes me feel empowered because it allows me to feel like iI am in control and not simply at the whim of a merciless process that I have no say in. The belief that there is something I can do to determine how this story ends motivates me to keep working, to keep striving to accomplish things that people might think are impossible. if I didn’t have my faith, I wouldn’t have a reason to get up each day.”
“There are many people here that don’t have much hope,” he continues. “They feel like they are in despair and see no way out of their condition. One of the reasons why I’m trying to accomplish the big goals that I’m working towards is because I sincerely believe that I can open up a way to eventual freedom for myself by helping others in this situation believe that there is a way out, and that they, too, can accomplish their dreams, help others and change the outcome of their lives.”