Christian leaders in Tennessee are pleading for clemency on behalf of a man on death row who they believe deserves another chance at life. Donnie Edward Johnson is scheduled to be executed on May 16 for the 1984 murder of his wife, Connie Johnson. But the 68-year-old man experienced a religious conversion in prison and has become a minister to other inmates at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, said pastor Furman Fordham of Nashville’s Riverside Chapel Seventh-day Adventist Church. “Don Johnson’s ministry is living,” Fordham told the Associated Press on Thursday. “He is doing behind those walls what I aspire to do outside the walls.” Fordham and several prison ministry volunteers hosted a news conference at the Riverside church on Thursday, after attending a clemency meeting with staff for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R). John Dysinger, one of the meeting’s attendees, said his family has grown close to Johnson after meeting the inmate years ago through his prison ministry. Dysinger said that he thinks the meeting with the governor’s staff went well and that he is hopeful Lee will show Johnson mercy. “I have every hope they’re praying about it and they’re going to make the decision that Jesus would make,” Dysinger said.

Tennessee Department of Corrections via AP Death row inmate Donnie Edward Johnson in an undated photo released by the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Johnson was convicted of murdering his wife in a Memphis camping center in 1984. He shoved a 30-gallon plastic bag down her throat until she suffocated, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports. He was sentenced to death. Tennessee’s Supreme Court upheld the verdict, with one justice noting that Connie Johnson had suffered during her last moments. “The homicide was inhuman and brutal to an almost indescribable degree,” Justice William Harbison wrote in 1987. Thirty years ago, Jimmy Pitt, a now-deceased member of the Riverside church, started a Bible study with Johnson in prison. That was the start of Johnson’s long relationship with the Seventh-day Adventist church, which is located about 10 miles from the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Johnson now leads Bible studies at the prison and ministers to other inmates who are on death row, Fordham told the Tennessean. Johnson was ordained as an elder at the Riverside church in 2008, even though the inmate has never entered the church building. Cynthia Vaughn, Connie Johnson’s daughter from an earlier marriage, has also joined the clemency effort. Vaughn was 7 years old at the time of her mother’s murder. In an April opinion piece for the Commercial Appeal, Vaughn described visiting Don Johnson in prison for the first time in years and venting her anger over the pain she’d endured because of her mother’s death. She wrote that she realized then that the hatred she harbored toward him was harming her deeply ― and she decided to forgive him. Vaughn added that she now feels Johnson’s story of Christian redemption is both sincere and “extraordinary.” “Over these past few years, Don has become one of my last connections to my mother, and his execution will not feel like justice to me. It will feel like losing my mother all over again,” Vaughn wrote. “I want to save his life.”

Mark Humphrey / ASSOCIATED PRESS Pastor Furman Fordham (right) speaks on behalf of Johnson on April 3, 2019, in Nashville.