The grisly reason Taylor Parker isn’t allowed phone calls or a TV on death row

Maternal Instinct’s Taylor Parker won’t be able to choose a last meal on death row when she is executed, but that’s not the only thing restriction she has in jail.

The convicted murderer killed expecting mother Reagan Simmons-Hancock and stole her unborn baby from her abdomen, and the crime was retold in a Netflix true crime documentary this month.

Parker is now on death row at the Patrick O’Daniel Unit after being found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death on 9th November 2022, and is awaiting an execution date.

The 33-year-old isn’t allowed phone calls, a TV or contact visits while awaiting execution, which is very different to other prisoners on death row. Here’s the grisly reason why.

Credit: Bi-State Detention Center

Why Taylor Parker isn’t allowed phone calls, TV or contact visits on death row

Taylor Parker isn’t allowed to watch TV, use a phone or have physical contact with family because she is on death row in Texas, and the state has the strictest death row rules in the US.

The restrictions were tightened after Thanksgiving night in November 1998, when seven prisoners used hacksaw blades to cut through a fence and attempted to escape from the Ellis Unit in Huntsville. Six of the men were caught straight away, but one of them made it over the fence, sparking a week-long manhunt. He was found dead a few days later, after drowning in a nearby creek.

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Before that, death row prisoners were allowed to work and socialise with other prisoners on the unit. But following the escape attempt, death row prisoners in Texas are now locked in 8-by-12-foot cells for 23 hours a day with just one hour for recreation in a slightly larger cell, Prison Legal News reports.

Exercise is only permitted two to four times a week, and they are kept isolated from other prisoners. They are served meals in their cells alone and have practically no opportunity to interact with any other humans. On top of that, they’re not allowed to watch TV or use a phone, except for calls from their attorneys.

Taylor Parker obviously has been granted a few phone calls over the years, such as this one to her daughter, but these would have been one-offs, with regular phone calls strictly prohibited.

Death row prisoners are allowed to buy a radio, but it can be confiscated by guards at any moment. They are also not allowed contact visits with friends and family, meaning no physical contact is allowed. Even meetings with attorneys aren’t usually private, so everyone can hear.

In 2017,  the University of Texas School of Law’s Human Rights Clinic published a report that found conditions for death row prisoners in Texas violated “basic human rights as well as a number of international treaties that were voluntarily ratified by the US and which are binding on Texas”.

Almost a decade later, it still remains the strictest death row in the United States.

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Featured image credit: Netflix