Second Part of Michael's Series Alcatraz of the South that he writes for the Minutes Before Six website
ADMIN NOTE One of our regular writers Bill Van Poyck has had a death warrant signed with a scheduled execution date of 12 June 2013. Many avenues are being worked on and his attorneys are filing briefs for a stay of execution. We are not giving up hope that Bill's sentence can be commuted to a life sentence where he could be released for time served (26 years), getting him off death row. Please sign the petition on Bill's website HERE and spread the word. Thank You
By Michael Lambrix
Part 1 can be read HERE
The solid steel door was now all that separated me from that one single step that would lead me down into another world few could even imagine in their own worst nightmare. I couldn’t help but think of Alice in Wonderland, and how with just one unfortunate step, she fell down that rabbit hole into a surreal world where nothing was as it might seem to be. But my rabbit hole would cast me down into the very bowels of the greater beast that is our prison system, a hell that even the most hardened convicts feared.
This door heading on to the wing that houses Florida’s Death Row was all but identical to the others I passed as I was escorted down that seemingly never-ending main corridor of Florida State Prison. By the looks of that plain door, nothing gave so much as a hint of the misery and deprivation of the lost souls housed therein. And yet there was that intangible feeling, that presence that hung into the air that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise and as I stood silently awaiting the guard within to open the door, a sense of fear overcame me. Had I looked in a mirror at that moment, I have no doubt I would have seen the fear upon my face.
Anyone who stood in my shoes at that very moment and said they were not scared was either a fool or a liar. But I also knew that in this prison world the only thing worse than showing fear would be to admit being scared.
I didn’t know what to expect and from all the stories I had already heard, I knew it wasn’t good. Finally, the face of a guard appeared at that small window and the sound of the big brass key being inserted into the lock was quickly followed by that door now swinging outward. As the door was opened, a gust of cold air blew outward. It was late March of 1984 and not especially cold, but that single unexpected gust made me shiver.
Obediently I stepped across that threshold on to the Death Row wing, almost expecting to be sucked down into the depths of hell as I did, but the concrete floor beneath my feet remained solid even if the strength of my own legs beneath me didn’t. Just as quickly that door now behind me crashed shut with what seemed to be a thunderous sound, and the lock turned and I was trapped within, with nowhere to run even if I might had wanted to.
As with all the wings at Florida State Prison, when entering from the main corridor, one finds himself standing on the “quarter-deck” of the second floor. The quarter-decks are the officer’s station, its walls lined with bulletin boards, including a large one with the names, prison inmate number and race of each inmate housed on the wing. To the left of where I stood, just inside that door, was the sergeant’s desk and to the far side of that were three small rooms – a small storage closet, a small bathroom, and then another smaller closet used to store cleaning supplies.
To my immediate right there were concrete steps leading to the third floor cell blocks and down to the first floor cell blocks. On the wall next to the door I had just walked through was a “fire escape plan”- a diagram of each floor that showed the layout of the wing. Since I was left standing there while the sergeant and two officers were doing something else at the desk, I took a few minutes to examine the layout.
All three floors were laid out the same, with a quarterdeck area from which the cellblocks extended. In the very middle of each floor, running in length from the quarterdeck all the way back to the very end of the wing was what was called a “pipe alley” where all the plumbing and electrical outlets ran. This pipe alley also served to separate the north side from the south side, with each tier of six by nine foot solitary cells backed up against that pipe alley facing outward.
Each tier had both an inner and outer catwalk, with the very narrow inner catwalk providing access to each of the cells, and the much wider outer catwalk used by the guards when they made their periodical cell checks. Each tier had 17 cells, each virtually identical, measuring six foot by nine foot with a steel bunk securely affixed to one side and a combination of stainless steel sink/toilet affixed to the back wall. Towards the ceiling on the back wall was a single vent measuring not more than a cubic foot, although wider than it was tall.
Each of these 102 cells on the wing was a concrete crypt, with three sides and the floor and ceiling solid concrete. Only the front of each cell open by way of a wall of steel bars spaced precisely four inches apart, as was the sliding cell door itself, with the exception of a “bean flap” on each door, which is a cutaway section with a steel plate about six inches wide where the food trays were passed in (which is why it is traditionally called a “bean flap”).
As I stood there examining the wing layout, I couldn’t help but notice the loud noises coming from each side of the quarterdeck, obviously coming from the cellblock area. It wasn’t just prisoners taking but I could hear their T.V.s and radios, many radios.
The sergeant stood up from the desk and walked across the quarterdeck, motioning at me to follow. Along the one wall next to the center door leading into the pipe alley was a single, long wooden bench and the sergeant sat down and instructed me to sit, too. I remained in the handcuffs and leg shackles and I shuffled over to the bench and sat as instructed.
Without any malice or animosity in his voice, the sergeant began by telling me I needed to know how things work. He began by looking at me and telling me point blank that he’s not there to judge me and as long as I don’t give them a problem, they won’t give me a problem. That seemed fair enough – but as time went by I would learn that although this philosophy was generally true, there were still other guards who thought it was part of their job to antagonize Death Row prisoners and go out of their way to make us as miserable as possible. But fortunately, these few were the exception to the general rule.
It quickly became clear that the sergeant had given this same introductory speech only too many times before. I was told that I was the fourth condemned prisoner that week alone. The class of 1984 would prove to be one of the busiest years for the Florida courts in sentencing prisoners to death.
Much of what the sergeant told me I already knew – Death Row was not a regular prison and we would not be allowed to move around like those in the general inmate population (“gen-pop”) do. In gen-pop, each prisoner is required to work at an assigned job whether it is in the kitchen, mowing the lawns, or maintaining the facility. When not working, most gen-pop inmates could play sports, or go to the prison chapel, or just hang out with their chosen group of other inmates.
But not Death Row, as we were special. Under the politically motivated pretense of “security,” all death-sentenced prisoners in Florida are kept in continuous solitary confinement for as long as they might remain under that sentence of death. Incredibly, they say that this confinement status is for our own protection, as if allowing us to mingle and move around other prisoners might get us killed, which is kind of ironic, considering that the state sent us to death row to kill us.
But logic has nothing to do with this, and it becomes only too clear that the continuous solitary confinement of all Death Row prisoners has nothing to do with any legitimate “security” concerns. Rather, it is intended to serve the State’s greater purpose of breaking the condemned man both physically and psychologically in a methodical process towards what they hope will be our execution.
The sergeant continued in an almost monotone, instructing me on what was expected of me. Once assigned to a cell, it was my responsibility to keep it clean. If a guard told me to “cuff up,” I was to immediately comply, without question. I already knew that the common prison term “cuff up” meant that the guard intended to place me in handcuffs, but until then I did not know that anytime any death-sentenced prisoner left his assigned cell, he must be first handcuffed, unless he had medical problems verified by the prison doctor. This meant that we had to be handcuffed behind the back whenever we left our cells.
But then again, we didn’t leave our cells that much. In Florida, all death-sentenced prisoners are prohibited from eating meals in the prison chow hall, or going to the prison gym or chapel. All meals were brought to the individual cells and the only regular departures from your cell would be to shower three times a week and go to the recreation yard built just for death row – a relatively small concrete pad enclosed on all sides by twelve foot high security fencing topped by razor wire. A few hundred feet away was a guard tower where the watchful eye of a trained marksman waited ready to shoot anyone stupid enough to try to scale that fence.
Otherwise, the only time I would leave my assigned cell would be if I had a medical appointment at the clinic up front, or if I had either a legal or a family visit.
I was surprised to learn that even on Death Row, I would be allowed visits with family or friends each weekend for up to six hours at a time, per day. And that although death-sentenced prisoners were kept in restraints (even when walking the few feet from the assigned cell to the shower cell, the only two exceptions were when we went to the recreation yard and when we had social visits.
For all the negatives I could speak of regarding Florida’s Death Row, the one positive was social visits from family and friends. Unlike many other Death Rows, (such as Texas) that permit only non-contact visits through a thick plate of glass, Florida allows its condemned prisoners to have regular contact visits with family members or other friends as long as they are approved to visit, a relatively easy process that requires a criminal background check by prison officials to make sure the visitor is not a wanted outlaw.
I would come to learn that the Death Row visiting park is seen as “sacred ground” by prisoners. No matter what problem you might have with another death-sentenced prisoner, you do not make it an issue during a visit. We all knew only too well that there were many politicians and prison officials who did not want death-sentenced prisoners to have visits at all, much less regular contact visits and if given any excuse, they would quickly push to take these visits away. For that reason, there was an understanding among all death-sentenced prisoners that the visiting park was holy and God help the idiot who might get stupid and give them a reason to take our visits.
But even as the sergeant explained how I would be allowed to have visits with family and friends each weekend, I already knew that I would have few, if any, visits. In those first few years I had no visits at all, and the vast majority of death-sentenced prisoners had just as few, if any, as a big part of being condemned to die is being removed from that world out there.
The sergeant then explained that the laundry workers came to wing once a week to change out the state clothing each inmate was provided. At the time, the designated uniform for all Death Row inmates was a pair of dark blue denim-type pants with nothing but an apricot colored t-shirt. The state would not provide death-sentenced prisoners any type of shoes, but at that time we could have family and friends send us shoes and clothing as well as various basic hygiene products (soap, toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, etc.), but of course, that was dependent upon each prisoner having someone willing to send a care package. If not, many did without.
With the introductory speech complete, the sergeant told me to follow him and we were joined by the other two officers as we went to the nearby concrete staircase, and then descended down into the bowels of that beast. Upon reaching that lower level quarterdeck, I noticed that, unlike that second floor quarterdeck that also served as the officers’ station, the lower level had nothing but an enclosed area that appeared to be an office at the one end, which I later learned was for the classification officer assigned to the Death Row wing.
As with that second floor, to each far side of this quarterdeck were steel bar gates leading into the catwalks. The sergeant said that I would be housed in “1-south-6”, which meant that my assigned Death Row cell was on the first floor, south side, cell six, and I was led toward that south side gate that led into the cellblock area.
The closer I got towards the actual cells, the louder the sound of various radios and T.V.’s became, and above those electronic noises were the voices of unseen prisoners conversing with each other, often yelling to be heard above others.
We entered that gate and took the first few steps only to have the sergeant stop at two side-by-side empty cells, which he explained were the shower cells where three times a week on the evening shift I would be escorted, then locked within, to take a 5 minutes shower. He then proceeded further down the tier and came to the first cell housing another inmate. Still wearing both the handcuffs and leg shackles, I slowly shuffled by that first cell, then another and another, each housing an inmate. The first five inmates paid me no mind at all, with only the Columbian in cell five looking up at me to inspect his neighbor.
There were no loud screams of “fresh meat” or the derogatory calls that Hollywood movies typically exaggerate as a new guy enters into a prison cellblock that first time. Just that quickly, we reached cell number six, and the cell door was already open and I entered into my new home. Almost immediately the cell door rolled shut with a loud metallic clang and the sergeant first told me to back up to the cell door, then he reached through the open bean flap and removed the handcuffs, then reached down to my legs and removed the leg shackles and without another word, they walked away.
Although the noise continued all around me, I felt an overwhelming silence within as I stood there those first few moments in that cold concrete crypt that was my new cage. It had been a long day, a very, very long day and I was both physically and mentally exhausted. For more than ten continuous hours I had been kept restrained and both my hands and feet tingled almost painfully as the blood finally was able to circulate in each. I looked around and my new cell was nothing more than an empty concrete box with the exception of a steel bunk along the one wall, and a rolled-up prison “mattress” (if it can be called that) with a bedroll consisting of a rough wool “horse blanket” and two bed sheets – all of which had seen better days.
There was not table or chair and the height of the bunk made it uncomfortable to sit upon as a metal rail ran its length that cut into my thigh, so I sat on the toilet. I learned quickly that the toilet was the only seat in the house.
I was just sitting down to untie my shoelaces so I could pull off my shoes and try to rub some life back into my too-long shackled feet, I heard a voice nearby calling out, “Hey, new guy – cell six,” then, “Hey, what’s your name?” It took me a long moment to realize that the voice was calling me – I was “cell six,” I was the “new guy,” and I responded, “I’m Mike. Who are you?”
With those simple words, a long conversation began. Although I was exhausted, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep right away, anyway. It was already late afternoon and I assumed they would be bringing dinner soon. I stood up and took the few steps to the front of my cell so I could try to see who was calling me, and as I did, I noticed an arm reaching around that concrete wall from the adjacent cell and didn’t know what to make of that.
At the time, each cell had only a single incandescent light bulb that hung down from the ceiling in the upper front corner of the cell, and it was barely enough light to see by. But in that dim light, I noticed that the arm extending outward towards my cell held what appeared to be a Popsicle stick, and at the very end of that stick was a small fragment of a mirror. My new neighbor was “spooking” me, prison slang for checking me out, but not necessarily in a bad way…just curious.
“Hey,” the voice called out. “My name is J.D.” I would learn that his full name was James D. Raulerson, and he would soon become my new friend and mentor, making my transition to the life under a sentence of death somewhat tolerable.
With introductions quickly behind us, J.D. offered me a cup of coffee and as I accepted, a few minutes later he again reached around the wall towards my side, and I reached out and took that steaming cup of coffee from him, expressing my gratitude as it had been at least a year since I had a good cup of coffee. No sooner did I take that cup of coffee, there was J.D.’s hand reaching out again, this time with a pack of cookies, which he insisted I take and I really didn’t offer much opposition as I hadn’t eaten all day.
That night was not shower night and once the guards brought our dinner then returned to collect the empty trays, I found that other than the once-nightly “master count,” we didn’t see a lot of the guards other than an occasional cell check as one walked by in the outer catwalk, essentially paying no mind to any of us.
I would spend the next hours leaning up against that concrete wall that divided my cell from J.D.’s and we talked around the wall. Others also hollered out, wanting to know who the new guy was, but each time even before I could answer, J.D. would yell back, “His name is Mike”. As the evening progressed, guys I didn’t even know were passing various items from cell to cell towards me. I quickly learned that Death Row really was different from the gen-pop. When I first came to the row, there was camaraderie among the guys and for the most part, we looked out for each other.
None of these guys knew me and only J.D. was close enough to actually have a conversation with me over all the other noise. But that first evening I received “care packages” from others around me with food and snacks and basics that we all used, such as toothpaste and deodorant and someone even sent me a state coat and an extra blanket, which I soon learned was most important as once it got dark outside, the temperature quickly dropped and that extra blanket kept me warm that first night and many nights after.
Most of the snacks and other items sent to me came without any note or means of identifying who sent it. Nobody asked for anything in return – back then, we all called it “looking out.” My first night on Death Row was nothing like I had expected it to be, although my expectations themselves had been vague. I really hadn’t known what to expect. I only knew that what I found was not at all what I had thought it might be.
Sometime after midnight the T.V.s and radios on the wing slowly faded out and even the guys talking to others died down and the wing went to sleep. I bid J.D. a good night and threw the sheets and blankets on the already worn-out mattress, and lay back, and as I lay there thinking about my new environment, I too drifted off into a deep sleep and my first day came to its end.
Next: Part III Shaking the Bush, Boss,
Michael Lambrix
Michael Lambrix #482053
Union Correctional Institution
7819 NW 228th Street (P3226)
Raiford, FL 32026-4400
USA
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Monday, 6 May 2013
Alcatraz of the South Part 1
Alcatraz of the South Part 1 (written by Mike for the Minutes to Six website
By Michael Lambrix
The funny thing about not having a future is that you tend to spend way too much time thinking about the past and all those distorted memories of the life you might have once had. It doesn’t take too much to think back to those better days and when you’ve spent as much time in a solitary cell as I have over the past three decades, your attempt to hold on to those past memories too often begin to blend into the world you’re now trapped in and the present becomes one with that past in the strongest of ways.
Most recently, it was a simple question posed by a friend, asking me what it was like when I first came to Florida’s death row so long ago. She wanted me to tell her how I felt that first day and what my initial impressions were. I suppose that was a simple enough question but how does one look back through the many years and describe that first moment when the world he once knew ceased to exist and as if awakening to a nightmare, he steps into a virtual man-made hell that few could even begin to imagine?
As I struggle with a way to answer that simple question, my thoughts drift back to a time in my early teens when living in the San Francisco Bay area where I was born and raised. A friend’s father had just bought a new boat and we all begged to go along as he took that cabin cruiser out that very first time.
We began our trip early that morning at a marina in San Rafael, not too far from where San Quentin State Prison looked out over the bay, just a short distance from the Richmond Bridge that joined Marin and Alameda countries. Side by side with my friend, I stood proudly at the bow of the boat, our knuckles clenched tightly to that stainless steel rail as the water broke beneath us. We skirted southward around the bay towards that narrow passage between the sparsely populated hills of Tiburon and Larkspur, and the infamous and ironically named Angel Island where Japanese Americans were involuntarily interned during the World War II, and then towards the mouth of Richardson Bay where the funky houseboats around Sausalito then lay anchor and our captain, oh captain, proudly leaned down on his horns.
We then swung southward again, crossing the bay in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge with those twin engines gunned as we fought the current that had swept many a lesser boat out to the sea and back up into the bay along the bunks of what was once Crissy Field at the Presidio, past the stuffy St. Francis Yacht Club, on towards Fisherman’s Wharf and the Ferry Terminal.
By then it was approaching mid-morning and, as is so common on those early days, thick banks of drifting fog rolled in across the bay just as we turned in towards Alcatraz Island. At that time I had heard many stories about that island, but had never seen it up close before. The boat had slowed to barely a crawl, inching its way towards that bellowing foghorn and we remained on point, straining to see through those drifting bunks of seemingly impenetrable fog and then suddenly, there it was directly in front of us, the towering castle-like monstrosity that is Alcatraz, rising from the depths of the sea.
As we slowly flanked the island, everyone on the boat was silent, each of us looking up towards that abandoned monument of human misery and with the sun still rising over the distant hills behind the island, that late morning light cast strange shadows from the broken windows of that fortress-like cellblock that topped the island so as that one could almost see the faceless figures of those long forgotten convicts who once made that infamous Rock what it was. Now, I imagines, their tortured souls stood a silent vigil perhaps also looking out towards a life they once had.
We had all heard the stories of the depravation and the desperation of the men condemned to that island hell and how the federal government had closed and all but abandoned the island after a daring and fateful midnight escape that proved the seemingly inescapable prison had its weaknesses after all.
The stories told around our scout campfires hinted that those desperate convicts may had made it off the island, but they didn’t leave the water alive, and there in the dead of the night out on the bay, the tortured souls of these ghosts still cry out as they were forever condemned to drift in endless circles around Alcatraz, never to set foot on dry land again.
But for all the stories that I might had heard, and even when I think back to that morning when I first saw for myself that soulless steel and stone miscreation floating in the bay between those thick banks of ghostly fog, never once, not even in my worst childhood nightmare could I have imagined how my own destiny would one day closely parallel that of those lost souls, and I too would go on to become one of those faceless figures standing in the shadows of the shattered windows of an only too similar cold concrete and steel monstrosity maliciously designed to methodically break the will of even the strongest of men.
It had been about ten years, almost to the day, since that prophetic boat trip when that plain windowless white van pulled up to the heavy steel gates at the backside of Florida State Prison to deliver its human cargo. I sat alone, shackled and chained in a cage in the back, as I was the cargo. Only the day before I had been sentenced to death. That was March 22, 1984, and although seemingly so long ago, I can still remember it as if that was yesterday.
My journey into this man-made hell had begun many hours before we finally approached the gates leading into this beast known as Florida State Prison and I already knew only too well that FSP wasn’t just any prison – it was the end of the line and it was here that I had been delivered to die. Only those condemned to death come straight to FSP as all others commonly graduate to this prison after screwing up at other institutions and proving they cannot be housed anywhere else. For that reason, FSP had come to be known as the Alcatraz of the South, where convicts only came when they couldn’t be sent anywhere else. There wasn’t a prisoner in the south who didn’t fear the place or know its reputation for violence and death was by no means an exaggeration.
There I sat in that van, in the heart of what was known as the “Iron Triangle,” that area of northwest Florida around the town of Starke, where at least six state prisons formed the backbone of an industry imprisoning society’s outcasts. Just across the way and yet in another county altogether stood “The Rock of Raiford,” made famous in a few Humphrey Bogart movies.
As I now know, the local industry dates back to 1913 when Florida built a few temporary stockades on 18,000 acres of land they had purchased at $5.00 an acre. At that time, it was called the State Prison Farm and was intended to accommodate only those prisoners the state could not sell to private businesses, which was the practice even after slavery was abolished.
By 1919 hundreds of both male and female convicts worked together to farm about 4,000 acres of crops and run a shoe factory that put out about 10 pairs of shoes a day. The state hired a superintendent and about 40 guards who were paid $35.00 a month plus room and board.
But in 1923 then-Governor Hardee put a stop to the time honored practice of selling state prisoners for labor. For the first time, all convicted felons in Florida had to be sent to a state prison. By 1928, the infamous “Rock” known as Raiford State Prison was built near the original stockades, and a license tag factory put them to work. Once the construction of state prisons began, it never stopped. Soon more buildings were constructed to house even more prisoners and on and on it grew. By the 1950’s Florida decided it was time to have their own maximum-security prison, where convicts who couldn’t be housed anywhere else could be warehoused and a death house could be built.
Florida State Prison was born the same year I was – 1960. Originally considered an extension of “The Rock,” it was commonly called “The East Unit.” But the unlucky convicts who called it home knew it for what it was – “The Alcatraz of the South.” By the time I arrived, FSP had already earned its reputation as a hell beyond comprehension.
As I now look back to that early Spring day of March 1984, I can’t help but think of the classic Dante’s “Inferno” and how the imaginary friend journeyed down with the condemned man through those nine rings of hell. As much as I might wish I had my own imaginary guide to accompany me down and down, I already knew that it would be my fate to make this journey alone, even though I too was about to descend into an “inferno” beyond the comprehension. To be able to now merge the man I am today with that much younger man that first entered the man-made hell is all that I might hope for as I now tell my tale.
I can imagine myself sitting in that van so long ago, waiting for those gates to swing open and suck me inside. As I strained to see over the guards’ shoulders and out that front window into that great beyond, all I can see was a barren and seemingly lifeless landscape enclosed by first one and then another tall steel fence topped off with rows of ribboned razor wire and between this gauntlet of impenetrable fences were stacked rows of this same razor wire.
The heavy gate slowly slid open allowing the van to finally enter. Above us was a concrete gun tower and below us, a pit where a guard would walk beneath the vehicle to be sure nothing or no one was attached to the undercarriage. They called this the Sally port. The driver got out, and only then could I finally see that to my far right there were blue clad prisoners walking around a grass field and playing softball or working out on weights. That didn’t look too bad. Only later was I informed that those guys were “general population” prisoners and that inviting rec yard was only for them, not for the Death Row.
FSP was a virtual warehouse of solitary cells where most were intended to first psychologically, and then physically, slowly rot away. Only a small group of FSP were “population” inmates, and only because they were needed to cook, and clean and whatever else actual work had to be done.
I stretched forward as far as I could to get a better look, towards a small concrete area enclosed by yet another tall fence topped off with razor wire; Death Row. An even shorter wing sticking out the end of the building next to the Death Row wing was Q-wing. The bottom floor, right through the second window, was home to Old Sparky.
A few minutes later the van cleared the security check and we drove into the compound, straight down a narrow ribbon of asphalt toward the far end. As we did so, I made a mental note that the prison lay as straight as a ruler, with six almost virtually identical “wings,” each three stories high, extending outward from that backbone somewhat like a centipede lying on its back with its legs stretched straight outward. Only as the van approached the far end did the building structure change as a loading dock area, that I later knew to be the kitchen, break the uniformity.
Just beyond that was a circular drive at the base of a long concrete ramp that ascends up into the building itself, which was the only means into or out of this building that I could see. But every prisoner who has ever had the misfortune of doing time at FSP knows this ramp. Although the prison is stacked three stories high, it is actually the second floor that is the main floor of the entire prison. For that reason, unlike Dante’s “Inferno,” one does not descend into the depths of this hell, but must actually climb up this mini-mountain of a ramp, slowly shuffling along in chains and shackles that make the climb all that much more difficult, and then, and only then, do you enter the prison through a polished tile hallway that leads towards what has always been known as “Times Square,” where the four corners of this world cross within.
Slowly I shuffled, and following the directions of my keeper, we moved up this hall towards a wall of steel bars with electric gates to each side.
Upon reaching that first set of gates, I arrived at Times Square and stood patiently as we awaited the control room on the far side to open the gate so we could enter. As I would learn, all new inmates arriving at FSP are first placed in a steel “holding cage” in front of the control room there at Times Square, and so too was I.
There I was to wait to be processed in and brought down to the Medical Infirmary for a cursory check-up before being brought to the wing where I would be housed. Whether it was callous indifference, or the product of malicious intent, inmates first arriving, including myself, would wait in that small cage often for hours, all the while remaining handcuffed behind the back with both waist chains and leg irons (shackled). Even as those hours slowly passed, I knew better than to complain. FSP had a long history of instantaneous “hands-on” discipline and not even someone as new and naïve as I was then would be stupid enough to provoke the guards.
Finally towards the late afternoon my time came, and I was pulled from the Times Square cage and thrown a bedroll that I was expected to pick up and carry even though I remained handcuffed and chained behind the back. I obediently crouched down and grabbed the bedroll and then with a guard at each side. I was led to yet another wall of steel bars, awaiting the gate leading into the main hall that runs from one end of the building to the other to open. And then it did, and I again entered, metaphorically descending into another ring of this hell.
Conveniently, I would get the full tour, as Death Row was housed only on the wings at the farthest end of the hall, through a series of more gates, for all practical purposes, an isolated area that was itself a prison within a prison.
Stepping through those Time Square gates and into that long hall to my immediate right was a double set of steel doors with a small square window into the prison chapel. I quickly looked through that little window and was surprised to find a cavernous space that actually did look very much like a free-world church, complete with polished pews of stained wood divided neatly by a path of red carpet leading up to an altar accented by a wood cross and illuminated by the soft light of what appeared to be candles. Unfortunately, in the three decades I have spent on Florida’s Death Row, not even once has a death-sentenced prisoner ever been allowed to attend a church service.
Walking farther, just a short way up the hall we come to yet another wall of bars with an electronic gate to each side. To my right is the prison gym, enclosed and securely separated by two steel doors and another small glass window, deliberately too small for anyone to get through if a riot broke out. As I looked through that window, I could see the vast space within, open all the way from the first floor below us to the ceiling far above, with a full wood floored basketball court, and what appeared to be a stage where the notorious “boxing ring” once was, now replaced by sets of steel weights and benches. But again that gym is off limits to Death Row.
Directly opposite the gym was first what to be an open dining room, one of two identical dining rooms, but this one had been converted into the “Administrative Confinement Visiting Park” (ACVP), which is prison label for the Death Row visiting area, where if family and friends are willing, they could come each weekend for up to a 6 hour “contact” visit in a relatively relaxed environment. But few death-sentenced prisoners actually get regular visits and for the most part, it remained empty.
Immediately adjacent to the ACVP was the “population” dining hall that at that time remained in use. As I would quickly come to know, Death Row were never allowed to eat in the prison dining hall – Death Row was a continuous confinement status, and all meals are served and eaten in the cell. I would learn I was lucky, in a way, not to have access to these areas. This prison has more killings that the rest of Florida’s prisons combined and most of these killings happen in either the dining hall or the gym. As the years passed, I would come to know many condemned prisoners who caught their cases by killing other inmates either in the dining hall or gym, although a few took place on the wings.
Again, we waited momentarily for the gate to open and then walked through. Each of the 13 housing wings along this main hall are sealed off by the solid steel doors and locked from both sides. That way, even if something happened on one wing, it is isolated from the other wings.
Walking up that hall, the first solid steel door to my left had a large “W” painted above the door. Back then, “W-wing” was a “max psyche” wing where prisoners who could not be broken anywhere else were sent there, and once you went in, you either came out broken or dead. It would be years later, after too many died under the pretense of being administered “psychiatric care,” that the State would close that wing down and today W-wing is not even acknowledged by the FDOC. But for those who did time at FSP up until the eighties, each has many stories of the horrors that took place on W-wing.
In relatively quick succession we silently passed the three housing wings on the right side known as “J”, “K” and “L” wings, which at that time I first came to Florida State Prison were where the population prisoners were housed three tiers high with 17 single man cells to each side of each floor, all the way up to the roof of the third floor, giving the impression of a large open space surrounded by the cells housing over a hundred population prisoners on each of the three wings. Unlike the wings housing Death Row, each of the cells on these wings was built on the outside wall so that within each cell the inmate had his very own window. (Too often over the many, too many, years that followed, I wished that I had access to a window so that I could feel the air coming in from outside.)
To my left where three wings used to house those in “closed custody” – a common confinement status similar to other states’ “segregated confinement,” where those who committed serious disciplinary infractions would be kept for what could be long periods of time, isolated in single man cells with very few privileges and under conditions that arguably made even Death Row seem like a good place to be. See, “The Harsh Prison Treatment at Starke”, Miami Herald, May 26, 1991, by Human Rights Watch prison project director Joanna Weschler (Admin note - Michael refers to this article and we have been unable to locate it online however we have found the report it appears this article is based on - Prison Conditions in the United States by Human Rights Watch. The director of this report was Joanna Weschler.)
Finally, we came to the last of these steel bar walls and its set of electric gates and the end of that long main hall could now be seen. This time we didn’t wait too long and I was quickly guided into this area known as “Corridor E,” which segregated the last five wings.
To my right was “N” and “P” wing, which were used to house even more “closed management” inmates when I first arrived to FSP in 1984, but by 1992 the growing number of Florida’s Death Row would be expanded to both of these wings. To my left was “S” and “R” wing, which in 1984 were both exclusively Death Row.
The segregated confinement wings behind the gate in “Corridor E” are all designed so that the cells are inside the middle of the wing, facing out so that these prisoners cannot have any direct access to a window. Each of the three floors has 2 sides, each side with 17 cells of about 6’ x 9’ and subtracting the area for the bunk and sink/toilet combo, each cell had an open area of, at best, 24 square feet – and in that small space the condemned would be warehoused for not only years, but decades.
The guard motioned me to the nearest wing, labeled with the letter “S” above the solid steel door. As we waited for the guards within to open the lock on their side, I realized there was another wing beyond these last four: Q-wing. That single steel door at the very end of this hall leads to where prisoners are executed. I couldn’t help but look. It appeared to be just another door not at all unlike the 12 other doors leading into housing areas along the main hall. There appeared to be nothing that indicated what might lie beyond that plain door.
But as the years would pass, I would find out that appearances could be quite deceiving. Through that otherwise normal looking door was where the Florida death house was. When walking through that door, one could be forgiven for thinking it was just another wing. And unless you really knew, it would appear to be just another wing. But through that door, if you take a quick right turn you’ll see a set of stairs that lead down to the first level, just as the stairs do on each of the wings. Only when you actually reach that lower level do you realize that it’s not at all like all the other wings.
Thank you for allowing me to share my introductory tour with you and I hope that you will join me in future segments of this series. In the following segment I will walk through that “S” wing door and on to Death Row.
Michael Lambrix #482053
Union Correctional Institution
7819 NW 228th Street (P3226)
Raiford, FL 32026-4400
USA
By Michael Lambrix
The funny thing about not having a future is that you tend to spend way too much time thinking about the past and all those distorted memories of the life you might have once had. It doesn’t take too much to think back to those better days and when you’ve spent as much time in a solitary cell as I have over the past three decades, your attempt to hold on to those past memories too often begin to blend into the world you’re now trapped in and the present becomes one with that past in the strongest of ways.
Most recently, it was a simple question posed by a friend, asking me what it was like when I first came to Florida’s death row so long ago. She wanted me to tell her how I felt that first day and what my initial impressions were. I suppose that was a simple enough question but how does one look back through the many years and describe that first moment when the world he once knew ceased to exist and as if awakening to a nightmare, he steps into a virtual man-made hell that few could even begin to imagine?
As I struggle with a way to answer that simple question, my thoughts drift back to a time in my early teens when living in the San Francisco Bay area where I was born and raised. A friend’s father had just bought a new boat and we all begged to go along as he took that cabin cruiser out that very first time.
We began our trip early that morning at a marina in San Rafael, not too far from where San Quentin State Prison looked out over the bay, just a short distance from the Richmond Bridge that joined Marin and Alameda countries. Side by side with my friend, I stood proudly at the bow of the boat, our knuckles clenched tightly to that stainless steel rail as the water broke beneath us. We skirted southward around the bay towards that narrow passage between the sparsely populated hills of Tiburon and Larkspur, and the infamous and ironically named Angel Island where Japanese Americans were involuntarily interned during the World War II, and then towards the mouth of Richardson Bay where the funky houseboats around Sausalito then lay anchor and our captain, oh captain, proudly leaned down on his horns.
We then swung southward again, crossing the bay in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge with those twin engines gunned as we fought the current that had swept many a lesser boat out to the sea and back up into the bay along the bunks of what was once Crissy Field at the Presidio, past the stuffy St. Francis Yacht Club, on towards Fisherman’s Wharf and the Ferry Terminal.
By then it was approaching mid-morning and, as is so common on those early days, thick banks of drifting fog rolled in across the bay just as we turned in towards Alcatraz Island. At that time I had heard many stories about that island, but had never seen it up close before. The boat had slowed to barely a crawl, inching its way towards that bellowing foghorn and we remained on point, straining to see through those drifting bunks of seemingly impenetrable fog and then suddenly, there it was directly in front of us, the towering castle-like monstrosity that is Alcatraz, rising from the depths of the sea.
As we slowly flanked the island, everyone on the boat was silent, each of us looking up towards that abandoned monument of human misery and with the sun still rising over the distant hills behind the island, that late morning light cast strange shadows from the broken windows of that fortress-like cellblock that topped the island so as that one could almost see the faceless figures of those long forgotten convicts who once made that infamous Rock what it was. Now, I imagines, their tortured souls stood a silent vigil perhaps also looking out towards a life they once had.
We had all heard the stories of the depravation and the desperation of the men condemned to that island hell and how the federal government had closed and all but abandoned the island after a daring and fateful midnight escape that proved the seemingly inescapable prison had its weaknesses after all.
The stories told around our scout campfires hinted that those desperate convicts may had made it off the island, but they didn’t leave the water alive, and there in the dead of the night out on the bay, the tortured souls of these ghosts still cry out as they were forever condemned to drift in endless circles around Alcatraz, never to set foot on dry land again.
But for all the stories that I might had heard, and even when I think back to that morning when I first saw for myself that soulless steel and stone miscreation floating in the bay between those thick banks of ghostly fog, never once, not even in my worst childhood nightmare could I have imagined how my own destiny would one day closely parallel that of those lost souls, and I too would go on to become one of those faceless figures standing in the shadows of the shattered windows of an only too similar cold concrete and steel monstrosity maliciously designed to methodically break the will of even the strongest of men.
It had been about ten years, almost to the day, since that prophetic boat trip when that plain windowless white van pulled up to the heavy steel gates at the backside of Florida State Prison to deliver its human cargo. I sat alone, shackled and chained in a cage in the back, as I was the cargo. Only the day before I had been sentenced to death. That was March 22, 1984, and although seemingly so long ago, I can still remember it as if that was yesterday.
My journey into this man-made hell had begun many hours before we finally approached the gates leading into this beast known as Florida State Prison and I already knew only too well that FSP wasn’t just any prison – it was the end of the line and it was here that I had been delivered to die. Only those condemned to death come straight to FSP as all others commonly graduate to this prison after screwing up at other institutions and proving they cannot be housed anywhere else. For that reason, FSP had come to be known as the Alcatraz of the South, where convicts only came when they couldn’t be sent anywhere else. There wasn’t a prisoner in the south who didn’t fear the place or know its reputation for violence and death was by no means an exaggeration.
There I sat in that van, in the heart of what was known as the “Iron Triangle,” that area of northwest Florida around the town of Starke, where at least six state prisons formed the backbone of an industry imprisoning society’s outcasts. Just across the way and yet in another county altogether stood “The Rock of Raiford,” made famous in a few Humphrey Bogart movies.
As I now know, the local industry dates back to 1913 when Florida built a few temporary stockades on 18,000 acres of land they had purchased at $5.00 an acre. At that time, it was called the State Prison Farm and was intended to accommodate only those prisoners the state could not sell to private businesses, which was the practice even after slavery was abolished.
By 1919 hundreds of both male and female convicts worked together to farm about 4,000 acres of crops and run a shoe factory that put out about 10 pairs of shoes a day. The state hired a superintendent and about 40 guards who were paid $35.00 a month plus room and board.
But in 1923 then-Governor Hardee put a stop to the time honored practice of selling state prisoners for labor. For the first time, all convicted felons in Florida had to be sent to a state prison. By 1928, the infamous “Rock” known as Raiford State Prison was built near the original stockades, and a license tag factory put them to work. Once the construction of state prisons began, it never stopped. Soon more buildings were constructed to house even more prisoners and on and on it grew. By the 1950’s Florida decided it was time to have their own maximum-security prison, where convicts who couldn’t be housed anywhere else could be warehoused and a death house could be built.
Florida State Prison was born the same year I was – 1960. Originally considered an extension of “The Rock,” it was commonly called “The East Unit.” But the unlucky convicts who called it home knew it for what it was – “The Alcatraz of the South.” By the time I arrived, FSP had already earned its reputation as a hell beyond comprehension.
As I now look back to that early Spring day of March 1984, I can’t help but think of the classic Dante’s “Inferno” and how the imaginary friend journeyed down with the condemned man through those nine rings of hell. As much as I might wish I had my own imaginary guide to accompany me down and down, I already knew that it would be my fate to make this journey alone, even though I too was about to descend into an “inferno” beyond the comprehension. To be able to now merge the man I am today with that much younger man that first entered the man-made hell is all that I might hope for as I now tell my tale.
I can imagine myself sitting in that van so long ago, waiting for those gates to swing open and suck me inside. As I strained to see over the guards’ shoulders and out that front window into that great beyond, all I can see was a barren and seemingly lifeless landscape enclosed by first one and then another tall steel fence topped off with rows of ribboned razor wire and between this gauntlet of impenetrable fences were stacked rows of this same razor wire.
The heavy gate slowly slid open allowing the van to finally enter. Above us was a concrete gun tower and below us, a pit where a guard would walk beneath the vehicle to be sure nothing or no one was attached to the undercarriage. They called this the Sally port. The driver got out, and only then could I finally see that to my far right there were blue clad prisoners walking around a grass field and playing softball or working out on weights. That didn’t look too bad. Only later was I informed that those guys were “general population” prisoners and that inviting rec yard was only for them, not for the Death Row.
FSP was a virtual warehouse of solitary cells where most were intended to first psychologically, and then physically, slowly rot away. Only a small group of FSP were “population” inmates, and only because they were needed to cook, and clean and whatever else actual work had to be done.
I stretched forward as far as I could to get a better look, towards a small concrete area enclosed by yet another tall fence topped off with razor wire; Death Row. An even shorter wing sticking out the end of the building next to the Death Row wing was Q-wing. The bottom floor, right through the second window, was home to Old Sparky.
A few minutes later the van cleared the security check and we drove into the compound, straight down a narrow ribbon of asphalt toward the far end. As we did so, I made a mental note that the prison lay as straight as a ruler, with six almost virtually identical “wings,” each three stories high, extending outward from that backbone somewhat like a centipede lying on its back with its legs stretched straight outward. Only as the van approached the far end did the building structure change as a loading dock area, that I later knew to be the kitchen, break the uniformity.
Just beyond that was a circular drive at the base of a long concrete ramp that ascends up into the building itself, which was the only means into or out of this building that I could see. But every prisoner who has ever had the misfortune of doing time at FSP knows this ramp. Although the prison is stacked three stories high, it is actually the second floor that is the main floor of the entire prison. For that reason, unlike Dante’s “Inferno,” one does not descend into the depths of this hell, but must actually climb up this mini-mountain of a ramp, slowly shuffling along in chains and shackles that make the climb all that much more difficult, and then, and only then, do you enter the prison through a polished tile hallway that leads towards what has always been known as “Times Square,” where the four corners of this world cross within.
Slowly I shuffled, and following the directions of my keeper, we moved up this hall towards a wall of steel bars with electric gates to each side.
Upon reaching that first set of gates, I arrived at Times Square and stood patiently as we awaited the control room on the far side to open the gate so we could enter. As I would learn, all new inmates arriving at FSP are first placed in a steel “holding cage” in front of the control room there at Times Square, and so too was I.
There I was to wait to be processed in and brought down to the Medical Infirmary for a cursory check-up before being brought to the wing where I would be housed. Whether it was callous indifference, or the product of malicious intent, inmates first arriving, including myself, would wait in that small cage often for hours, all the while remaining handcuffed behind the back with both waist chains and leg irons (shackled). Even as those hours slowly passed, I knew better than to complain. FSP had a long history of instantaneous “hands-on” discipline and not even someone as new and naïve as I was then would be stupid enough to provoke the guards.
Finally towards the late afternoon my time came, and I was pulled from the Times Square cage and thrown a bedroll that I was expected to pick up and carry even though I remained handcuffed and chained behind the back. I obediently crouched down and grabbed the bedroll and then with a guard at each side. I was led to yet another wall of steel bars, awaiting the gate leading into the main hall that runs from one end of the building to the other to open. And then it did, and I again entered, metaphorically descending into another ring of this hell.
Conveniently, I would get the full tour, as Death Row was housed only on the wings at the farthest end of the hall, through a series of more gates, for all practical purposes, an isolated area that was itself a prison within a prison.
Stepping through those Time Square gates and into that long hall to my immediate right was a double set of steel doors with a small square window into the prison chapel. I quickly looked through that little window and was surprised to find a cavernous space that actually did look very much like a free-world church, complete with polished pews of stained wood divided neatly by a path of red carpet leading up to an altar accented by a wood cross and illuminated by the soft light of what appeared to be candles. Unfortunately, in the three decades I have spent on Florida’s Death Row, not even once has a death-sentenced prisoner ever been allowed to attend a church service.
Walking farther, just a short way up the hall we come to yet another wall of bars with an electronic gate to each side. To my right is the prison gym, enclosed and securely separated by two steel doors and another small glass window, deliberately too small for anyone to get through if a riot broke out. As I looked through that window, I could see the vast space within, open all the way from the first floor below us to the ceiling far above, with a full wood floored basketball court, and what appeared to be a stage where the notorious “boxing ring” once was, now replaced by sets of steel weights and benches. But again that gym is off limits to Death Row.
Directly opposite the gym was first what to be an open dining room, one of two identical dining rooms, but this one had been converted into the “Administrative Confinement Visiting Park” (ACVP), which is prison label for the Death Row visiting area, where if family and friends are willing, they could come each weekend for up to a 6 hour “contact” visit in a relatively relaxed environment. But few death-sentenced prisoners actually get regular visits and for the most part, it remained empty.
Immediately adjacent to the ACVP was the “population” dining hall that at that time remained in use. As I would quickly come to know, Death Row were never allowed to eat in the prison dining hall – Death Row was a continuous confinement status, and all meals are served and eaten in the cell. I would learn I was lucky, in a way, not to have access to these areas. This prison has more killings that the rest of Florida’s prisons combined and most of these killings happen in either the dining hall or the gym. As the years passed, I would come to know many condemned prisoners who caught their cases by killing other inmates either in the dining hall or gym, although a few took place on the wings.
Again, we waited momentarily for the gate to open and then walked through. Each of the 13 housing wings along this main hall are sealed off by the solid steel doors and locked from both sides. That way, even if something happened on one wing, it is isolated from the other wings.
Walking up that hall, the first solid steel door to my left had a large “W” painted above the door. Back then, “W-wing” was a “max psyche” wing where prisoners who could not be broken anywhere else were sent there, and once you went in, you either came out broken or dead. It would be years later, after too many died under the pretense of being administered “psychiatric care,” that the State would close that wing down and today W-wing is not even acknowledged by the FDOC. But for those who did time at FSP up until the eighties, each has many stories of the horrors that took place on W-wing.
In relatively quick succession we silently passed the three housing wings on the right side known as “J”, “K” and “L” wings, which at that time I first came to Florida State Prison were where the population prisoners were housed three tiers high with 17 single man cells to each side of each floor, all the way up to the roof of the third floor, giving the impression of a large open space surrounded by the cells housing over a hundred population prisoners on each of the three wings. Unlike the wings housing Death Row, each of the cells on these wings was built on the outside wall so that within each cell the inmate had his very own window. (Too often over the many, too many, years that followed, I wished that I had access to a window so that I could feel the air coming in from outside.)
To my left where three wings used to house those in “closed custody” – a common confinement status similar to other states’ “segregated confinement,” where those who committed serious disciplinary infractions would be kept for what could be long periods of time, isolated in single man cells with very few privileges and under conditions that arguably made even Death Row seem like a good place to be. See, “The Harsh Prison Treatment at Starke”, Miami Herald, May 26, 1991, by Human Rights Watch prison project director Joanna Weschler (Admin note - Michael refers to this article and we have been unable to locate it online however we have found the report it appears this article is based on - Prison Conditions in the United States by Human Rights Watch. The director of this report was Joanna Weschler.)
Finally, we came to the last of these steel bar walls and its set of electric gates and the end of that long main hall could now be seen. This time we didn’t wait too long and I was quickly guided into this area known as “Corridor E,” which segregated the last five wings.
To my right was “N” and “P” wing, which were used to house even more “closed management” inmates when I first arrived to FSP in 1984, but by 1992 the growing number of Florida’s Death Row would be expanded to both of these wings. To my left was “S” and “R” wing, which in 1984 were both exclusively Death Row.
The segregated confinement wings behind the gate in “Corridor E” are all designed so that the cells are inside the middle of the wing, facing out so that these prisoners cannot have any direct access to a window. Each of the three floors has 2 sides, each side with 17 cells of about 6’ x 9’ and subtracting the area for the bunk and sink/toilet combo, each cell had an open area of, at best, 24 square feet – and in that small space the condemned would be warehoused for not only years, but decades.
The guard motioned me to the nearest wing, labeled with the letter “S” above the solid steel door. As we waited for the guards within to open the lock on their side, I realized there was another wing beyond these last four: Q-wing. That single steel door at the very end of this hall leads to where prisoners are executed. I couldn’t help but look. It appeared to be just another door not at all unlike the 12 other doors leading into housing areas along the main hall. There appeared to be nothing that indicated what might lie beyond that plain door.
But as the years would pass, I would find out that appearances could be quite deceiving. Through that otherwise normal looking door was where the Florida death house was. When walking through that door, one could be forgiven for thinking it was just another wing. And unless you really knew, it would appear to be just another wing. But through that door, if you take a quick right turn you’ll see a set of stairs that lead down to the first level, just as the stairs do on each of the wings. Only when you actually reach that lower level do you realize that it’s not at all like all the other wings.
Thank you for allowing me to share my introductory tour with you and I hope that you will join me in future segments of this series. In the following segment I will walk through that “S” wing door and on to Death Row.
Michael Lambrix #482053
Union Correctional Institution
7819 NW 228th Street (P3226)
Raiford, FL 32026-4400
USA
Sunday, 16 December 2012
The Christmas Card
Article written bij Mike on the Minutes Before Six website
The Christmas Card
By C. Michael Lambrix
At this time of year I find myself wondering what Christmas has become. For almost 30 years now, I have been in continuous solitary confinement, condemned to death. Here on Florida’s Death Row there are no shopping malls or shiny decorations that have come to define the holidays in the real world. I can watch it all on my TV, and if what I’m watching is what Christmas out there in the real world is, then maybe I’m more fortunate that those who have been consumed by commercialism, and have lost sight of what it should mean.
What are we really celebrating at this time of year? Don’t get me wrong – I would give almost anything to spend Christmas with my children and grandchildren, and see that magic sparkle in their eyes as they rip open brightly colored packages stacked beneath a beautifully decorated Christmas tree.
And what very little I might still have left afterwards, I would willingly surrender too, if only I could spend Christmas Day gathered around Mom’s table with long-lost family as we share a traditional meal while basking in the glow of each other’s company, as those are the moments that memories are made of.
But for me, Christmas will be spent in a cage and there won’t be any warm hearth, or gifts beneath a tree. I will spend my holiday alone just as I have done for too many Christmas’s past and although it may be difficult for others to understand, I still feel blessed to celebrate Christmas in my own way.
I came to Florida’s Death Row in March of 1984 and it’s that first Christmas on “The Row” that I look back upon and remember. That was a very hard year. In that first year, there were eight men here on The Row put to death, one almost every month, and at a time when there was barely 100 of us here. That number now has increased to almost 400, with executions averaging two yearly.
With so many facing imminent executions, the stench of death practically hung over all of us like a toxic cloud, threatening to suffocate us. My cell neighbor had been on The Row for about eight years at the time, and throughout that first year James (J.D.) Raulerson looked out for me and, as only condemned men living in close proximity can, we became as close as family. He took me under his wing and generously and kindly showed me the ropes.
But just before the holidays, the Florida governor signed a “death warrant” on J.D., and he was taken away to the death watch area to await execution. His Christmas would be spent alone on the bottom floor of Florida State Prison’s infamous “Q-wing,” a few feet away from the door that leads into the execution chamber, and the following month, J.D. was executed.
Although I had sat in my death row cell as eight others were each put to death, and executions were not unfamiliar to me, by the time that first Christmas on The Row rolled around and J.D. was moved to death watch, it hit especially close to home. He was the first one that I was actually close to, though far too many others I came to later know as both friends and brothers would follow through the years.
That first Christmas on The Row was especially hard in part because I still held on to the more traditional way in which most celebrate this holiday. I missed being able to be with my loved ones and I could only wonder how my children might be spending their Christmas that year as I had no way to communicate with them, and hadn’t heard from them since my arrest in early 1983.
But that doesn’t mean that my family and friends were not in thought, and each night I anxiously waited for the mail to come in, hoping upon hope that maybe, just maybe, I might get a card or letter, but those cards and letters didn’t come.
Even as alone a condemned man might feel in that solitary cage, that physical isolation becomes a distant second to the overwhelming sense of abandonment one feels as each day ever-so-very-slowly drags by and that mail you so anxiously hope will come doesn’t, and each day without a word pushes you down further into an abyss of hopelessness and despair that slowly kills you from within – one small cut at a time.
Today I can look back and understand what I could not back then; that what I felt was not at all unique amongst those I lived around. It is part of the experience we all feel on The Row. When it comes down to it, those who love and care about us in the world don’t know how to handle our death sentences. When that sentence is imposed, there’s a presumption of finality not unlike what families experience when they learn a loved one has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Even those who truly do love us often become uncomfortable and distant, unable to cope with the impending loss of someone they love.
For them, there is the added stigma of having a loved one convicted of a heinous crime in the very community they, our families, must continue to live in. It took me many years to see beyond the misery of my own circumstance and come to understand that even as hard as it might be on me, my conviction and condemnation was at least just as hard on those I left behind.
For the many months of that first year, J.D. was my mentor and source of support and then he was gone. Many mornings I would awake, still expecting to see his arm reaching around that concrete wall that separated our cells, extending a cup of coffee or perhaps some kind of snack – his way of inviting me to get up and talk a while. Although we couldn’t physically see each other, as each solitary cell was only open at the front, facing outward, being able to stand there at the front of the cell and talk around that wall was a very real sense of communion that we shared.
Just that quickly, it was no more and in that month leading up to that first Christmas, that cell remained empty, leaving me all but isolated (as the man on my other side chose to keep to himself and would rarely talk at all.)
Perhaps I have always struggled with depression, although I can’t help but wonder who wouldn’t if thrown into a solitary cell facing the reality of death all around you. But that first Christmas had me feeling especially abandoned and overwhelmed and I became almost obsessed with questioning the “why” of it all. Finding few answers, I contemplated whether I should take the easy way out, and if I could find the strength to commit suicide. I did think about the many ways that might be accomplished and, as those thoughts too often invaded my overwhelming isolation, the person that I was back then would have welcomed an end to what has become an ongoing nightmare.
That Christmas of 1984 was on a Tuesday, just as it will be this year (2012) and when the cards and letters I hoped to receive didn’t come by that last weekend before Christmas, like too many others around me, I clung on to the hope that they would come that Monday, Christmas Eve.
Then that Monday came and I was not the only one on the wing who silently stood at his cell door hoping upon whatever measure of hope remained that this night before Christmas would miraculously bring that one card or letter from a loved one. It was almost a collective ritual, as each of us anxiously watched that clock in anticipation for “mail call.” We strained to hear the sound of those heavy brass keys as the guard came down to open the inner catwalk gate that led into the cellblock area, where he would slowly work his way down the wing, one cell at a time, passing out the mail. The whole floor went quiet as each of us anxiously waited for what we might receive.
As the guard approached my cell that night, he stopped and I’m sure in that moment my heart skipped a beat as I held my breath like a child would if confronted by Santa Claus. I watched as the guard looked down on his small stack of mail and silently picked up the top one, then unceremoniously laid that one plain white envelope on my door and without a word, walked away towards the next cell.
I picked that envelope up from my door and looked to see from who it might be, but there was no name or return address. I then looked at the postmark and could see that it was mailed from Key Largo, Florida a few days earlier, but I didn’t know anyone down in Key Largo.
A small piece of scotch tape had been used to seal the envelope, and I pulled it apart, then carefully reached in to pull the card out. It was just a plain card sporting a modestly decorative pattern on the front, with gold print letters that read, “Happy Holidays,” and inside, a generic wish that the season would be joyful and not much more.
But then I read what was written inside – just three simple words, and that was all… “I forgive you,” signed E. Banner. There was a moment of confusion before that sank in, and then I realized what I was holding, and I involuntarily sunk down upon my bunk. Sitting in silence, I stared at that simple card for what may very well have been hours as the passage of time became irrelevant…. “I forgive you.”
That simple card was from the mother of the victim in the case for which I now sat on death row. I recognized the name from court documents, and as I understood it, “Chip” was her only child. Throughout my trial, she never came to court and unlike the family of the young woman who also died that night Ms. Banner never campaigned for or demanded my death as the only acceptable measure of justice.
I didn’t sleep that Christmas Eve and carefully laid that simple card up on my small bookshelf and that night I laid there alone and in the darkness and solitude that surrounded me, I cried for the first time in too many years and then I got down on my knees and prayed to a God that I had given up on. That night I found the words and in my own incoherent way, I thanked Him for that card, and asked Him to touch Ms. Banner in a special way.
Not much is ever written about the personal persecution of condemned men, but I’d like to think that I am not the only one who has often struggled with an overwhelming sense of remorse for the tragedy that has touched too many lives.
But we live in a world in which the qualities that define what is good in humanity are only too rare, and a condemned man reaching out to ask for forgiveness is met with the heavy hand of scorn and impassioned vengeance. How dare we ask, much less expect such. But that card was sent on her own - from something within her – a quality that I can only stand in awe and respect of, as in my entire life I have known so very few people who had the strength and moral character to rise above their own personal loss and suffering to reach out with such compassion and forgiveness.
What made this act of unsolicited compassion especially remarkable is that she did not know what had actually happened that night that tragically resulted in her son’s death. She knew only what the prosecutor had told her, which now, many years later has been revealed as fabrication (see www.southerninjustice.com .) When she wrote out that simple card, she had every reason to believe that I had deliberately take the life of her child. In the years since, it has been revealed that the prosecutor deliberately manipulated and concealed crucial evidence while coercing false testimony that would have substantiated my consistently pled claim of being involuntarily compelled to act in self defense.
For this reason, that simple card meant so much and as I sat in that solitary cell that night before Christmas, I received a gift that I could not have imagined, beyond even that measure of mercy and compassion we all wish to receive from our fellow man, especially when we find ourselves alone and overwhelmed and feeling like the whole world is against us. There is no greater gauge of our humanity than summoning the strength to forgive another, and it’s a quality that is tragically too rare.
As that Christmas came and went, that card remained on my bookshelf, and countless times every day I would pick it up and read it again, and I thought about how incredibly hard it had to be for her to write those three words… “I forgive you.”
That Christmas card was, for me, the very definition of Christmas. So many get lost in the materialism of this spiritual holiday. But then there are these moments when the magic of Christmas shines through and in these moments we are blessed with the gift of being reminded of what Christmas is really about and our faith in humanity can be renewed even under the darkest circumstances.
Few of us seem to find that measure of strength within ourselves to forgive another, but I do believe that strength is within each of us, and knowing only too well how that simple Christmas card touched me on that Christmas so many years ago, it is my wish today that each of us can find that strength within ourselves.
Merry Christmas,
Michael Lambrix
The Christmas Card
By C. Michael Lambrix
At this time of year I find myself wondering what Christmas has become. For almost 30 years now, I have been in continuous solitary confinement, condemned to death. Here on Florida’s Death Row there are no shopping malls or shiny decorations that have come to define the holidays in the real world. I can watch it all on my TV, and if what I’m watching is what Christmas out there in the real world is, then maybe I’m more fortunate that those who have been consumed by commercialism, and have lost sight of what it should mean.
What are we really celebrating at this time of year? Don’t get me wrong – I would give almost anything to spend Christmas with my children and grandchildren, and see that magic sparkle in their eyes as they rip open brightly colored packages stacked beneath a beautifully decorated Christmas tree.
And what very little I might still have left afterwards, I would willingly surrender too, if only I could spend Christmas Day gathered around Mom’s table with long-lost family as we share a traditional meal while basking in the glow of each other’s company, as those are the moments that memories are made of.
But for me, Christmas will be spent in a cage and there won’t be any warm hearth, or gifts beneath a tree. I will spend my holiday alone just as I have done for too many Christmas’s past and although it may be difficult for others to understand, I still feel blessed to celebrate Christmas in my own way.
I came to Florida’s Death Row in March of 1984 and it’s that first Christmas on “The Row” that I look back upon and remember. That was a very hard year. In that first year, there were eight men here on The Row put to death, one almost every month, and at a time when there was barely 100 of us here. That number now has increased to almost 400, with executions averaging two yearly.
With so many facing imminent executions, the stench of death practically hung over all of us like a toxic cloud, threatening to suffocate us. My cell neighbor had been on The Row for about eight years at the time, and throughout that first year James (J.D.) Raulerson looked out for me and, as only condemned men living in close proximity can, we became as close as family. He took me under his wing and generously and kindly showed me the ropes.
But just before the holidays, the Florida governor signed a “death warrant” on J.D., and he was taken away to the death watch area to await execution. His Christmas would be spent alone on the bottom floor of Florida State Prison’s infamous “Q-wing,” a few feet away from the door that leads into the execution chamber, and the following month, J.D. was executed.
Although I had sat in my death row cell as eight others were each put to death, and executions were not unfamiliar to me, by the time that first Christmas on The Row rolled around and J.D. was moved to death watch, it hit especially close to home. He was the first one that I was actually close to, though far too many others I came to later know as both friends and brothers would follow through the years.
That first Christmas on The Row was especially hard in part because I still held on to the more traditional way in which most celebrate this holiday. I missed being able to be with my loved ones and I could only wonder how my children might be spending their Christmas that year as I had no way to communicate with them, and hadn’t heard from them since my arrest in early 1983.
But that doesn’t mean that my family and friends were not in thought, and each night I anxiously waited for the mail to come in, hoping upon hope that maybe, just maybe, I might get a card or letter, but those cards and letters didn’t come.
Even as alone a condemned man might feel in that solitary cage, that physical isolation becomes a distant second to the overwhelming sense of abandonment one feels as each day ever-so-very-slowly drags by and that mail you so anxiously hope will come doesn’t, and each day without a word pushes you down further into an abyss of hopelessness and despair that slowly kills you from within – one small cut at a time.
Today I can look back and understand what I could not back then; that what I felt was not at all unique amongst those I lived around. It is part of the experience we all feel on The Row. When it comes down to it, those who love and care about us in the world don’t know how to handle our death sentences. When that sentence is imposed, there’s a presumption of finality not unlike what families experience when they learn a loved one has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Even those who truly do love us often become uncomfortable and distant, unable to cope with the impending loss of someone they love.
For them, there is the added stigma of having a loved one convicted of a heinous crime in the very community they, our families, must continue to live in. It took me many years to see beyond the misery of my own circumstance and come to understand that even as hard as it might be on me, my conviction and condemnation was at least just as hard on those I left behind.
For the many months of that first year, J.D. was my mentor and source of support and then he was gone. Many mornings I would awake, still expecting to see his arm reaching around that concrete wall that separated our cells, extending a cup of coffee or perhaps some kind of snack – his way of inviting me to get up and talk a while. Although we couldn’t physically see each other, as each solitary cell was only open at the front, facing outward, being able to stand there at the front of the cell and talk around that wall was a very real sense of communion that we shared.
Just that quickly, it was no more and in that month leading up to that first Christmas, that cell remained empty, leaving me all but isolated (as the man on my other side chose to keep to himself and would rarely talk at all.)
Perhaps I have always struggled with depression, although I can’t help but wonder who wouldn’t if thrown into a solitary cell facing the reality of death all around you. But that first Christmas had me feeling especially abandoned and overwhelmed and I became almost obsessed with questioning the “why” of it all. Finding few answers, I contemplated whether I should take the easy way out, and if I could find the strength to commit suicide. I did think about the many ways that might be accomplished and, as those thoughts too often invaded my overwhelming isolation, the person that I was back then would have welcomed an end to what has become an ongoing nightmare.
That Christmas of 1984 was on a Tuesday, just as it will be this year (2012) and when the cards and letters I hoped to receive didn’t come by that last weekend before Christmas, like too many others around me, I clung on to the hope that they would come that Monday, Christmas Eve.
Then that Monday came and I was not the only one on the wing who silently stood at his cell door hoping upon whatever measure of hope remained that this night before Christmas would miraculously bring that one card or letter from a loved one. It was almost a collective ritual, as each of us anxiously watched that clock in anticipation for “mail call.” We strained to hear the sound of those heavy brass keys as the guard came down to open the inner catwalk gate that led into the cellblock area, where he would slowly work his way down the wing, one cell at a time, passing out the mail. The whole floor went quiet as each of us anxiously waited for what we might receive.
As the guard approached my cell that night, he stopped and I’m sure in that moment my heart skipped a beat as I held my breath like a child would if confronted by Santa Claus. I watched as the guard looked down on his small stack of mail and silently picked up the top one, then unceremoniously laid that one plain white envelope on my door and without a word, walked away towards the next cell.
I picked that envelope up from my door and looked to see from who it might be, but there was no name or return address. I then looked at the postmark and could see that it was mailed from Key Largo, Florida a few days earlier, but I didn’t know anyone down in Key Largo.
A small piece of scotch tape had been used to seal the envelope, and I pulled it apart, then carefully reached in to pull the card out. It was just a plain card sporting a modestly decorative pattern on the front, with gold print letters that read, “Happy Holidays,” and inside, a generic wish that the season would be joyful and not much more.
But then I read what was written inside – just three simple words, and that was all… “I forgive you,” signed E. Banner. There was a moment of confusion before that sank in, and then I realized what I was holding, and I involuntarily sunk down upon my bunk. Sitting in silence, I stared at that simple card for what may very well have been hours as the passage of time became irrelevant…. “I forgive you.”
That simple card was from the mother of the victim in the case for which I now sat on death row. I recognized the name from court documents, and as I understood it, “Chip” was her only child. Throughout my trial, she never came to court and unlike the family of the young woman who also died that night Ms. Banner never campaigned for or demanded my death as the only acceptable measure of justice.
I didn’t sleep that Christmas Eve and carefully laid that simple card up on my small bookshelf and that night I laid there alone and in the darkness and solitude that surrounded me, I cried for the first time in too many years and then I got down on my knees and prayed to a God that I had given up on. That night I found the words and in my own incoherent way, I thanked Him for that card, and asked Him to touch Ms. Banner in a special way.
Not much is ever written about the personal persecution of condemned men, but I’d like to think that I am not the only one who has often struggled with an overwhelming sense of remorse for the tragedy that has touched too many lives.
But we live in a world in which the qualities that define what is good in humanity are only too rare, and a condemned man reaching out to ask for forgiveness is met with the heavy hand of scorn and impassioned vengeance. How dare we ask, much less expect such. But that card was sent on her own - from something within her – a quality that I can only stand in awe and respect of, as in my entire life I have known so very few people who had the strength and moral character to rise above their own personal loss and suffering to reach out with such compassion and forgiveness.
What made this act of unsolicited compassion especially remarkable is that she did not know what had actually happened that night that tragically resulted in her son’s death. She knew only what the prosecutor had told her, which now, many years later has been revealed as fabrication (see www.southerninjustice.com .) When she wrote out that simple card, she had every reason to believe that I had deliberately take the life of her child. In the years since, it has been revealed that the prosecutor deliberately manipulated and concealed crucial evidence while coercing false testimony that would have substantiated my consistently pled claim of being involuntarily compelled to act in self defense.
For this reason, that simple card meant so much and as I sat in that solitary cell that night before Christmas, I received a gift that I could not have imagined, beyond even that measure of mercy and compassion we all wish to receive from our fellow man, especially when we find ourselves alone and overwhelmed and feeling like the whole world is against us. There is no greater gauge of our humanity than summoning the strength to forgive another, and it’s a quality that is tragically too rare.
As that Christmas came and went, that card remained on my bookshelf, and countless times every day I would pick it up and read it again, and I thought about how incredibly hard it had to be for her to write those three words… “I forgive you.”
That Christmas card was, for me, the very definition of Christmas. So many get lost in the materialism of this spiritual holiday. But then there are these moments when the magic of Christmas shines through and in these moments we are blessed with the gift of being reminded of what Christmas is really about and our faith in humanity can be renewed even under the darkest circumstances.
Few of us seem to find that measure of strength within ourselves to forgive another, but I do believe that strength is within each of us, and knowing only too well how that simple Christmas card touched me on that Christmas so many years ago, it is my wish today that each of us can find that strength within ourselves.
Merry Christmas,
Michael Lambrix
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
The Day God Died
The Day God Died
By C. Michael Lambrix
Never thought a common barnyard turkey would cause me to question my faith but there I was that last week of November 1988 watching a small T.V. through the bars of my cage as President Reagan proudly performed his time honored traditional ceremony of formally “pardoning” a big, white turkey there on the meticulously manicured front lawn of the White House, and yet all the while that big dumb bird just stood there completely oblivious to how the hands of fate had spared him an almost certain fate and he would be whisked away to live happily ever after on a farm in upstate New York. Ignorance truly is bliss and that was one blissful turkey.
Read the rest here at the MinutesBeforeSix website http://minutesbeforesix.blogspot.gr/2012/08/the-day-god-died.html
By C. Michael Lambrix
Never thought a common barnyard turkey would cause me to question my faith but there I was that last week of November 1988 watching a small T.V. through the bars of my cage as President Reagan proudly performed his time honored traditional ceremony of formally “pardoning” a big, white turkey there on the meticulously manicured front lawn of the White House, and yet all the while that big dumb bird just stood there completely oblivious to how the hands of fate had spared him an almost certain fate and he would be whisked away to live happily ever after on a farm in upstate New York. Ignorance truly is bliss and that was one blissful turkey.
Read the rest here at the MinutesBeforeSix website http://minutesbeforesix.blogspot.gr/2012/08/the-day-god-died.html
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man
By Andrew Cohen
Carlos DeLuna was put to death in December 1989 for a murder in Corpus Christi. But he didn't commit the crime. Today, his case reminds us of the glaring flaws of capital punishment.
THE JUDGE
Even for Justice Antonin Scalia, the crassest of the current United States Supreme Court justices, it was a particularly callous piece of writing. In 2006, in a case styled Kansas v. Marsh, the Court's five conservatives had just upheld a portion of Kansas' capital punishment law. The statute was interpreted to direct a sentence of death even if a jury found the "aggravating" and "mitigating" sentencing factors in equilibrium -- "equipoise," the Court lyrically called it. A tie, in other words, would mean death, not life.
For the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas had bent over backward to overturn a ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that had declared the law unconstitutional. The High Court's four liberal justices had voted to uphold the Kansas ruling. Justice John Paul Stevens, the Ford appointee, chastised Thomas for reaching out so aggressively to overturn a state court on a matter of state law. And Justice David Souter, the Bush I appointee, wrote about how such "equipoise" necessarily precluded a death sentence.
Mocking the rationale of both, and unsatisfied with the scope of Justice Thomas' majority opinion, Justice Scalia wrote a concurrence he will have to live with the rest of his life. As he sought to destroy Justice Souter's argument about the doubts reasonable people have about the accuracy and reliability of America's death penalty regime, Justice Scalia described a criminal justice system unfamiliar to anyone who has ever covered a murder case, read a book about one, or watched television news. Justice Scalia wrote:
It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case -- not one -- in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.
And then...
Capital cases are given especially close scrutiny at every level, which is why in most cases many years elapse before the sentence is executed. And of course capital cases receive special attention in the application of executive clemency. Indeed, one of the arguments made by abolitionists is that the process of finally completing all the appeals and reexaminations of capital sentences is so lengthy, and thus so expensive for the State, that the game is not worth the candle.
The proof of the pudding, of course, is that as far as anyone can determine (and many are looking), none of cases included in the .027% error rate for American verdicts involved a capital defendant erroneously executed.
There are two obvious and basic explanations for Justice Scalia's strident concurrence. Either he truly believed that capital cases are "given especially close scrutiny at every level," in which case he hadn't been paying attention to his work all those years. Or he did not truly believe that "capital cases receive special attention in the application of executive clemency," in which case his concurrence was just a thoughtless, reflexive reaction to Justice Souter's compelling case. Either way, he was wrong. Terribly wrong.
THE ARTICLE
The DeLuna case was flawed at virtually every level.
At 11 p.m Monday, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (at Columbia University) published and posted its Spring 2012 issue -- devoted entirely to a single piece of work about the life and death of two troubled and troublesome South Texas men. In explaining to their readers why an entire issue would be devoted to just one story, the editors of the Review said straightly that the "gravity of the subject matter of the Article and the possible far-reaching policy ramifications of its publication necessitated this decision."
The article is titled "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution" and it was written by James S. Liebman, Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White, Lauren Rosenberg and Daniel Zharkovsky. Los Tacayos can be translated from Spanish as "namesakes" and the two men at the heart of the story were, indeed, named Carlos DeLuna and Carlos Hernandez.. On December 7, 1989, this intense piece establishes beyond any reasonable doubt, Texas executed the former for a murder the latter had committed.
The Review article is an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work. And it ought to end all reasonable debate in this country about whether an innocent man or woman has yet been executed in America since the modern capital punishment regime was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1976. The article is also a clear and powerful retort to Justice Scalia in Kansas v. Marsh: Our capital cases don't have nearly the procedural safeguards he wants to pretend they do.
Soon to be published as a book, Los Tacayos Carlos is a seminal piece of online advocacy as well. Not only is the article itself now available on the web in its entirety (at www.thewrongcarlos.net) but so are all of its supporting materials. "The web version of the Article contains approximately 3,469 footnotes," the Review editors tell us, which in turn "provide hyperlinks to view the cited sources," including a great deal of the evidence relevant to the case. Now, everyone in the world who is interested can learn how bad it all can go when human beings try to administer what's supposed to be a fair, just and accurate death penalty.
THE HISTORY
Kansas v. Marsh was decided on June 26, 2006. The very next day, on June 27, 2006, two decorated Chicago Tribune reporters, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley, published the last of a three-part, groundbreaking series about the legal and factual problems with the DeLuna case. The headline that day was: "The Secret That Wasn't" and here was their lede:
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- It was a secret they all shared. Some kept it out of fear. Some because no one ever asked. Whatever their reasons, it was a secret that might have saved Carlos De Luna from the execution chamber. Twenty-three years after Wanda Lopez was murdered in the gas station where she worked, family members and acquaintances of another man, Carlos Hernandez, have broken their silence to support what De Luna had long asserted: Hernandez, a violent felon, killed Lopez in 1983.
A Tribune investigation has identified five people who say Hernandez told them that he stabbed Lopez and that De Luna, whom he called his "stupid tocayo," or namesake, went to Death Row in his place. They also say he admitted killing another woman, in 1979, a crime for which he was indicted but never tried. Although some aspects of De Luna's actions on the night of Lopez's killing remain suspicious, the Tribune uncovered substantial evidence that undermines his conviction.
I met Possley while we were both covering the McVeigh bombing trial. That was before his groundbreaking work a decade ago exposing the arbitrary and capricious nature of the death penalty in Illinois. Last year, when Illinois ended its experiment with capital punishment, it was in large part because of the Tribune and the work of Mills, Possley and fellow reporter Ken Armstrong. So why had he chosen back in 2005 to focus upon the DeLuna case? What had struck him? Last week, Possley told me via email:
When I reflect back on the series, what I think about most is how this case was a sensational case in a small arena. It didn't play out on a national stage and it happened so quickly -- so little time between arrest, conviction and execution. I remember that what really got me interested in the case was seeing the crime scene photos with all of the blood and then learning that there was no blood on DeLuna. It just didn't seem possible that he committed such a crime and was caught so quickly and had no blood on his clothing.That fact was so startling to me.
I really haven't changed my view of the case from back then. I thought it was a colossal, global failure of every corner of the criminal justice system. The media failed to question the case (not unusual in smaller markets where police and prosecutors are the best sources) as well.
Possley says the new piece "takes a giant step beyond our reporting because it's such a comprehensive and detailed account" of the DeLuna case. And why wouldn't it be? It was Liebman who first came to Possley and Mills, in November 2005, to see if the two veteran journalists couldn't independently investigate what his own team had discovered about the two Carloses. The resultant series became a finalist that year for a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. Someone was shouting from the rooftops, Justice Scalia.
Like a Karmic game of leapfrog, the two investigations have enabled one another. For their 2006 series, Possley and Mills got new information that Liebman initially had not uncovered. And now, today, Liebman has uncovered new information that in 2006 was unavailable to Possley and Mills. And what is the point of all? Why spend the inordinate time and energy writing about the guilt or innocence of a man dead now more than 20 years? In the Epilogue, Liebman makes it clear:
With the publication of this book, we make our voices heard. At the same time, we have attempted to present the case so that our readers can consider the evidence for themselves, reach their own conclusions about what happened, and let their own consciences dictate how much tolerance for doubt is allowable when human life is on the line. Whatever else is true, we owe it to the Carlos DeLunas of our nation, as well as the Wanda Lopezes, to ask these questions and to shout out the answers.
THE STORY
Like Possley and Mills in 2006, I don't have the space here to do justice to the facts of the DeLuna case. But I will try. Carlos DeLuna was executed in December 1989 for murdering Wanda Lopez in a February 1983 robbery in Corpus Christi. A jury convicted him in an afternoon of deliberation and sentenced him to death shortly thereafter. No appellate courts came to his rescue. And the six years it took from crime to execution was surprisingly -- suspiciously -- fast; nationwide, it's usually twice that long.
Texas convicted and executed DeLuna, all right, despite the fact that there was no blood or DNA evidence linking him to the scene of the crime. The state executed him despite the fact that the only eyewitness to the crime identified DeLuna while the suspect was sitting in the back of a police car parked in a dimly lit lot in front of the crime scene. Texas executed him despite the lack of DeLuna's fingerprints at the crime scene and the lack of the victim's hair and fibers on DeLuna. From a bloody scene, there was nothing.
No one can ever say again with a straight face that America doesn't execute innocent men. No one.
Texas convicted and executed DeLuna despite the fact that the police and prosecutors knew or should have known that Lopez's real murderer was a man named Carlos Hernandez, a violent criminal who looked almost exactly like DeLuna. Why? Because Hernandez was known to use the sort of knife used as the murder weapon. Because he matched initial descriptions of the suspect. Because he was known to be violent toward women. Oh, and because he evidently couldn't stop bragging about how he had murdered Lopez and gotten someone else to take the fall for him.
"... [It] is no overstatement to call it 'common knowledge' in 1980s Corpus Christi that Carlos Gonzalez Hernandez killed Wanda Lopez," Liebman and Co. conclude. Yet Texas executed DeLuna despite the fact that key evidence in the case went missing both before and after trial; that DeLuna initially was appointed a lawyer without criminal law experience; and that law enforcement failed to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence. Any one of these factors might warrant a new trial. Taken together they portray appalling injustice.
THE BACKSTORY
Reading through the manuscript last weekend, jarred by what I was seeing, I began to jot down a list of things that went terribly wrong in the DeLuna case -- issues of fact, of evidence, of testimony, of motives, of incompetence, of indifference, of fraud, of morality, of integrity, of constitutionality -- that should have been raised and answered long before DeLuna was convicted, much less executed, back in the 1980s. I stopped when I got to 10. Here's the list.
1. There was no DNA or blood evidence on DeLuna despite bloody murder scene. There were no fingerprints. There was only one eyewitness and he was sketchy about what he had seen.
2. Police/prosecutors knew the whereabouts of another, more likely, suspect. But they didn't tell the defense this before or after the trial.
3. When the defendant identified the likely killer shortly before trial, the police and prosecutors did not reasonably follow up even though they knew that the man identified was capable of committing the crime.
4. Based upon early witness reports, the police at first sought another suspect. They did not share this information with the defense even though the two men (the two Carloses) looked eerily like one another.
5. The police officer collecting witness accounts relayed inaccurate and incomplete descriptions of suspects to the police dispatcher, who radioed them to officers in manhunt.
6. Police investigators botched the crime scene by turning it back to the store manager just two hours after the murder to be washed down and reopened immediately.
7. Evidence from the initial investigation was checked out by a prosecutor the day after the trial and was never returned. Any usuable DNA thus was lost.
8. The trial judge appointed a solo civil practitioner without any criminal trial experience much less any capital trial experience. The defense did not call a single "mitigating" witness in the sentencing phase of trial.
9. Police investigators did not measure a bloody footprint they photographed at the scene of the crime or test a cigarette butt they found on the floor of the store where the victim died.
10. A 9-11 dispatcher failed to quickly dispatch police to the scene of the crime, despite the fact that the victim had called for help. Later, the "manhunt tape" made by dispatchers was taped over and not turned over to the defense by the police.
Surely this epic malfeasance and misfeasance cannot be what Justice Scalia had in mind when he wrote in Marsh about capital cases getting "especially close scrutiny at every level." Indeed, as here, the opposite was true. The DeLuna case was flawed at virtually every level. And all it would have taken to do justice would have been for one prosecutor or cop, one judge or witness, to step up and tell the truth. That didn't happen. And when it did, thanks to Liebman, Mills and Possley, it was too late for Carlos DeLuna.
What do I think happened? All of the things that go wrong every day in capital cases in this country, all of the human failings and official, institutional biases and prejudices and self-justifications and self-delusions that turn Justice Scalia's Marsh concurrence into a farce. The bottom line? The criminal justice system decided, combustibly, that Carlos DeLuna was bad enough to be executed without a remotely fair process. The community was fine with the result. The media didn't care. And the rule of law "covered" it all.
THE EXPERTS
MORE ON THE DEATH PENALTY
Racial Bias in Death Penalty Cases: A North Carolina Test
The Looming Death of the Death Penalty
Why Lawyers and Judges Should Watch Executions
Why America's Death Penalty Just Got Us Sanctioned by Europe
The Appeal of Death Row
The answer to Los Tocayos Carlos, if there can be one, is that the case is so old its failings are now outdated and irrelevant. The district attorney lobbyists will argue that capital cases, in Texas and elsewhere, are handled much more professionally today than they were 30 years ago. And because both of the Carloses are now long dead, there isn't much of a media hook here, either. Posthumous exonerations don't give the cameras the just-out-of-prison "walk shot" television producers love.
But it would be a shame if we were to view the DeLuna case through the prism of legal history. There is nothing ancient about the lessons it teaches. DeLuna may be gone. But the problems his case represents still are here, in virtually every jurisdiction that still imposes capital punishment. So last week I asked some of the most prominent death penalty experts in the country to look at my DeLuna "list" and then identify pending cases that were similarly marked with such obvious reasonable doubts.
I asked Richard Dieter, at the Death Penalty Information Center, and Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project. I reached out to professors like Eric Freedman, Sean O'Brien and Bennett Gershman, to practitioners like George Kendall, and to earnest other lawyers who handle capital cases from more of a ground-level view. They all agreed that today in America there are plenty of more recent cases where these sorts of issues have arisen or could arise. Here are links to just a few of the cases they cited (again, I stopped at the count of 10)
D'Ambrosio v. Bagley (Ohio- faulty crime scene analysis, information withheld by law enforcement, other known viable suspects.)
Elmore v. Ozmint (South Carolina--ineffective counsel, no eyewitnesses, evidence fabricated)
Keith v. Bobby (Ohio-- no DNA, blood or fingerprint evidence, other known viable suspects)
Noling v. Bradshaw (Ohio--unreliable eyewitness identification, other known viable suspects)
Arkansas v. Howard (Arkansas -- DNA withheld)
Skinner v. Switzer (Texas -- DNA withheld following Supreme Court intervention.)
In Georgia, Troy Davis was executed last year despite a dearth of physical evidence and only a single eyewitness linking him to the crime. In Texas, Claude Jones was executed in 2000 because of DNA evidence we now know did not belong to him. In North Carolina, it took officials ten years to release Darryl Hunt after DNA tests exonerated him of murder. Justice Scalia is either kidding himself, or being disingenuous, when he proclaims the justice system goes out of its way to protect these people.
THE LESSON
On the day, sooner than you think, when the United States Supreme Court again outlaws the death penalty, the justices will almost certainly cited the DeLuna case as one of the prime reasons why. It is not the first recent instance where smart, reasonable people have compellingly proven that an innocent man was executed in Texas. And it's certainly not the first time we've read the details of a capital case where the work of government officials -- police, prosecutors, judges -- was so profoundly and consistently shoddy.
But there is something especially compelling about the DeLuna case. It's what drew Possley to it. It's what haunted the lone eyewitness for all these years. A legendary case of injustice deserved -- it needed -- a legendary treatment. And it got one. No one can ever say again with a straight face that America doesn't execute innocent men. No one. Barry Scheck told me Friday: "If Carlos DeLuna were still alive, [the Article] would form the basis of a habeas petition that would have exonerated him."
Anyone who cares about the integrity of our justice system, and the constitutional values it is supposed to reflect, should expect Justice Scalia to read the Review article this summer -- and certainly before he writes another word for the Court about the death penalty. We'll see. I also especially recommend Los Tocayos Carlos to anyone and everyone -- judge, prosecutor, police official, witness, medical expert, etc -- who had anything at all to do with making the DeLuna case the symbol it will now become.
DeLuna was reportedly slow as a child and tested as mildly mentally retarded as a juvenile. Later, he was in and out of trouble with the law until he was found (and was perhaps beaten) by the police on the night of the Lopez murder. There is great doubt even today that he fully understood the magnitude of the trouble he was in, even as he was nearing the end in 1989, which is why he made such a perfect patsy for Carlos Hernandez.
The ultimate villain of this awful story, Hernandez died in prison, in 1999, boasting to the end that he had killed Wanda Lopez and allowed another man to take the fall for it. The cops knew this. The prosecutors knew or should have known it. Witnesses knew it. And yet no one did anything to stop the state executioners from carrying out their job. Why no one listened to Hernandez for all those years, and why no one hears the cries of others today, is a question Justice Scalia and many others have to answer for themselves.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/yes-america-we-have-executed-an-innocent-man/257106/
Carlos DeLuna was put to death in December 1989 for a murder in Corpus Christi. But he didn't commit the crime. Today, his case reminds us of the glaring flaws of capital punishment.
THE JUDGE
Even for Justice Antonin Scalia, the crassest of the current United States Supreme Court justices, it was a particularly callous piece of writing. In 2006, in a case styled Kansas v. Marsh, the Court's five conservatives had just upheld a portion of Kansas' capital punishment law. The statute was interpreted to direct a sentence of death even if a jury found the "aggravating" and "mitigating" sentencing factors in equilibrium -- "equipoise," the Court lyrically called it. A tie, in other words, would mean death, not life.
For the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas had bent over backward to overturn a ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that had declared the law unconstitutional. The High Court's four liberal justices had voted to uphold the Kansas ruling. Justice John Paul Stevens, the Ford appointee, chastised Thomas for reaching out so aggressively to overturn a state court on a matter of state law. And Justice David Souter, the Bush I appointee, wrote about how such "equipoise" necessarily precluded a death sentence.
Mocking the rationale of both, and unsatisfied with the scope of Justice Thomas' majority opinion, Justice Scalia wrote a concurrence he will have to live with the rest of his life. As he sought to destroy Justice Souter's argument about the doubts reasonable people have about the accuracy and reliability of America's death penalty regime, Justice Scalia described a criminal justice system unfamiliar to anyone who has ever covered a murder case, read a book about one, or watched television news. Justice Scalia wrote:
It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case -- not one -- in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.
And then...
Capital cases are given especially close scrutiny at every level, which is why in most cases many years elapse before the sentence is executed. And of course capital cases receive special attention in the application of executive clemency. Indeed, one of the arguments made by abolitionists is that the process of finally completing all the appeals and reexaminations of capital sentences is so lengthy, and thus so expensive for the State, that the game is not worth the candle.
The proof of the pudding, of course, is that as far as anyone can determine (and many are looking), none of cases included in the .027% error rate for American verdicts involved a capital defendant erroneously executed.
There are two obvious and basic explanations for Justice Scalia's strident concurrence. Either he truly believed that capital cases are "given especially close scrutiny at every level," in which case he hadn't been paying attention to his work all those years. Or he did not truly believe that "capital cases receive special attention in the application of executive clemency," in which case his concurrence was just a thoughtless, reflexive reaction to Justice Souter's compelling case. Either way, he was wrong. Terribly wrong.
THE ARTICLE
The DeLuna case was flawed at virtually every level.
At 11 p.m Monday, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (at Columbia University) published and posted its Spring 2012 issue -- devoted entirely to a single piece of work about the life and death of two troubled and troublesome South Texas men. In explaining to their readers why an entire issue would be devoted to just one story, the editors of the Review said straightly that the "gravity of the subject matter of the Article and the possible far-reaching policy ramifications of its publication necessitated this decision."
The article is titled "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution" and it was written by James S. Liebman, Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White, Lauren Rosenberg and Daniel Zharkovsky. Los Tacayos can be translated from Spanish as "namesakes" and the two men at the heart of the story were, indeed, named Carlos DeLuna and Carlos Hernandez.. On December 7, 1989, this intense piece establishes beyond any reasonable doubt, Texas executed the former for a murder the latter had committed.
The Review article is an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work. And it ought to end all reasonable debate in this country about whether an innocent man or woman has yet been executed in America since the modern capital punishment regime was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1976. The article is also a clear and powerful retort to Justice Scalia in Kansas v. Marsh: Our capital cases don't have nearly the procedural safeguards he wants to pretend they do.
Soon to be published as a book, Los Tacayos Carlos is a seminal piece of online advocacy as well. Not only is the article itself now available on the web in its entirety (at www.thewrongcarlos.net) but so are all of its supporting materials. "The web version of the Article contains approximately 3,469 footnotes," the Review editors tell us, which in turn "provide hyperlinks to view the cited sources," including a great deal of the evidence relevant to the case. Now, everyone in the world who is interested can learn how bad it all can go when human beings try to administer what's supposed to be a fair, just and accurate death penalty.
THE HISTORY
Kansas v. Marsh was decided on June 26, 2006. The very next day, on June 27, 2006, two decorated Chicago Tribune reporters, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley, published the last of a three-part, groundbreaking series about the legal and factual problems with the DeLuna case. The headline that day was: "The Secret That Wasn't" and here was their lede:
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas -- It was a secret they all shared. Some kept it out of fear. Some because no one ever asked. Whatever their reasons, it was a secret that might have saved Carlos De Luna from the execution chamber. Twenty-three years after Wanda Lopez was murdered in the gas station where she worked, family members and acquaintances of another man, Carlos Hernandez, have broken their silence to support what De Luna had long asserted: Hernandez, a violent felon, killed Lopez in 1983.
A Tribune investigation has identified five people who say Hernandez told them that he stabbed Lopez and that De Luna, whom he called his "stupid tocayo," or namesake, went to Death Row in his place. They also say he admitted killing another woman, in 1979, a crime for which he was indicted but never tried. Although some aspects of De Luna's actions on the night of Lopez's killing remain suspicious, the Tribune uncovered substantial evidence that undermines his conviction.
I met Possley while we were both covering the McVeigh bombing trial. That was before his groundbreaking work a decade ago exposing the arbitrary and capricious nature of the death penalty in Illinois. Last year, when Illinois ended its experiment with capital punishment, it was in large part because of the Tribune and the work of Mills, Possley and fellow reporter Ken Armstrong. So why had he chosen back in 2005 to focus upon the DeLuna case? What had struck him? Last week, Possley told me via email:
When I reflect back on the series, what I think about most is how this case was a sensational case in a small arena. It didn't play out on a national stage and it happened so quickly -- so little time between arrest, conviction and execution. I remember that what really got me interested in the case was seeing the crime scene photos with all of the blood and then learning that there was no blood on DeLuna. It just didn't seem possible that he committed such a crime and was caught so quickly and had no blood on his clothing.That fact was so startling to me.
I really haven't changed my view of the case from back then. I thought it was a colossal, global failure of every corner of the criminal justice system. The media failed to question the case (not unusual in smaller markets where police and prosecutors are the best sources) as well.
Possley says the new piece "takes a giant step beyond our reporting because it's such a comprehensive and detailed account" of the DeLuna case. And why wouldn't it be? It was Liebman who first came to Possley and Mills, in November 2005, to see if the two veteran journalists couldn't independently investigate what his own team had discovered about the two Carloses. The resultant series became a finalist that year for a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. Someone was shouting from the rooftops, Justice Scalia.
Like a Karmic game of leapfrog, the two investigations have enabled one another. For their 2006 series, Possley and Mills got new information that Liebman initially had not uncovered. And now, today, Liebman has uncovered new information that in 2006 was unavailable to Possley and Mills. And what is the point of all? Why spend the inordinate time and energy writing about the guilt or innocence of a man dead now more than 20 years? In the Epilogue, Liebman makes it clear:
With the publication of this book, we make our voices heard. At the same time, we have attempted to present the case so that our readers can consider the evidence for themselves, reach their own conclusions about what happened, and let their own consciences dictate how much tolerance for doubt is allowable when human life is on the line. Whatever else is true, we owe it to the Carlos DeLunas of our nation, as well as the Wanda Lopezes, to ask these questions and to shout out the answers.
THE STORY
Like Possley and Mills in 2006, I don't have the space here to do justice to the facts of the DeLuna case. But I will try. Carlos DeLuna was executed in December 1989 for murdering Wanda Lopez in a February 1983 robbery in Corpus Christi. A jury convicted him in an afternoon of deliberation and sentenced him to death shortly thereafter. No appellate courts came to his rescue. And the six years it took from crime to execution was surprisingly -- suspiciously -- fast; nationwide, it's usually twice that long.
Texas convicted and executed DeLuna, all right, despite the fact that there was no blood or DNA evidence linking him to the scene of the crime. The state executed him despite the fact that the only eyewitness to the crime identified DeLuna while the suspect was sitting in the back of a police car parked in a dimly lit lot in front of the crime scene. Texas executed him despite the lack of DeLuna's fingerprints at the crime scene and the lack of the victim's hair and fibers on DeLuna. From a bloody scene, there was nothing.
No one can ever say again with a straight face that America doesn't execute innocent men. No one.
Texas convicted and executed DeLuna despite the fact that the police and prosecutors knew or should have known that Lopez's real murderer was a man named Carlos Hernandez, a violent criminal who looked almost exactly like DeLuna. Why? Because Hernandez was known to use the sort of knife used as the murder weapon. Because he matched initial descriptions of the suspect. Because he was known to be violent toward women. Oh, and because he evidently couldn't stop bragging about how he had murdered Lopez and gotten someone else to take the fall for him.
"... [It] is no overstatement to call it 'common knowledge' in 1980s Corpus Christi that Carlos Gonzalez Hernandez killed Wanda Lopez," Liebman and Co. conclude. Yet Texas executed DeLuna despite the fact that key evidence in the case went missing both before and after trial; that DeLuna initially was appointed a lawyer without criminal law experience; and that law enforcement failed to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence. Any one of these factors might warrant a new trial. Taken together they portray appalling injustice.
THE BACKSTORY
Reading through the manuscript last weekend, jarred by what I was seeing, I began to jot down a list of things that went terribly wrong in the DeLuna case -- issues of fact, of evidence, of testimony, of motives, of incompetence, of indifference, of fraud, of morality, of integrity, of constitutionality -- that should have been raised and answered long before DeLuna was convicted, much less executed, back in the 1980s. I stopped when I got to 10. Here's the list.
1. There was no DNA or blood evidence on DeLuna despite bloody murder scene. There were no fingerprints. There was only one eyewitness and he was sketchy about what he had seen.
2. Police/prosecutors knew the whereabouts of another, more likely, suspect. But they didn't tell the defense this before or after the trial.
3. When the defendant identified the likely killer shortly before trial, the police and prosecutors did not reasonably follow up even though they knew that the man identified was capable of committing the crime.
4. Based upon early witness reports, the police at first sought another suspect. They did not share this information with the defense even though the two men (the two Carloses) looked eerily like one another.
5. The police officer collecting witness accounts relayed inaccurate and incomplete descriptions of suspects to the police dispatcher, who radioed them to officers in manhunt.
6. Police investigators botched the crime scene by turning it back to the store manager just two hours after the murder to be washed down and reopened immediately.
7. Evidence from the initial investigation was checked out by a prosecutor the day after the trial and was never returned. Any usuable DNA thus was lost.
8. The trial judge appointed a solo civil practitioner without any criminal trial experience much less any capital trial experience. The defense did not call a single "mitigating" witness in the sentencing phase of trial.
9. Police investigators did not measure a bloody footprint they photographed at the scene of the crime or test a cigarette butt they found on the floor of the store where the victim died.
10. A 9-11 dispatcher failed to quickly dispatch police to the scene of the crime, despite the fact that the victim had called for help. Later, the "manhunt tape" made by dispatchers was taped over and not turned over to the defense by the police.
Surely this epic malfeasance and misfeasance cannot be what Justice Scalia had in mind when he wrote in Marsh about capital cases getting "especially close scrutiny at every level." Indeed, as here, the opposite was true. The DeLuna case was flawed at virtually every level. And all it would have taken to do justice would have been for one prosecutor or cop, one judge or witness, to step up and tell the truth. That didn't happen. And when it did, thanks to Liebman, Mills and Possley, it was too late for Carlos DeLuna.
What do I think happened? All of the things that go wrong every day in capital cases in this country, all of the human failings and official, institutional biases and prejudices and self-justifications and self-delusions that turn Justice Scalia's Marsh concurrence into a farce. The bottom line? The criminal justice system decided, combustibly, that Carlos DeLuna was bad enough to be executed without a remotely fair process. The community was fine with the result. The media didn't care. And the rule of law "covered" it all.
THE EXPERTS
MORE ON THE DEATH PENALTY
Racial Bias in Death Penalty Cases: A North Carolina Test
The Looming Death of the Death Penalty
Why Lawyers and Judges Should Watch Executions
Why America's Death Penalty Just Got Us Sanctioned by Europe
The Appeal of Death Row
The answer to Los Tocayos Carlos, if there can be one, is that the case is so old its failings are now outdated and irrelevant. The district attorney lobbyists will argue that capital cases, in Texas and elsewhere, are handled much more professionally today than they were 30 years ago. And because both of the Carloses are now long dead, there isn't much of a media hook here, either. Posthumous exonerations don't give the cameras the just-out-of-prison "walk shot" television producers love.
But it would be a shame if we were to view the DeLuna case through the prism of legal history. There is nothing ancient about the lessons it teaches. DeLuna may be gone. But the problems his case represents still are here, in virtually every jurisdiction that still imposes capital punishment. So last week I asked some of the most prominent death penalty experts in the country to look at my DeLuna "list" and then identify pending cases that were similarly marked with such obvious reasonable doubts.
I asked Richard Dieter, at the Death Penalty Information Center, and Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project. I reached out to professors like Eric Freedman, Sean O'Brien and Bennett Gershman, to practitioners like George Kendall, and to earnest other lawyers who handle capital cases from more of a ground-level view. They all agreed that today in America there are plenty of more recent cases where these sorts of issues have arisen or could arise. Here are links to just a few of the cases they cited (again, I stopped at the count of 10)
D'Ambrosio v. Bagley (Ohio- faulty crime scene analysis, information withheld by law enforcement, other known viable suspects.)
Elmore v. Ozmint (South Carolina--ineffective counsel, no eyewitnesses, evidence fabricated)
Keith v. Bobby (Ohio-- no DNA, blood or fingerprint evidence, other known viable suspects)
Noling v. Bradshaw (Ohio--unreliable eyewitness identification, other known viable suspects)
Arkansas v. Howard (Arkansas -- DNA withheld)
Skinner v. Switzer (Texas -- DNA withheld following Supreme Court intervention.)
In Georgia, Troy Davis was executed last year despite a dearth of physical evidence and only a single eyewitness linking him to the crime. In Texas, Claude Jones was executed in 2000 because of DNA evidence we now know did not belong to him. In North Carolina, it took officials ten years to release Darryl Hunt after DNA tests exonerated him of murder. Justice Scalia is either kidding himself, or being disingenuous, when he proclaims the justice system goes out of its way to protect these people.
THE LESSON
On the day, sooner than you think, when the United States Supreme Court again outlaws the death penalty, the justices will almost certainly cited the DeLuna case as one of the prime reasons why. It is not the first recent instance where smart, reasonable people have compellingly proven that an innocent man was executed in Texas. And it's certainly not the first time we've read the details of a capital case where the work of government officials -- police, prosecutors, judges -- was so profoundly and consistently shoddy.
But there is something especially compelling about the DeLuna case. It's what drew Possley to it. It's what haunted the lone eyewitness for all these years. A legendary case of injustice deserved -- it needed -- a legendary treatment. And it got one. No one can ever say again with a straight face that America doesn't execute innocent men. No one. Barry Scheck told me Friday: "If Carlos DeLuna were still alive, [the Article] would form the basis of a habeas petition that would have exonerated him."
Anyone who cares about the integrity of our justice system, and the constitutional values it is supposed to reflect, should expect Justice Scalia to read the Review article this summer -- and certainly before he writes another word for the Court about the death penalty. We'll see. I also especially recommend Los Tocayos Carlos to anyone and everyone -- judge, prosecutor, police official, witness, medical expert, etc -- who had anything at all to do with making the DeLuna case the symbol it will now become.
DeLuna was reportedly slow as a child and tested as mildly mentally retarded as a juvenile. Later, he was in and out of trouble with the law until he was found (and was perhaps beaten) by the police on the night of the Lopez murder. There is great doubt even today that he fully understood the magnitude of the trouble he was in, even as he was nearing the end in 1989, which is why he made such a perfect patsy for Carlos Hernandez.
The ultimate villain of this awful story, Hernandez died in prison, in 1999, boasting to the end that he had killed Wanda Lopez and allowed another man to take the fall for it. The cops knew this. The prosecutors knew or should have known it. Witnesses knew it. And yet no one did anything to stop the state executioners from carrying out their job. Why no one listened to Hernandez for all those years, and why no one hears the cries of others today, is a question Justice Scalia and many others have to answer for themselves.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/yes-america-we-have-executed-an-innocent-man/257106/
Monday, 21 May 2012
Rethinking Solitary Confinement
New York Times March 10, 2012
Prisons Rethink Isolation, Saving Money, Lives and Sanity
By ERICA GOODE
PARCHMAN, Miss. — The heat was suffocating, and the inmates locked alone in cells in Unit 32, the state’s super-maximum-security prison, wiped away sweat as they lay on concrete slab beds.
Kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours each day, allowed out only in shackles and escorted by guards, they were restless and angry — made more so by the excrement-smeared walls, the insects, the filthy food trays and the mentally ill inmates who screamed in the night, conditions that a judge had already ruled unacceptable.
So it was not really surprising when violence erupted in 2007: an inmate stabbed to death with a homemade spear that May; in June, a suicide; in July, another stabbing; in August, a prisoner killed by a member of a rival gang.
What was surprising was what happened next. Instead of tightening restrictions further, prison officials loosened them.
They allowed most inmates out of their cells for hours each day. They built a basketball court and a group dining area. They put rehabilitation programs in place and let prisoners work their way to greater privileges.
In response, the inmates became better behaved. Violence went down. The number of prisoners in isolation dropped to about 300 from more than 1,000. So many inmates were moved into the general population of other prisons that Unit 32 was closed in 2010, saving the state more than $5 million.
The transformation of the Mississippi prison has become a focal point for a growing number of states that are rethinking the use of long-term isolation and re-evaluating how many inmates really require it, how long they should be kept there and how best to move them out. Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Ohio and Washington State have been taking steps to reduce the number of prisoners in long-term isolation; others have plans to do so. On Friday, officials in California announced a plan for policy changes that could result in fewer prisoners being sent to the state’s three super-maximum-security units.
The efforts represent an about-face to an approach that began three decades ago, when corrections departments — responding to increasing problems with prison gangs, stiffer sentencing policies that led to overcrowding and the “get tough on crime” demands of legislators — began removing ever larger numbers of inmates from the general population. They placed them in special prisons designed to house inmates in long-term isolation or in other types of segregation.
At least 25,000 prisoners — and probably tens of thousands more, criminal justice experts say — are still in solitary confinement in the United States. Some remain there for weeks or months; others for years or even decades. More inmates are held in solitary confinement here than in any other democratic nation, a fact highlighted in a United Nations report last week.
Humanitarian groups have long argued that solitary confinement has devastating psychological effects, but a central driver in the recent shift is economics. Segregation units can be two to three times as costly to build and, because of their extensive staffing requirements, to operate as conventional prisons are. They are an expense that many recession-plagued states can ill afford; Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois announced plans late last month to close the state’s supermax prison for budgetary reasons.
Some officials have also been persuaded by research suggesting that isolation is vastly overused and that it does little to reduce overall prison violence. Inmates kept in such conditions, most of whom will eventually be released, may be more dangerous when they emerge, studies suggest.
Christopher B. Epps, Mississippi’s commissioner of corrections, said he found his own views changing as he fought an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over conditions in the prison, which one former inmate described as “hell, an insane asylum.”
Mr. Epps said he started out believing that difficult inmates should be locked down as tightly as possible, for as long as possible.
“That was the culture, and I was part of it,” he said.
By the end of the process, he saw things differently and ordered the changes.
“If you treat people like animals, that’s exactly the way they’ll behave,” he now says.
A Very Costly Experiment
James F. Austin held up the file of an inmate in Unit 32 and posed a question to the staff members gathered in a conference room at the Mississippi Department of Corrections headquarters in Jackson.
“O.K., does this guy really need to be there?” he asked.
It was June 2007, and the department was under pressure to make court-ordered improvements to conditions at Unit 32, where violence was brewing. Dr. Austin, a prison consultant, had been called in by the state. As the discussion proceeded, the staff members were startled to discover that many inmates in Unit 32 had been sent there not because they were highly dangerous, but because they were a nuisance — they had disobeyed orders, had walked away from a minimum-security program or were low-level gang members with no history of causing trouble while incarcerated.
“He started saying, ‘You tell me what kind of person needs to be locked up,’ and it wasn’t near the numbers that we had,” said Emmitt L. Sparkman, deputy commissioner of corrections. By the time they were done, the group had determined that up to 80 percent of the 1,000 or more inmates at Unit 32 could probably be safely moved to less restrictive settings.
Like many such prisons, Mississippi’s supermax, opened in 1990, owed its existence to the fervor for tougher punishment that swept through the country in the 1980s and 1990s.
“There was an incredible explosion in the prison population coupled with a big infusion of gangs,” Dr. Austin said. “Riots were occurring. Prison officials were literally losing control.”
Some states built special units to isolate difficult prisoners — “the worst of the worst,” prison officials said — from the general prison population. Others retrofitted existing prisons or established smaller units within larger facilities. The federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., was locked down in 1983 after the murder of two prison guards, its inmates confined to cells 23 hours a day and then kept that way permanently. In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, a remote town near the Oregon border, specially designed to control inmates in conditions that minimize human interaction.
By 2005, 44 states had supermax prisons or their equivalents. In most, inmates were let out of their cells for only a few hours a week. They were fed through slots in their cell doors and were denied access to work programs or other rehabilitation efforts. If visitors were allowed, the interactions were conducted with no physical contact.
And while prisoners had previously been sent to isolation for 10 or perhaps 30 days as a temporary disciplinary measure, they were now often placed there indefinitely.
Asked to explain the purpose of such confinement, prison wardens surveyed in 2006 by Dan Mears, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, cited “increasing safety, order and control throughout prison systems and incapacitating violent or disruptive inmates.”
But beyond that, said Dr. Mears, who called the rise of supermax prisons “a big, very costly experiment,” the goals seemed murky. Who exactly were “the worst of the worst”? How many people really needed such harsh control, and for how long? And how should the effectiveness of the prisons be judged, especially when measured against the costs of building and operating them?
Dr. Mears said there were no clear answers; indeed, he said, it is virtually impossible to determine how many inmates are in supermax prisons in the United States because there is no national tracking system and because states differ widely in what they call segregation units. “I don’t know of any business that would do this, not something that costs this much, with so little evidence or clarity about what you’re getting,” Dr. Mears said.
With no precise definition of who belonged there, prison systems began to send people to segregation units who bore little resemblance to the serial killers or terrorists the public imagined filled such prisons.
“Certainly there are a small number of people who for a variety of reasons have to be maintained in a way that they don’t have access to other inmates,” said Chase Riveland, a former head of corrections in Colorado and Washington State who now serves as an expert witness in prison cases. “But those in most systems are pretty small numbers of people.”
Mr. Epps, who is president-elect of the American Correctional Association, likes to say prison officials started out isolating inmates they were scared of but ended up adding many they were simply “mad at.”
‘The Real Damage’
In 1831, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where prison officials were pioneering a novel rehabilitation method based on Quaker principles of reflection and penitence. They called it solitary confinement.
“Placed alone in view of his crime,” de Tocqueville wrote in a report to the French government, the prisoner “learns to hate it, and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.”
But for many prisoners, isolation was as likely to produce mental illness as remorse, and by the late 19th century, enthusiasm for the approach had flagged. In 1890, deciding the case of a death row inmate held in solitary confinement, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller of the Supreme Court wrote that many prisoners fell, “after even a short confinement, into a semifatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still committed suicide.”
It was the last time the nation’s highest court would address the psychological effects of solitary confinement directly. But lower courts in some states have acknowledged the stress that isolation puts on inmates who are already mentally ill, prohibiting their being placed in solitary except in urgent circumstances.
When Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and expert on the effects of solitary confinement, toured Unit 32 for the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, he found that about 100 of the more than 1,000 inmates there had serious mental illness, in many cases improperly diagnosed. Some were actively hallucinating. Others threw feces or urine at guards or howled in the night.
In turn, the mentally ill inmates were mistreated by corrections officers, who had little understanding of their condition, Dr. Kupers said.
In a report filed to the court, he described the case of James Coffield, a mentally ill prisoner who had demonstrated “a long history in Unit 32 of bizarre and disruptive behaviors” that prison psychiatrists “characterized as merely ‘manipulative’ and which security staff punished with increasingly harsh force, including repeated gassing with chemicals.”
Mr. Coffield eventually tried to hang himself but failed and ended up in a vegetative state.
Many states continue to house inmates with mental illness in isolation. Some inmates appear to function adequately in solitary confinement or even say they prefer it. But studies suggest that the rigid control, absence of normal human interaction and lack of stimulation imposed by prolonged isolation can cause a wide range of psychological symptoms including insomnia, withdrawal, rage and aggression, depression, hallucinations and thoughts of suicide, even in prisoners who are mentally healthy to begin with.
A study of prisoners in the Pelican Bay supermax, for example, found that almost all reported nervousness, anxiety, lethargy or other psychological complaints. Seventy percent said they felt themselves to be at risk of “impending nervous breakdown.”
“Worse still is the fact that for many of these men, the real damage only becomes apparent when they get out of this environment,” said Craig W. Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert on the effects of solitary confinement, who led the study.
In fact, some research has found that inmates released from supermax units are more likely to reoffend than comparable prisoners released from conventional maximum-security prisons, and that those crimes are more likely to be violent. In Colorado, said Tom Clements, executive director of corrections, it turned out that about 40 percent of inmates held in long-term isolation were being released directly to the community with no transition period.
The psychological research has drawn attention, not least from the international community. In a report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Juan E. Méndez, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture and other abuse, called for a ban on solitary confinement except in limited situations and singled out the United States for its reliance on the method.
In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights blocked the extradition of four terrorism suspects from Britain, saying it wanted to study whether imprisonment at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., violated a ban on inhuman or degrading treatment.
Yet for states, economic and practical arguments may prove more persuasive than humanitarian concerns.
“It’s just exceedingly expensive to hold someone in a segregation bed,” said Angela Browne, a senior fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit policy and research group, and head of the institute’s segregation reduction project, which works with states to find alternatives to segregation.
Several states, citing economic reasons, have converted supermax units to more conventional prisons, and a few have closed the prisons altogether. Unit 32 was closed in 2010. The increased costs are largely a result of the staffing required to deliver food and other services to cells and escort prisoners when they are let out.
In 2010, for example, Virginia reported that it cost $89.59 per day to keep a prisoner at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax unit with 399 employees, compared with $60.04 per day at Sussex II State Prison, a maximum-security facility that houses almost 500 more inmates but has a staff of 353.
Gambling on Change
Roy Harper, serving time for armed robbery, kidnapping and other charges, used to wake in his cell at Unit 32 seized with anxiety every morning. “You never know what the day is going to bring,” he said recently.
Sometimes it was flooding from malfunctioning toilets. Sometimes it was inmates setting fires or cutting themselves — two prisoners cut off their own testicles in the time he spent there, he said — and sometimes it was just the sense of isolation he felt, “like being alone in the world.”
Mr. Harper was a prisoner in Unit 32 from the day it opened to the day it closed, 20 years later. But the summer of 2007, he recalled, was worse than most. When the killings began, prison officials first cracked down, taking away the inmates’ fans — the only relief from summer temperatures that approached 100 degrees and, according to an environmental expert who filed a report on the conditions, could feel like 120 or more. They kept prisoners in their cells around the clock, not even allowing them out for exercise, he said.
Mr. Sparkman, the deputy corrections commissioner, viewed the situation as so critical that in July he moved from his home in Jackson to Parchman, where Unit 32 sits on the grounds of the state penitentiary. It was clear that a different approach was needed, he said: “What we were doing, the 23-hour lockdown, was not working.”
But the shift had to be made carefully.
“It was gradual, and it was very controlled,” Mr. Sparkman said. “We started out with one building, identifying those groups that we could let out, and we let some of them out. Some of them we were able to transfer completely out.”
A few guards rebelled at the new orders and resigned in protest. A few others were fired. But by the end of six months, most prisoners were spending hours a day outside their cells or had been moved to the general population of other prisons. A clothing warehouse was turned into a group dining hall, and a maintenance room was converted to an activities center. The basketball court filled with players.
Mr. Harper did not benefit immediately from the changes. He remained in 23-hour lockdown until he worked his way to greater privileges. But he was elated at what he saw, he said, with inmates “working again, walking without chains, going to the yard, going to the chow hall.”
The A.C.L.U. continues to monitor conditions in other prisons in the state. But Margaret Winter, the lead lawyer for the A.C.L.U. in its lawsuit over Unit 32, said she watched the transformation there in wonder, especially as two men who at the beginning of the process seemed deeply entrenched in their views shifted direction. The change, she said, was “stunning.”
Mr. Sparkman said the new approach went against everything he had been trained to do. “If you’d come to me in 2002 and told me I was going to do something like that, I’d say, ‘You don’t know me,’ ” he said. “I’d have probably locked them down for anything that squeaked.”
Mr. Epps looks back at the decision as a nerve-racking gamble.
“Was it scary? Absolutely,” he said. “But it worked out just fine. We didn’t have a single incident.”
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
Prisons Rethink Isolation, Saving Money, Lives and Sanity
By ERICA GOODE
PARCHMAN, Miss. — The heat was suffocating, and the inmates locked alone in cells in Unit 32, the state’s super-maximum-security prison, wiped away sweat as they lay on concrete slab beds.
Kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours each day, allowed out only in shackles and escorted by guards, they were restless and angry — made more so by the excrement-smeared walls, the insects, the filthy food trays and the mentally ill inmates who screamed in the night, conditions that a judge had already ruled unacceptable.
So it was not really surprising when violence erupted in 2007: an inmate stabbed to death with a homemade spear that May; in June, a suicide; in July, another stabbing; in August, a prisoner killed by a member of a rival gang.
What was surprising was what happened next. Instead of tightening restrictions further, prison officials loosened them.
They allowed most inmates out of their cells for hours each day. They built a basketball court and a group dining area. They put rehabilitation programs in place and let prisoners work their way to greater privileges.
In response, the inmates became better behaved. Violence went down. The number of prisoners in isolation dropped to about 300 from more than 1,000. So many inmates were moved into the general population of other prisons that Unit 32 was closed in 2010, saving the state more than $5 million.
The transformation of the Mississippi prison has become a focal point for a growing number of states that are rethinking the use of long-term isolation and re-evaluating how many inmates really require it, how long they should be kept there and how best to move them out. Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Ohio and Washington State have been taking steps to reduce the number of prisoners in long-term isolation; others have plans to do so. On Friday, officials in California announced a plan for policy changes that could result in fewer prisoners being sent to the state’s three super-maximum-security units.
The efforts represent an about-face to an approach that began three decades ago, when corrections departments — responding to increasing problems with prison gangs, stiffer sentencing policies that led to overcrowding and the “get tough on crime” demands of legislators — began removing ever larger numbers of inmates from the general population. They placed them in special prisons designed to house inmates in long-term isolation or in other types of segregation.
At least 25,000 prisoners — and probably tens of thousands more, criminal justice experts say — are still in solitary confinement in the United States. Some remain there for weeks or months; others for years or even decades. More inmates are held in solitary confinement here than in any other democratic nation, a fact highlighted in a United Nations report last week.
Humanitarian groups have long argued that solitary confinement has devastating psychological effects, but a central driver in the recent shift is economics. Segregation units can be two to three times as costly to build and, because of their extensive staffing requirements, to operate as conventional prisons are. They are an expense that many recession-plagued states can ill afford; Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois announced plans late last month to close the state’s supermax prison for budgetary reasons.
Some officials have also been persuaded by research suggesting that isolation is vastly overused and that it does little to reduce overall prison violence. Inmates kept in such conditions, most of whom will eventually be released, may be more dangerous when they emerge, studies suggest.
Christopher B. Epps, Mississippi’s commissioner of corrections, said he found his own views changing as he fought an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over conditions in the prison, which one former inmate described as “hell, an insane asylum.”
Mr. Epps said he started out believing that difficult inmates should be locked down as tightly as possible, for as long as possible.
“That was the culture, and I was part of it,” he said.
By the end of the process, he saw things differently and ordered the changes.
“If you treat people like animals, that’s exactly the way they’ll behave,” he now says.
A Very Costly Experiment
James F. Austin held up the file of an inmate in Unit 32 and posed a question to the staff members gathered in a conference room at the Mississippi Department of Corrections headquarters in Jackson.
“O.K., does this guy really need to be there?” he asked.
It was June 2007, and the department was under pressure to make court-ordered improvements to conditions at Unit 32, where violence was brewing. Dr. Austin, a prison consultant, had been called in by the state. As the discussion proceeded, the staff members were startled to discover that many inmates in Unit 32 had been sent there not because they were highly dangerous, but because they were a nuisance — they had disobeyed orders, had walked away from a minimum-security program or were low-level gang members with no history of causing trouble while incarcerated.
“He started saying, ‘You tell me what kind of person needs to be locked up,’ and it wasn’t near the numbers that we had,” said Emmitt L. Sparkman, deputy commissioner of corrections. By the time they were done, the group had determined that up to 80 percent of the 1,000 or more inmates at Unit 32 could probably be safely moved to less restrictive settings.
Like many such prisons, Mississippi’s supermax, opened in 1990, owed its existence to the fervor for tougher punishment that swept through the country in the 1980s and 1990s.
“There was an incredible explosion in the prison population coupled with a big infusion of gangs,” Dr. Austin said. “Riots were occurring. Prison officials were literally losing control.”
Some states built special units to isolate difficult prisoners — “the worst of the worst,” prison officials said — from the general prison population. Others retrofitted existing prisons or established smaller units within larger facilities. The federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., was locked down in 1983 after the murder of two prison guards, its inmates confined to cells 23 hours a day and then kept that way permanently. In 1989, California opened Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, a remote town near the Oregon border, specially designed to control inmates in conditions that minimize human interaction.
By 2005, 44 states had supermax prisons or their equivalents. In most, inmates were let out of their cells for only a few hours a week. They were fed through slots in their cell doors and were denied access to work programs or other rehabilitation efforts. If visitors were allowed, the interactions were conducted with no physical contact.
And while prisoners had previously been sent to isolation for 10 or perhaps 30 days as a temporary disciplinary measure, they were now often placed there indefinitely.
Asked to explain the purpose of such confinement, prison wardens surveyed in 2006 by Dan Mears, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, cited “increasing safety, order and control throughout prison systems and incapacitating violent or disruptive inmates.”
But beyond that, said Dr. Mears, who called the rise of supermax prisons “a big, very costly experiment,” the goals seemed murky. Who exactly were “the worst of the worst”? How many people really needed such harsh control, and for how long? And how should the effectiveness of the prisons be judged, especially when measured against the costs of building and operating them?
Dr. Mears said there were no clear answers; indeed, he said, it is virtually impossible to determine how many inmates are in supermax prisons in the United States because there is no national tracking system and because states differ widely in what they call segregation units. “I don’t know of any business that would do this, not something that costs this much, with so little evidence or clarity about what you’re getting,” Dr. Mears said.
With no precise definition of who belonged there, prison systems began to send people to segregation units who bore little resemblance to the serial killers or terrorists the public imagined filled such prisons.
“Certainly there are a small number of people who for a variety of reasons have to be maintained in a way that they don’t have access to other inmates,” said Chase Riveland, a former head of corrections in Colorado and Washington State who now serves as an expert witness in prison cases. “But those in most systems are pretty small numbers of people.”
Mr. Epps, who is president-elect of the American Correctional Association, likes to say prison officials started out isolating inmates they were scared of but ended up adding many they were simply “mad at.”
‘The Real Damage’
In 1831, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where prison officials were pioneering a novel rehabilitation method based on Quaker principles of reflection and penitence. They called it solitary confinement.
“Placed alone in view of his crime,” de Tocqueville wrote in a report to the French government, the prisoner “learns to hate it, and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.”
But for many prisoners, isolation was as likely to produce mental illness as remorse, and by the late 19th century, enthusiasm for the approach had flagged. In 1890, deciding the case of a death row inmate held in solitary confinement, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller of the Supreme Court wrote that many prisoners fell, “after even a short confinement, into a semifatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still committed suicide.”
It was the last time the nation’s highest court would address the psychological effects of solitary confinement directly. But lower courts in some states have acknowledged the stress that isolation puts on inmates who are already mentally ill, prohibiting their being placed in solitary except in urgent circumstances.
When Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and expert on the effects of solitary confinement, toured Unit 32 for the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, he found that about 100 of the more than 1,000 inmates there had serious mental illness, in many cases improperly diagnosed. Some were actively hallucinating. Others threw feces or urine at guards or howled in the night.
In turn, the mentally ill inmates were mistreated by corrections officers, who had little understanding of their condition, Dr. Kupers said.
In a report filed to the court, he described the case of James Coffield, a mentally ill prisoner who had demonstrated “a long history in Unit 32 of bizarre and disruptive behaviors” that prison psychiatrists “characterized as merely ‘manipulative’ and which security staff punished with increasingly harsh force, including repeated gassing with chemicals.”
Mr. Coffield eventually tried to hang himself but failed and ended up in a vegetative state.
Many states continue to house inmates with mental illness in isolation. Some inmates appear to function adequately in solitary confinement or even say they prefer it. But studies suggest that the rigid control, absence of normal human interaction and lack of stimulation imposed by prolonged isolation can cause a wide range of psychological symptoms including insomnia, withdrawal, rage and aggression, depression, hallucinations and thoughts of suicide, even in prisoners who are mentally healthy to begin with.
A study of prisoners in the Pelican Bay supermax, for example, found that almost all reported nervousness, anxiety, lethargy or other psychological complaints. Seventy percent said they felt themselves to be at risk of “impending nervous breakdown.”
“Worse still is the fact that for many of these men, the real damage only becomes apparent when they get out of this environment,” said Craig W. Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an expert on the effects of solitary confinement, who led the study.
In fact, some research has found that inmates released from supermax units are more likely to reoffend than comparable prisoners released from conventional maximum-security prisons, and that those crimes are more likely to be violent. In Colorado, said Tom Clements, executive director of corrections, it turned out that about 40 percent of inmates held in long-term isolation were being released directly to the community with no transition period.
The psychological research has drawn attention, not least from the international community. In a report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Juan E. Méndez, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture and other abuse, called for a ban on solitary confinement except in limited situations and singled out the United States for its reliance on the method.
In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights blocked the extradition of four terrorism suspects from Britain, saying it wanted to study whether imprisonment at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., violated a ban on inhuman or degrading treatment.
Yet for states, economic and practical arguments may prove more persuasive than humanitarian concerns.
“It’s just exceedingly expensive to hold someone in a segregation bed,” said Angela Browne, a senior fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit policy and research group, and head of the institute’s segregation reduction project, which works with states to find alternatives to segregation.
Several states, citing economic reasons, have converted supermax units to more conventional prisons, and a few have closed the prisons altogether. Unit 32 was closed in 2010. The increased costs are largely a result of the staffing required to deliver food and other services to cells and escort prisoners when they are let out.
In 2010, for example, Virginia reported that it cost $89.59 per day to keep a prisoner at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax unit with 399 employees, compared with $60.04 per day at Sussex II State Prison, a maximum-security facility that houses almost 500 more inmates but has a staff of 353.
Gambling on Change
Roy Harper, serving time for armed robbery, kidnapping and other charges, used to wake in his cell at Unit 32 seized with anxiety every morning. “You never know what the day is going to bring,” he said recently.
Sometimes it was flooding from malfunctioning toilets. Sometimes it was inmates setting fires or cutting themselves — two prisoners cut off their own testicles in the time he spent there, he said — and sometimes it was just the sense of isolation he felt, “like being alone in the world.”
Mr. Harper was a prisoner in Unit 32 from the day it opened to the day it closed, 20 years later. But the summer of 2007, he recalled, was worse than most. When the killings began, prison officials first cracked down, taking away the inmates’ fans — the only relief from summer temperatures that approached 100 degrees and, according to an environmental expert who filed a report on the conditions, could feel like 120 or more. They kept prisoners in their cells around the clock, not even allowing them out for exercise, he said.
Mr. Sparkman, the deputy corrections commissioner, viewed the situation as so critical that in July he moved from his home in Jackson to Parchman, where Unit 32 sits on the grounds of the state penitentiary. It was clear that a different approach was needed, he said: “What we were doing, the 23-hour lockdown, was not working.”
But the shift had to be made carefully.
“It was gradual, and it was very controlled,” Mr. Sparkman said. “We started out with one building, identifying those groups that we could let out, and we let some of them out. Some of them we were able to transfer completely out.”
A few guards rebelled at the new orders and resigned in protest. A few others were fired. But by the end of six months, most prisoners were spending hours a day outside their cells or had been moved to the general population of other prisons. A clothing warehouse was turned into a group dining hall, and a maintenance room was converted to an activities center. The basketball court filled with players.
Mr. Harper did not benefit immediately from the changes. He remained in 23-hour lockdown until he worked his way to greater privileges. But he was elated at what he saw, he said, with inmates “working again, walking without chains, going to the yard, going to the chow hall.”
The A.C.L.U. continues to monitor conditions in other prisons in the state. But Margaret Winter, the lead lawyer for the A.C.L.U. in its lawsuit over Unit 32, said she watched the transformation there in wonder, especially as two men who at the beginning of the process seemed deeply entrenched in their views shifted direction. The change, she said, was “stunning.”
Mr. Sparkman said the new approach went against everything he had been trained to do. “If you’d come to me in 2002 and told me I was going to do something like that, I’d say, ‘You don’t know me,’ ” he said. “I’d have probably locked them down for anything that squeaked.”
Mr. Epps looks back at the decision as a nerve-racking gamble.
“Was it scary? Absolutely,” he said. “But it worked out just fine. We didn’t have a single incident.”
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
Monday, 28 November 2011
Execution Day November 15, 2011
Days like today really suck. Few people can even begin to understand what all of us here on death row go through when they put one of us to death. A few hours ago the State of Florida put Oba Chandler to death by lethal injection. For those who even knew of this event, at best it amounted to nothing more than a few seconds on the sic o’ clock news, summarily reporting that at 4:00 PM this afternoon Oba Chandler was put to death at Florida State Prison. As the story was told on the news, they may have seen the white hears pulling out of the prison gate carrying his body back out to the real world, but that’s it.
For those of us here, it was an all day ritual that cumulated in the death of someone who lived among us for 17 years. Myself, I did not personally know Oba Chandler, as |I was never housed on the same tier as him. We live in a small world, but it is a methodically segregated world where each of us are continiously kept in individual solitary cages until they are ready to put us to death.
Unless you’re actually housed on the same floor in proximity of others, you may never cross paths with many others as the only other time you might meet others is in the death row yard or in the “visiting park” And in the 17 years Chandler spent on Florida’s death row he never once had a visit. Many of the guys back here never get a visit – nobody cares to come see them, not even when the state prepares to kill them. Prisons are full of tragic stories. Nobody should have to face death without someone there to reach out in compassion. In the weeks leading up to the death of Oba Chandler we heard many on the local news zealously arguing why simply putting a 65 year old man, who allegedly killed 3 people over 20 years ago, by lethal injection was too humane. These people wanted him to suffer, as in their opinion taking his life was not enough.
I honestly don’t know what to say about those who are compelled to advocate torturing a condemned man to death. For over a quarter century I have lived among those that society has labeled to be the worst of the worst, but when I hear these people talk I have to wonder who the real monsters are? Even if I am to assume that these condemned are actually guilty of whatever heinous crimes they were convicted of, I know that inflicting that same measure of death upon another would only make me just as much as a monster.
What I know is that Oba Chandler’s last days and hours were not easy. I cannot imagine how anyone of moral conscience could say that forcing a person to quite literally count down the final hours, then minutes until they are deliberately put to death is humane. I have been there myself comig within hours of being executed and although tat was now almost 22 years ago this month, I still have nightmares about my own death watch experience. ( see www.doinglifeondeathrow.blogspot.com )
I personally know a lot of the staff who work here and I was troubled by what I heard. Up until recently, when executions are scheduled the warden would do all he could to make it appear to be just another day. But not warden Singer. He apparently thrives on the whole ritual, making it an all day event that every prisoner here cannot ignore. Warden Singer wants us to know that it is a special day, that it will be a day that one of us will die. From early morning hours he has ordered the staff to wear their “dess uniform” (class A), which is only done on execution days. From breakfast through dinner the meal schedule is deliberately thrown off, breaking te normal routine and causing stress and anxiety among all prisoners.
Up until warden Singer took ver, previous wardens would at least try to show compassion to the condemned - but humanity comes from being humane, and just because you’re a man doesn’t make you humane. I was troubled when I was told that contrary to long standing tradition warden Singer did not allow Oba Chandler to have a last meal. Instead, all he got was a brown bag with a state peanut butter sandwich. If we can not find that measure of compassion and basic humanity when taking the life of another person then we really have to wonder who the real monsters are.
Michael Lambrix
For those of us here, it was an all day ritual that cumulated in the death of someone who lived among us for 17 years. Myself, I did not personally know Oba Chandler, as |I was never housed on the same tier as him. We live in a small world, but it is a methodically segregated world where each of us are continiously kept in individual solitary cages until they are ready to put us to death.
Unless you’re actually housed on the same floor in proximity of others, you may never cross paths with many others as the only other time you might meet others is in the death row yard or in the “visiting park” And in the 17 years Chandler spent on Florida’s death row he never once had a visit. Many of the guys back here never get a visit – nobody cares to come see them, not even when the state prepares to kill them. Prisons are full of tragic stories. Nobody should have to face death without someone there to reach out in compassion. In the weeks leading up to the death of Oba Chandler we heard many on the local news zealously arguing why simply putting a 65 year old man, who allegedly killed 3 people over 20 years ago, by lethal injection was too humane. These people wanted him to suffer, as in their opinion taking his life was not enough.
I honestly don’t know what to say about those who are compelled to advocate torturing a condemned man to death. For over a quarter century I have lived among those that society has labeled to be the worst of the worst, but when I hear these people talk I have to wonder who the real monsters are? Even if I am to assume that these condemned are actually guilty of whatever heinous crimes they were convicted of, I know that inflicting that same measure of death upon another would only make me just as much as a monster.
What I know is that Oba Chandler’s last days and hours were not easy. I cannot imagine how anyone of moral conscience could say that forcing a person to quite literally count down the final hours, then minutes until they are deliberately put to death is humane. I have been there myself comig within hours of being executed and although tat was now almost 22 years ago this month, I still have nightmares about my own death watch experience. ( see www.doinglifeondeathrow.blogspot.com )
I personally know a lot of the staff who work here and I was troubled by what I heard. Up until recently, when executions are scheduled the warden would do all he could to make it appear to be just another day. But not warden Singer. He apparently thrives on the whole ritual, making it an all day event that every prisoner here cannot ignore. Warden Singer wants us to know that it is a special day, that it will be a day that one of us will die. From early morning hours he has ordered the staff to wear their “dess uniform” (class A), which is only done on execution days. From breakfast through dinner the meal schedule is deliberately thrown off, breaking te normal routine and causing stress and anxiety among all prisoners.
Up until warden Singer took ver, previous wardens would at least try to show compassion to the condemned - but humanity comes from being humane, and just because you’re a man doesn’t make you humane. I was troubled when I was told that contrary to long standing tradition warden Singer did not allow Oba Chandler to have a last meal. Instead, all he got was a brown bag with a state peanut butter sandwich. If we can not find that measure of compassion and basic humanity when taking the life of another person then we really have to wonder who the real monsters are.
Michael Lambrix
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