It’s every father’s dream to see his kids grow strong, but dads can always remember the times when their children were frail and weak. My son had been through a lot. His sickle-cell condition made for some difficult days. Yet I’d watched him grow and thrive despite the health challenges. I’d kept strong through most of the legal hurdles thrown my way. I’d watched stone-faced as a court sentenced me to death for a crime I didn’t commit. I’d even survived those first few days on death row, where loneliness and despair imprison men a second time. But when I learned that my son had been unconscious as a result of a stroke, I sobbed. It was a typical example of the pressures prison puts on families. Mom didn’t want to upset me and worried about my emotional state. She’d kept the news from me until he was doing better. Maybe she was doing me a favor, but she had to play both sides against the middle. Perhaps she was right. I couldn’t do anything for my son. Inside the walls of my cage, I was a helpless voyeur to the struggles of the child I cared for deeply.
The trauma at home drove me to work harder on my case. Death row can turn a man into a makeshift investigator and amateur lawyer in no time. I started researching the case law that was being cited in my appellate brief as well as the cases the state was using to keep me confined in this cage. I began writing letters to pen pal banks that had been established by different organizations asking for more pen friends to write. I wrote letters to the governor, to the president of the United States, and to the media. I created a nonprofit organization called Join Hands for Justice with my dear friend Isabelle Perin from France. The organization’s mission was to bring people together around the world, in an effort to make one loud voice for justice on my behalf.
I’d been assigned a new attorney, Virgie Mouton, an appellate defender I hadn’t met and someone, it turns out, I would never meet face-to-face in my life. She had worked as a briefing attorney with the First Court of Appeals in Houston and taught classes before heading to law school. In her letters to me, she struck me as prepared, but I wasn’t sure how much that mattered. While defendants and lawyers work closely during trial, appellate lawyers work in the quiet recesses of their offices, removed from the person whose case is their focus. They type away, making complex arguments about procedure, almost as if their true client is the legal process itself, as much or more than the individual case motivating the appeal. Her ultimate goal was to save my life, and because I’d been sentenced to death, my appeal would go directly to the Court of Criminal Appeals, the top criminal appellate court in Texas.
It took almost two years for the decision to be rendered by the high court, which came in late 1997. After resets and delays, false hopes and despair, the court did what it almost always does in these cases. It poured me out, affirming the lower trial court’s ruling. This set my case on a more difficult legal road, closing one of the few doors I’d had left.
One of the oddities of the death penalty system is that the courts run responsibility through many hands before finally killing the condemned. It’s an excruciating process where hope waxes and wanes for the accused. I was in the early part of my appellate journey in 1997, and soon Virgie’s efforts were buttressed by a newly minted writ lawyer named Pat McCann, who came on to lead the writ effort and inject new eyes and enthusiasm into my team. Pat was fresh out of law school and full of the sort of exuberance only found in those brand-new lawyers just getting started. He hadn’t yet been crushed by the weight of disappointment and disillusionment that seeps into most appellate lawyers over time. In Texas, around 2 percent of direct appeals are granted, and habeas corpus writs are granted just as rarely. Habeas corpus is the most important step in the appeals process. This is the first and only appeal that allows evidence from outside the record to argue the claims. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 streamlined the appellate process so the inmate would only get “one bite of the apple.” Once you have filed the habeas writ, it sets the stage for the rest of the process. The first time I met Pat, who was charged with preparing this all-important writ, I could tell he’d spent some time with my case file.
“I think we’ve got a real chance here,” Pat told me, his investigator flanking him at the Ellis Unit. “No promises, but I might be able to get you out in about a year.” I didn’t know how to judge that statement. I wanted to believe it fully, of course, but how could I know whether this was just another false turn in an excruciating process that offered very few true promises?
That qualifies as high optimism for those who work on capital appeals. In a way, Pat’s excitement was welcomed. I knew better, of course. I’d been poured out more times than I could count by jurors and jurists from Austin to Angleton. It struck me that nothing would be easy. But the fight can only be fought when there’s hope powering the process. Pat helped me take the first steps in a journey that took far longer than the year he’d proposed. Still, I sensed that Pat wasn’t ready to do it on his own. No one on the runs had heard of him. One of the curiosities of death row is that you sometimes take advice from people with names like Charlie Machete, inmates without much book sense but with more death penalty experience than a whole study group of third-year law students. Charlie didn’t know Pat, and he suggested that I broaden my team. After all, Bill Clinton had just pushed through Congress the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act amid a rise of public consciousness in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings. The law purported to make the appeals process “more efficient and streamlined.” Those words sounded good to the public and policymakers, but for men on death row like me, they read more like justifications for removing the governor from Texas’s already speedy death penalty machine. Before, there were multiple stages of appeal, including the writ, the appeals courts, and the governor’s office. Now the new law cut out some of those options, and that was a scary new development in an already intimidating process. My state habeas appeal would be critically important for setting the tenor of my future defense.
Nick Bell, my first male pen pal, who had reached out to me with a letter on his own, had been watching my case from Switzerland, writing occasionally and helping to build international awareness. My growing network of European friends and allies were spreading the word around their countries by holding meetings, having fund-raisers, and writing to their own governments about my case. European media started to come over for interviews. European schoolkids started to write to me too; they’d ask a thousand questions about me and the death penalty, and then write a paper about it for class. Europe was learning about my case through this network of allies. Nick was visiting in 1997 when Pat joined my case, and, like Charlie, he was convinced that I needed a broader legal team with more experience. He sought out Roy Greenwood, a veteran capital defense lawyer who had an understanding of the process and the politics. Roy agreed to consult on my case, offering his assistance to Pat along the way as he filed my habeas corpus appeal in the spring of 1998. The working relationship was far from smooth. Attorneys have egos and different styles. Even those who mean well might not mesh together. On death row, I’d receive word that my team wasn’t communicating well. In a time of quiet desperation, and with the odds already long, I needed teammates on the same page.
As the days crept by, a war was ravaging Eastern Europe. Pat, a US Navy reservist, got the call back to service near the end of 1999. He withdrew from my case right away, in order to trade one duty for another, leaving the ravaged masses at Ellis Unit for the battle-torn streets of Bosnia. His exit left Roy Greenwood free to take my case, and he did, becoming my attorney of record, and guiding the case through the appellate process for the long years that followed.
Throughout those years, I would get to know more and more about the inner workings of death row. In addition to my friends abroad, I began to make more friends in prison, throwing myself into the daily activities and board games with the other guys.
My reading habits picked up, too, because I now had access to more books. I would read anything from
novels to the teachings of Siddha Yoga. I gained a thirst for knowledge, and I knew that books would be the way to quench it. I also started writing down events that were taking place in my life on the row. I wanted to make sure that if the state killed me for a crime I didn’t commit, I would at least be able to leave my thoughts about it all behind me in my notes. I began to realize, too, that writing allowed me to vent and to escape my reality for a few hours at a time. So I would write every day, whether it was notes to myself about what was going on around me, or letters to my friends across the world. Death row was often quiet at night. Men would spend hours on their typewriters writing letters asking for someone to help save their lives. There was a little metal desktop that stuck out of the wall right beside my bunk. We were allowed to keep our radio or hot pot on top of it. It was also our dinner table, as well as our desk to write letters or for reading. I started the book that you are holding in your hands at that table, where the words on these pages first flowed out of me and into my personal journal. I always tuned my radio to jazz music on Sunny 99.1 FM while I wrote. It was hard for me to get in a writing mode with music that had lyrics; I would end up singing along with the radio. Jazz allowed me to relax and just write as I listened clearly to my own thoughts, with the melodies serving as a gentle layer around me, in which I could enter my own little cocoon. Everything and anything that I would write in my journal or letters would be the truth. I wanted to make sure that if my journal and letters were stolen or confiscated by the officers for whatever reason, they would have the truth about my life in their possession. Everyone on death row had his own story to tell, so it was quite natural to be up late at night and hear other typewriters making the same zinging noises as my own. Most nights I was up reading or writing until they started serving breakfast at 3 a.m., and most of the time I passed on breakfast to continue doing what I was doing. Breakfast wasn’t worth breaking a rhythm that could possibly help save my life, or at the very least, take my mind away from that awful place.
I also began paying attention to news about the criminal justice system. I became interested in politics and followed all the top stories of the day, as much as I could through the newspapers and radio. I started becoming more conscious of how the death penalty functioned within US society. The state had awakened a calling, a sense of advocacy that I didn’t know had existed inside of me. I could no longer just wish to free myself from the nightmare that I was experiencing; my growing disdain for the prison system was igniting a new fire within my heart. I began to realize that I had to develop my voice regarding these daily indignities toward people, each one of them a human being, and each person suffering in ways I didn’t think our society should allow. I witnessed and experienced inhumanity every day behind the prison walls, and I was motivated to become a change agent.
I eventually started working as a trusty on another wing, one that allowed inmates to be out of their cells all day. There, I could talk to the inmates assembled in the dayroom playing board games, watching TV, or playing sports. Marijuana was plentiful there. Most of the female officers usually worked the wings on the program, and that led to personal friendships and sometimes more. The line between inmates and officers had been crossed, and death row was alive.
I had logged three years on the work program when one night changed death row forever. It was November 1998, in the days approaching Thanksgiving. The holidays always bring a sort of insanity to bear. Some guys like to forget. Others dip deeper into their own personal dungeons. That year, seven men decided it was time to leave death row. I didn’t know of the plans. I only learned of the great escape when an officer told me that seven men had gone missing, much to the consternation of the prison personnel and the surrounding community. I found out the next morning that the men had colored their clothes to fit in with their surroundings. They used cardboard to protect themselves from the harshness of razor wire that sat atop the prison fences. They scurried out as officers took notice. Those officers fired shots. Six of the seven lay down, content to live on death row a little longer. One kept running. Martin Gurule must have figured that he was going to die anyway, so why not take a chance? He ran right toward the small river that served as a boundary for the prison. Ten days later, the authorities found his body floating in the river. He’d been shot, and eventually drowned.
Things changed on death row after that day. The work program was suspended. Men were kept in their cages for more hours out of the day. The recreation program, which had allowed for basketball games, turned to something more sinister. All of a sudden, men were expected to fulfill their physical needs simply by walking around a small outdoor area. Even the artists took a hit. Because the escapees had used art supplies to obscure their clothing and scale the fences, death row became an art-supply-free zone.
The changes were in some ways a blessing and other ways a curse. I moved again, this time to a unit with mesh supporting the cage bars. I wasn’t planning on escaping, but the mesh made it difficult to see the television. The near-constant headaches prompted me to watch less television and write more letters to my many loyal friends overseas. On the flip side, the move put me back into contact with Robert Carter, who had been living in a different wing of the prison since his sentencing. Suddenly, we were in the same rec group, forced to walk around in close proximity for the first time since he’d lied on me in court.
Our encounter was tense. Carter stood alone by a metal table. I walked up to him without a plan. Men had approached me before, asking if I wanted them to hurt Carter on my behalf. I didn’t want that, and I wasn’t after violence or some kind of revenge. Really, I had the unrelenting compulsion to figure out what had gone through his mind. Before I could speak, he began apologizing. He said that he’d always told the district attorney that I was innocent, but Sebesta had continued to threaten new charges against his wife, Cookie. He told me what I already knew: Charles Sebesta never wanted the truth. I had a choice to make. Bitterness is a heavy weight to bear, and on death row, I carried enough with me already. I forgave Carter then and there. We had been on death row for about four years together, but we’d never been around each other. I think I might have seen him in passing about twice since first arriving. When I was in Carter’s presence, the strange thing is that I couldn’t even be mad at him at this point. I had seen so much injustice in the system, that for me it had become more than about Robert Carter’s lie. I was able to forgive Carter that day because I understood the games that Sebesta had played on him with his wife. Holding an indictment over her head with no evidence to support it was the D.A.’s tactical threat to make sure Carter maintained his lie about me.
Still, while I might have been forgiving, I was human. When I opened my mouth and started talking to Carter at that table, it took everything in me not to ask him if he in fact did the crime. I was scared to know, but I wondered how much of all of this was a lie. I didn’t ask because I couldn’t be in his presence that long to hold a conversation. I told Carter that the rec group wouldn’t be big enough for the two of us. He needed to find another group.
Carter understood. He walked directly to the gate and told the officer there that his own lies had landed a fellow rec group member on death row for no good reason. I’m not sure what the officers thought I would do. Surely, after seeing men beat other men senseless for something like this or for no reason at all, they expected me to take out some anger on Carter. The officers removed him immediately. He was placed in a different wing of the row by the end of the day, and I never saw him again. The last time I had heard about him was when someone told me about the dying declaration he made on the gurney trying to right a wrong. Before taking his last breath, he was telling everyone who would listen that he had lied on me. I thought it was the least that he could do.
MARCH 2000:
MORE SECURITY AND LESS FREEDOM ON TERRELL UNIT
THE ATTEMPTED ESCAPE IN 1998 was the first time a death row inmate had successfully conquered the walls of a prison since a member of Bonni
e and Clyde’s gang did it in 1934. Naturally, the whole ordeal had legislators and local citizens alike on edge. We heard rumors for weeks that death row would be moved from Ellis to a more serious maximum-security prison. The early reports weren’t flattering. Terrell Unit would be our future home. Men could expect less freedom, if that was even possible.
Officers didn’t dare move every prisoner at once. They started by moving the men with poor disciplinary records. It took many months before they got around to the rest of us. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I grew ill on the night before the move, and in typical death row fashion, there was no doctor to be found. My temperature rose well above 100 degrees as the nurse sent me away with nothing more than ibuprofen. It was precisely the sort of mood I didn’t want to be in when officers came to execute the standard moving routine.
Ceremonial stripping precedes any move on the row. We were searched, then handed only a pair of boxers and some socks. Each man wore handcuffs and lined up single-file down the hallway. Inmates moved on a human conveyor belt, shuttled onto the back porch for further strip searches by correctional officers and Texas Rangers. I wondered whether my price was going up or down on the auction block every time I spread my cheeks, raised my feet, stuck out my tongue, or touched my toes.
Infinite Hope Page 17
