Confessions of an Innocent Man

by David R. Dow

  • • •

  Nights and days passed without signification. If the leaves changed color, I didn’t know. You can tell the season from the angle the sun shines, but only if you can see the sunlight. For long stretches of time the cell block was so hot my thin mattress stayed damp and moldy. Then for a week it would be so cold you could see your breath. For a month it would be comfortable. And then it would again be hot. East Texas has its own seasons.

  We measured our lives not by the month, but by what sport was being played. Guys bet commissary items on basketball games, then turned to baseball, and football after that. People wouldn’t say, I got a date in August; they’d say, I’m gonna miss the NFL. After his visit from the warden, Águila said to me, Shit, Inocente, I’m gonna miss the World Cup. Como siempre, mi corazón dice México, but the boys just don’t have it this year. So go on ahead and bet the bank on Italy, you feel me? Italy squeaked by France in the finals of that year’s cup, winning five to three on penalty kicks after extra time ended in a one-to-one tie.

  My lawyers wrote me regularly and came to visit once a month even though they had no news. Over time these visits grew less awkward. I learned one of the lawyers on my team, Luther, had been a US Marine, and the other, Laura, a professional musician. Sargent told me my lead lawyer, Olvido, was filthy rich from being a big-shot corporate lawyer before she started representing us inmates. I asked Sargent if he knew why she had made the trade. He said, Is it sexist to say she might have herself a bit of a Jesus complex?

  During our third meeting Olvido said, It’s a myth that most guys on death row claim to be innocent. I’ve been doing this work many years and you’re just the second one.

  I had said, I am innocent.

  She said, I know you are. And that’s the reason I have to ask you a really hard question.

  Here’s what she explained: Lawyers representing death row inmates raise two broad kinds of challenges. One attacks the jury’s guilty verdict. The other attacks the death sentence. For nearly all her clients, the goal was to win the second claim, and the attempt to undermine the verdict was designed mostly to gain leverage in avoiding an execution. And that strategy appealed to her clients, because all they wanted was a life sentence instead of being put to death. She said, My clients tell me all they want is to see their families and die of a heart attack playing handball with the guys. But my case presented an unusual problem, because I did not want to spend my life in prison for a crime I did not do. The dilemma my lawyers faced was that if they decided to raise both kinds of challenges, a court might be just worried enough about my guilt that it would grant me relief from my sentence. She said, That way, in case you are guilty, the judge is not responsible for putting a murderer back on the street, but if it turns out you didn’t do it, the judge has not allowed the execution of an innocent man. I said, That makes no sense. She said, Legally that’s true, but it might make emotional sense. How would you like to order the execution of somebody who didn’t commit a crime?

  She said, So what I need to know is whether you want to run the risk that the judge decides to split the baby by leaving your guilty verdict intact but throwing out the death sentence.

  I said, No way. Either you hit a grand slam or you strike out. I’m not playing for a single.

  She said, I’m not just covering my ass here, but I have to make sure you realize this is a decision you can’t take back.

  I tried to imagine living in prison for forty years. Across the visiting area an Asian inmate was talking on the phone to a petite woman bouncing two toddlers on her knees. Olvido turned around, saw what I was looking at, then turned back. Maybe being alive would be better than being dead, even if it meant living like an animal in a poorly run zoo. I wondered whether those two Asian kids would be able to remember whether they ever touched their dad.

  She said, If you decide now not to raise certain issues, I don’t get to raise them later. You’d be betting your life on the one issue, and I have to tell you it’s much harder for a man to prove he’s not guilty than it is for the government to send someone who’s innocent to death row.

  I said, This is an easy call for me.

  She said, It’s not for me.

  I had said, But I get to make the decision, right?

  She said, Yes, you do.

  I said, Then prove I’m innocent. If you can’t, let them kill me.

  I stood up and touched my fist to the glass. I said, I’m sorry to lay this on you, and I meant it. Still, on the walk back to my cell, I felt the inner calm that accompanies the certainty you’ve made the absolutely right call.

  * * *

  • • •

  Every other month, a new inmate would arrive. Every three weeks, one would depart. We’d always be on lockdown on execution day. I’d lie on my bunk and listen to a radio show from Houston that counted down the minutes to the execution, and once the time of death was announced, the host would play a tape of a recording he had made with the inmate earlier that week. They sounded on tape just the way they had in real life. The host of the show would talk to the guys about whether they were scared, what their lives had been like, and what they had done to get here. It was the first time I knew the details of the murders these friends of mine had committed.

  The morning after one of these shows, I had said to Sargent, I know this violates the inmate code, but can I ask you why you’re here? I pestered Águila until he told me his story.

  Sargent said, Molina.

  I said, Yeah, Molina. Either way, it bothers me when I listen to Ray on the radio on execution days and hear about it. It makes me want to replay every conversation I had with the guy and try to reinterpret it, or understand it in a different way. Does that make sense?

  Sargent said, Inocente, you cain’t be all mawkish and shit in here.

  But he told me anyway. He was a drug dealer. He said he had killed more people than the police gave him credit for. He wasn’t bragging. He said, Most of them deserved it.

  I said, Most?

  He said, Yeah, most.

  It’s unusual for a drug dealer to end up on death row for killing another drug dealer, but that’s not why Sargent was here. He had also killed his girlfriend’s mother and sister. He whispered when he told me. I asked him why.

  He said, I ain’t got no fuckin’ clue. How messed up is that?

  He said, I hate rememberin’ that day. Matter a fact, I started tryin’ to forget as soon as I booked on outta that house. They was good people. I don’t hate myself like a lot a the brothers in here, but I do hate some a the things I done.

  He said, I got a daughter who don’t talk to me. No matter how they kill me, it ain’t gonna hurt more than that.

  If I’d met Sargent anywhere else we’d have passed without exchanging a word. I probably would have been scared of him. Same goes for Águila. We definitely would not have been friends. But here, inside, Sargent and I had two things in common. We had the same lawyer, and we liked each other.

  I was getting six or eight letters a week from people in Europe, mostly women. Most of the guys on the row had one or two pen pals, but I was as famous as Ted Bundy, according to Sargent, so my mail never stopped. Some of the women sent revealing photos of themselves, but I never saw them. By the time the letters reached me, some guard was using them as pinups. I threw all the letters away.

  Sargent said, Cruel not to write ’em back.

  I said, More cruel to answer.

  He said, True that, Inocente.

  One woman from Hungary wrote me three months after her first unanswered letter arrived and said, fuck you you airogant prix. I new you murdered of your wife. Someone from Holland sent Bible verses with hand-drawn illustrations. I showed Sargent a pencil sketch of Jesus walking across the Sea of Galilee, and he asked if he could have it. A woman from England wrote me a letter every week for almost three years. She wrote in long looping script
on paper too thick to fold. The letters were filled with mundane details of her life—what she had cooked for dinner, what she had watched on TV, what was happening in the world of politics, what her new puppy had chewed up. I marveled at her tenacity, but still I wrote no reply. A month had passed without my hearing from her when I received another letter on the same thick stationery, this one written by the woman’s grown-up daughter. She was writing to let me know her mother had passed away. She asked how she could transfer to my prison ledger a few hundred pounds her mother had left to me. It was the only letter I answered. I wrote, Your mother made my days here immeasurably brighter. I will miss our correspondence dearly. I wish you and your family the very best, and I gave her instructions for adding money to a numbered account she didn’t know belonged to Sargent, not to me.

  Sleep was how I passed time. Outside prison, I slept like a normal person. Here, I sometimes slept fourteen hours a day. I took up yoga. I ordered volumes of poetry and spent time working on my memory. It could take me an entire day to learn a single sonnet. I memorized pi to seventy-three places. I did these things for myself, to keep my brain and body from atrophy, because I intended to get out of here. I did not know how or when, but I knew. I was not going to die in prison.

  Other things I did as a service. I wrote a cookbook of dishes inmates could build from items in the commissary, using their hot plates to prepare: potato-chip-crusted hot dogs atop a frijoles-and-salsa reduction; kung pao tuna salad with Asian vinaigrette (basically, bottled Italian dressing spiked with soy sauce); cheddar-stuffed turkey cutlets (made by placing shredded cheddar between double slices of packaged turkey and browning on the hot plate). The recipes were passed along the row by kite and word of mouth. The friendly guards started calling me Inmate Chef. Sargent asked me if I could come up with a soul-food recipe, so I dreamed up smothered pork chop, which consisted of a ham steak cooked with spinach leaves (from the spinach salad), braised with juice from squeezing cherry tomatoes.

  It occurred to me a life sentence might not be that bad. And I hated myself for having the thought.

  Day 1,067: My lawyers’ prediction about how long the legal proceedings would take was proving astonishingly accurate. They came by to tell me the state court had ruled against me, finding the evidence sufficient to support my guilt.

  I said, What evidence?

  Olvido said, Physical evidence placing you at the murder scene.

  I said, But I lived there.

  Olvido said, I know.

  They told me I was entitled to a new lawyer for federal court, and the new lawyer could try to raise issues they had not raised by arguing they had been incompetent, and it had been a mistake not to challenge the death sentence.

  I said, You did what I asked you to do. I want you all to keep being my lawyers. Is that allowed?

  Olvido told me it was, and my team got up to leave. Luther still walked erect, but Olvido and Laura appeared deflated, like their clothes were two sizes too large. I banged on the glass and Olvido turned back around and picked up the phone.

  I said, When you’re relying on me to lift your spirits, you might as well be flying on a plane with a pilot who’s blind. But I still want to make sure you know how much I appreciate you. It’s not your fault I’m here. Everybody here knows, including me, if you can’t win, it means nobody can. Capiche?

  I touched my hand to the glass.

  She said, Mr. Zhettah, you’re a prince.

  I said, I asked you to please call me Rafael.

  She said, Yes, you did. Rafael, you are a prince.

  She smiled, and I smiled in return.

  On the walk back to my cell, I decided to surrender.

  * * *

  • • •

  Before they left, my lawyers gave me a copy of the court’s ruling. The decision against me had not been unanimous. One judge said in his view, the evidence used to convict was inadequate. There had been no eyewitnesses. There was no physical evidence. I even had an alibi. All indications were Tieresse and I had a warm and loving marriage. Yes there was philandery, the judge wrote, but if sexual promiscuity were proof of murder, Lord Byron himself would have stood trial. Two other judges disagreed. One said the absence of evidence proved only that I was a cold and calculating planner. The other said I would have known when Tieresse was going to be alone, how to turn off the alarm, and how much time I would have to clean up the scene. Sometimes, she wrote, the obvious suspect is obvious precisely because he is guilty.

  When the Mexican agents shot and killed my father, I was only a college freshman, so I never got to see him age. If my natural life span was going to be roughly the same as his, I had no way of knowing what that number was. But that night, two weeks after my forty-second birthday, I sat on my bunk, convinced I had passed my life’s halfway point, and I sobbed. I heard Sargent saying, Talk to me, Inocente. But I was too deep in my hole. I said, Maybe later. I’m not ready yet.

  Early the next morning, though, when I should have been getting breakfast, a transport team showed up and told me to pack my things. They moved me off B-pod at dawn. The COs do that, move people around a lot, and at random. Team shows up at your door, says pack your house, links you up, and puts you someplace else. Supposedly it’s for security, but that’s BS. It’s just a way for the guards to harass the inmates. Being moved with no warning bothers some guys. They get to know their neighbors, and then they’re not neighbors anymore; they fix up their cell, get it all clean and arranged, then they have to start over. It didn’t bother me, though. I didn’t want to feel comfortable here. Everything they could do to make my life miserable I welcomed. The team showed up, and I said, Buenos días, jefe. What took y’all so long?

  Sargent heard me packing up. I told him about what my lawyers had said. He said, Did you know Gandhi was against hunger strikes?

  I said, What are you talking about?

  He said, Gandhi thought people who went on hunger strikes in prison were attempting to coerce the jailers to improve conditions or release them early. He was against any kind of coercion.

  I said, So I should walk to the gurney instead of making them carry me?

  Sargent said, Shit, Inocente, you’re like some motherfuckin’ logician. Hell no, you shouldn’t walk. What I’m sayin’ is the only thing you can control is whether you’re true to yourself, you feel me?

  I said, Yeah I do. Thanks, Sargent.

  He said, Peace, brother. Catch up with you later when the Brownshirts here move us again.

  * * *

  • • •

  They took me to D-pod. Looking back, I believe it was D-pod that turned me into who I am today. It obliterated the categories I had used to make sense of the world. Until then, I was just a visitor here. I didn’t belong. But on D-pod, the last vestige of the chef and husband and friend I had been were erased, and I became someone whose entire identity is his tribe.

  I wanted to ask Sargent whether that was Gandhi’s point, but Sargent, of course, wasn’t here. I missed him already. I missed Águila too.

  When Lilac left me in my new cell, she handed me earplugs, and soon I learned why. At nine that night, the guy next door started talking in tongues. I hollered, Kindly keep it down, brother, and he responded with a series of clicks I didn’t understand. I inserted the earplugs and went to sleep. I woke the next morning when the trustee passing out breakfast sounded an alarm. Moments later, three helmeted COs rushed into my neighbor’s cell. He’d used a cereal spoon to gouge out his one good eye, then he ate it. They took him by helicopter to a psychiatric unit an hour south of Houston, and they told the rest of us we’d be on lockdown for a week.

  Later that day, the oldest guy on the row died in his sleep. He was a seventy-four-year-old white guy from Dallas who’d been confined to a wheelchair since having a stroke two years before. When they rolled him to the dayroom he cradled a canister of oxygen in his lap. The captain announce
d lockdown would last an additional seven days.

  A guy who called himself Preacher Bob grew agitated. He told the captain even God had spared the righteous before He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The captain said, Whatever, inmate, and walked away. Preacher Bob head butted his door and launched into an incoherent sermon that lasted more than seven hours. Despite my earplugs, his ranting kept me awake all night. I sent him a kite that said, Fidel Castro’s rambling speeches are shorter than your mumbo jumbo. How about at least turning down the volume so we can get some sleep? He wrote back and said, Who’s that, the Mexican guy on A-pod?

  I decided to fast for a week just to see if the guards would notice. I don’t know how much weight I lost, it’s not like we can just step on a scale, but my boxer shorts were suddenly too large, and I could see my hip bones and count my ribs. Nobody said a word. I opened a book Sargent had given me by someone named Beccaria, but my mind wandered, and I couldn’t remember what I’d read. On the eighth day of lockdown I decided not to shave. When I had the beginnings of a beard, the CO ordered me to get rid of it. I told him I didn’t have a razor. He brought me one that afternoon and ordered me again to lose the beard. I ignored him. He said, Last warning, inmate. Do it now. I felt him watching me. I heard Preacher Bob quoting Jeremiah. Do not be afraid of them. They will fight against you but not overcome you, for I shall rescue you. I rubbed my eyes so hard I could see floaters. It got very quiet. I looked out my cell and saw three guards wearing helmets and a fourth holding a video camera, a clipboard, and a can that looked like it held bug spray. I said, Is there an issue here? and then I thought to myself, So this is how it happens. One of them opened the beanhole and hit me with a burst of tear gas mixed with Mace. Water poured from my eyes and I felt bile rise in my throat. I dry heaved. Someone shouted to move away from the door, and then the beanhole opened again and a second stream hit me on my cheek. I heard a guard say, Three, two, one, then the door banged open and the three helmeted COs crashed in and threw me to the floor. I was on my stomach, struggling to get a breath. I felt a knee in my back and a sharp edge where my front tooth had broken. They tore off my jumpsuit and cuffed my hands, then hustled me to another cage with a drain in the floor. A female guard blasted me with a fire hose while the CO with the video camera continued to record. The CO who had ordered me to shave said, Last warning means last warning, inmate. Still cuffed, and now naked and dripping wet, I sat on my ass in the detox cage until two new COs arrived and marched me to a cell on the upper floor. The door slid shut behind me and I said, Hey, where’s my stuff? The mattress had no sheets and I had no clothes. I sat on the floor and hugged my knees to my chest, trying to get warm.