FLYING FREE

I watched the sadistic guards pit the two muscular inmates against one another in the metal cage. They danced around each other, occasionally sinking a blow, turning nose cartilage into jello and teeth into birds, trying to escape their metal confines. Other inmates gathered around and cheered while guards laughed viciously. This was one of the games played on death row.

One of the other little tricks was to tell a death row inmate that Mom was coming for a surprise visit. He would dress carefully before the guards made him strip down. “Oh, wait, we have the wrong Jones,” the guards would laugh to the crestfallen prisoner.

I am an innocent man, wrongly convicted of murder and have been in this hellhole for eighteen years. The longer I stay here, the more I learn the tricks of the trade. I even know how to kill someone. I can take an old magazine, remove the metal staple, then take a pair of underwear and use the elastic for a catapult. I can fortify the metal staple with cardboard ads from the magazine to make a dart. I then can dip the dart in a solution of nicotine and human feces which has percolated in a cup of urine over a period of days. I can then roll up the magazine and attach it to the bars with the underwear and retract the catapult, insert the deadly dart and shoot it right into your neck. You will die of sepsis in three days. I’m not saying I did this, just that I have the ability to do so!

I wasn’t always like this. I am afraid that I am losing my sense of humanity. I am losing the ability to mirror other people so I can understand what they think. Let me start at the beginning.

I was living in a house with my girlfriend, when the girl next door was murdered. I had nothing to do with it and the cops knew it full well. They were under pressure to solve the case and so they determined that I would be the fall guy. I was at work at the time of the murder and my fellow workers verified this. They had DNA from the murder scene but it was not mine. At this time, they didn’t have the expertise to determine whether the DNA was mine and hid it under a pile of files. I have to admit that I was not a perfect person. I did drugs and had a record for petty theft. But I was not a murderer!

Next, the police visited my girlfriend and told her they would take her kids and charge her as an accessory to murder if she did not finger me. She was terrified at the thought of losing them, so went along with whatever the shifty police claimed.

My parents did not have much money so I was assigned a lousy attorney who assumed I did it and didn’t give me a good defense. I now sit on death row, hoping the courts will agree to hear my appeal. My cell is dark with warm air filtering through the steel grate. I want desperately to maintain my sanity so spend hours reading, writing, listening to music and sports on my little radio.

This is a very scary place to be. One time, after last visits with friends and family, I was loaded cavalierly into the windowless death van and taken to the place where all executions were held. I was allowed to meet with spiritual counselors and to eat my last meal. There were only ten feet between me and the death chamber. Two hours from execution, it was postponed to allow testing of the DNA on all of the evidence.

I was so grateful to my sister who had gone to college and then law school in order to help me escape this injustice. Now that she was an attorney, she dedicated her life to my exoneration. Finally, she realized that it was too much for her and she contacted the Innocence Project who began working to see that the DNA was tested.

When the DNA proved that I was not the murderer, my case was appealed and finally, I was released to my exhilarating freedom. I am so grateful to my sister, my supporters and the Innocence Project but it has come too late for me. I have just been diagnosed with lung cancer and only have a few months to live. I try not to think of the past and focus on the stars in the midnight sky, bringing their light to so many.

I try to rationalize what I have been through. I think more and more about reincarnation – about being energy in a constant state of transformation. Death is not the end. Perhaps I will return as a sleek panther or a soaring eagle.

I think about parallel universes where I am not the person who was incarcerated on death row for a crime I did not commit. I am the person who has traveled and visited unknown places, rising to great heights – not the one that spent most of his life behind bars. As I approach my death, I am finally able to visualize flying free from my constraints into a connection with the forces of nature.