Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

you were just talking to a couple of days before is now gone forever. These are men you’ve lived with for years, yet you don’t even get to attend the funeral, so there’s no sense of closure. The preachers all get a disgusting gleam in their eyes when an execution is at hand. They hover around the condemned man’s cell like flies, threatening him with damnation unless he buys the mentality they’re selling. They don’t have time for you unless you’re about to die. They never even stop to say hello until that point. Many men vow that they’ll verbally abuse them if they hang around their cells when execution is imminent. The sentiment is “You had no time for me when I was living. Now that I’m dying I have no time for you.”
    The worst part of the weeks preceding an execution is the guards. You can tell they get off on it, because it adds a little excitement to their jobs. A spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Correction will go on television to give a speech about how hard it is on them, but it’s nothing more than words to convince a gullible public how humane they are here. The truth is that the guards stand around and tell jokes about it before and afterward. They’ll actually be friendly to the condemned man for a few days before the execution, even if they’ve abused and neglected him up until then. This is done out of sheer morbidity. They want to be able to tell others that they had a conversation with the dead man.
    Some of the prisoners can’t remember what you said to them or what they said to you just hours before. If you remind them, they will argue with you that such a conversation never took place. Others are grown men in their thirties who still behave like mean-spirited teenagers. Their mental development (what little there was) stopped once they began abusing drugs and alcohol.
    To say that someone can’t hold their mud is prison slang for anal leakage. With that in mind I leave it to you to figure out how an inmate earned the name “Mudpie.” Mudpie could be no more oblivious to reality than if he walked around with a bag on his head. His greatest talent is lying to himself, and he makes it his life’s work to distort every piece of information that passes through his senses. If self-deception were an art, Mudpie would be a master. He’s the only person who can’t see through his own smoke screen. He says things that leave everyone staring at him in disbelief.
    An example of his self-deception would be his addictions. Mudpie would sell his soul for cigarettes or marijuana. Anytime he knows someone in the barracks has some, he goes into a frenzy. He’ll beg from everyone and sell everything he owns to get it. He smokes so much that everything in his cell stinks of it. I once overheard him tell his father that he was soon going to be executed just so his father would send him money. It worked the first time, but the second time he tried it, his father called Mudpie’s lawyer and found out the truth—that Mudpie was nowhere near an execution date. Who in their right mind would fake their death for cigarettes? Ah, but Mudpie becomes very angry when you call him an addict and a dope fiend, and constantly informs people that he has “quit.” What that means is that he can’t find any right then. When called upon to explain why his father no longer speaks to him, he insists it’s because he broke off contact with his family so they wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. And he
forces
himself to believe it. He doesn’t see the contradiction in his actions—that if he truly didn’t want to worry his family he would not have called them with news of a nonexistent execution date.
    Mudpie has been known to launch into a sermon about how he doesn’t believe in gratuitous violence, after which he threatens to kill another inmate for trying to change the channel on the television. At least once a day he’ll condemn someone for something he himself did the day before. He can be quite interesting to watch. I’ll see him screw something up, then tell myself, “There’s no way in hell he can put a spin on that. He’ll
have
to live up to it.” I’m wrong every time. He always pulls some trick out of his bag. It seems he would learn from his mistakes, but he never does. He brings a world of trouble upon himself time after time, and ignores the pattern. I’ve become convinced that this is now a necessity, because he’d probably commit suicide if forced to take a