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

of my life I would never think of one without the other. Later in life those images began to feel like home to me and they brought me comfort. They became symbols of the purest kind of magick, and reminded me of a time when I was safe and loved. There’s something about it that can never be put into words, but the sight of a scarecrow now makes my heart swell. It makes me want to cry. The memory of those jovial October scarecrows on southerners’ front porches takes me to some other place. Now the scarecrow symbolizes a kind of purity.
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    E very so often, sitting here in solitary confinement, I need to become something else. I need to transform myself and gain a new perspective on reality. When I do, everything must change—emotions, reactions, body, consciousness, and energy patterns. I turned to Zen out of desperation. I had been through hell, traumatized, and sent to Death Row for a crime I did not commit. My anger and outrage were eating me alive. Hatred was growing in my heart because of the way I was being treated on a daily basis. The cleaner you are, the more light that can shine through you. Clear out all the bad, and the current will float through like light through a windowpane. It’s a process I have pushed myself through many times. Each day that I wake up means that I’m one day closer to new life. I can feel the years of accumulated programming and trauma melting away from my body, leaving behind a long-remembered cleanness. I usually have at least a vague idea of what I hope to accomplish or experience—create an art project, explore other realms of consciousness—but this time I’m blindly flowing to wherever the current carries me. I feel younger than I have in the past decade, and memories I had long forgotten are now once again within touching distance.
    In the movies it’s always the other prisoners you have to watch out for. In real life, it’s the guards and the administration. They go out of their way to make your life harder and more stressful than it already is, as if being on Death Row were not enough. They can send a man to prison for writing bad checks and then torment him there until he becomes a violent offender. I didn’t want these people to be able to change me, to touch me inside and turn me as rotten and stagnant as they were. I tried out just about every spiritual practice and meditative exercise that might help me to stay sane over the years.
    I’ve lost count of how many executions have taken place during my time served. It’s somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I believe. Some of those men I knew well and was close to. Others, I couldn’t stand the sight of. Still, I wasn’t happy to see any of them go the way they did.
    Many people rallied to Ju San’s cause, begging the state to spare his life, but in the end it did no good. He had committed such a heinous crime. Frankie Parker had been a brutal heroin addict who killed his former in-laws and held his ex-wife hostage in an Arkansas police station. Over the years he had become Ju San, an ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest with many friends and supporters. On the night of his execution in 1996, shortly after he was pronounced dead, his teacher and spiritual adviser was allowed to walk down Death Row and greet the convicts. It was the first time that a spiritual adviser had been permitted to speak to inmates after an execution. He told us what Frankie’s last word was, what he ate for a last meal, and he described his execution to us.
    I had been watching the news coverage of Ju San’s death when someone stepped in front of my door. I turned to see a little old bald man in a black robe and sandals, clutching a strand of prayer beads. He had these wild white eyebrows that were so out of control they looked like small horns. He practically had handlebar mustaches above his eyes. He seemed intense and concentrated as he introduced himself. A lot of Protestant preachers come through Death Row, but they all seem to think themselves better than us. You could tell it by the way most of them didn’t even bother to shake hands. Kobutsu wasn’t like that at all. He made direct, unwavering eye contact and seemed to be genuinely pleased to meet me. It had been his personal mission to do everything he could to help Ju San, and he was pretty torn up over the execution. Before he left, he said I should feel free to write to him at any time. I took him up on that offer.
    He and I began corresponding, and I