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

sooner or later a person’s physical appearance comes to resemble whatever is in their heart. I shudder to think what this guy’s true nature was. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking of him as “Piggy Little.”
    Piggy Little was an old-school asshole. You could tell he’d never succeeded at anything in his life, and he was out for revenge. He seemed to think his personal God-given mission in life was to harass and torment me in every way possible. He kept his hands on me at all times—he pushed, pulled, and jerked me around continuously.
    After ten or fifteen minutes, the chief inspector came into the office and sat behind a desk. His name was Gary Gitchell, and I’d seen him at the station a couple of times before, but I’d never had to deal with him. Gitchell was slightly more intelligent than his coworkers, which is most likely why he was the boss. He was no intellectual giant, but he didn’t have to be when compared with the rest.
    “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asked.
    I stared at him blankly, saying nothing.
    “You may as well tell me something now because your friend has already confessed. This is your only chance to make sure you don’t take all the blame.” I felt like I had somehow gotten lost in this conversation, or that I must be missing something, because it wasn’t making sense to me. Friend? Confessed?
    “Who are you talking about?” I asked. It was his turn to look at me blankly. I had no idea who he could be talking about, because I knew it couldn’t be Jason.
    He continued along the same lines with statements like “You should just tell us something, because your friend is already pointing the finger at you. If you want to make sure he doesn’t put everything on you, this is your only chance.” This went on for at least half an hour, Gitchell talking while Piggy glared. When he finally realized this wasn’t going anywhere, I was put inside a cell that wasn’t much larger than a phone booth. I was left there throughout the night, confined to a space so small I couldn’t even stretch my legs out. There was no water, no restroom, nothing. Every so often Gitchell came in and asked more of the same. At one point he came in and said, “One of the officers told me you wanted to talk to me.” I hadn’t even seen an officer in hours. “He lied,” I informed him. This continued until well after sunrise.
    When I wasn’t being questioned, I was trying to solve this mystery. Who could Gitchell be talking about? What had this friend said I had done? None of it made any sense.
    A cop came in and demanded my clothes. I’d never experienced anything like this in my life and thought him some sort of pervert, judging by the looks of him. I was given more clothes—an old, ragged police uniform that was at least twelve sizes too large. I had to gather the waist and tie it in a knot to keep the pants from falling down. This is how I made my first court appearance.
    At ten in the morning on June 4, I was arraigned. Jason, Jessie, and I were called separately. I was walked down a narrow hallway that suddenly opened up into a courtroom. I was stunned by the contrast. The jail itself was filthy and roach-infested to the point of making you not want to touch anything for fear of contamination. It was a place the general public was never meant to see. I’d grown used to that, so the dazzlingly clean and well-lit courtroom was jarring.
    I blinked like an animal pulled from its hole and looked around me. The place was packed from wall to wall, and the only faces I recognized were my mother’s and father’s. Everyone else in the place watched me with hatred in their eyes. Every few seconds someone popped up as though in a Whac-A-Mole game and snapped pictures of me. I hadn’t slept in about thirty-six hours, so everything had an even more surreal quality to it.
    The judge—his name was Rainey—began rambling while I leaned against a wall to keep my knees from buckling. Four cops kept their hands on me at all times, as if they expected me to break and run at any second. In the course of maybe ten minutes, I was charged with three counts of capital murder. I didn’t hear the charges outside the panic, fear, and exhaustion in my head. When the judge got to the “How do you plead?” part of the show, I said, “Not guilty.” I was following the instructions of a lawyer temporarily assigned to me, who’d told me minutes before the hearing what to say. My voice sounded