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

family knew where I was being held. He looked incredulous when I told him I was innocent. I would see him about three more times over the course of the next year, and never for longer than thirty minutes at a time. You would think that if a guy were going on trial, and could very well be sentenced to death, that his lawyers would spend a lot of time preparing him for court. Mine did not. He didn’t tell me what he would be doing to prepare for the trial or give me any idea of what to expect or to do in the meantime. Perhaps this is how capital cases are handled, I thought. After all, this guy is a lawyer, so he must know what he’s doing, right? Surely they wouldn’t appoint me a lawyer who was ineffectual or uncaring. I had a lot to learn.
    The same court that was putting me on trial was also paying my lawyer. Look at it this way—are you going to employ someone who makes you look stupid and rubs your face in your own mistakes? No. You’re going to pay the guy who knows his place and sticks with the program. These guys get paid the same amount whether they win or lose, so why try too hard? Later, during the trial, when I asked why they didn’t push a point or challenge a ruling, they answered, “We have to work with the judge on a daily basis and don’t want to piss him off.”
    “Beyond a reasonable doubt” disappeared, and “Innocent until proven guilty” had left the building. Once they go through all that trouble to accuse and arrest you, you’re going down unless you’ve got a couple million dollars on hand to hire some real gunslingers to come to your aid. I was a fool back then, though. Still wet behind the ears. I thought the purpose of the justice system was to see that justice is done. That’s the way it works on TV. While I was counting on divine intervention, they were plotting my demise.
    The court system does not have the sane man’s mentality, even though it’s built on his back. It’s an insane snake of mammoth proportions, all tangled up in itself. It’s vicious and demented, biting any flesh it can reach. It’s so entangled and drunken that it will eventually strangle itself to death. There’s no way to convey its madness to anyone who hasn’t come into contact with its sluggish embrace. The people who operate within it have become as deranged as the lunatic snake itself, and justice is a foreign concept. They accept pointless and drawn-out procedures as religion. Nothing outrages them more than an idea that makes sense, and there’s nothing they’ll fight harder against. It’s no wonder there are so many jokes about lawyers. It’s only growing worse since the time of Kafka. There’s no way to understand it. It is a world without logic.
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    O nce I was released from the hospital and taken back to the jail, I was put in a padded cell with no clothes. I lived in only my underwear for days.
I’d heard of padded rooms all my life and imagined them to be like a giant pillow. It’s nothing of the sort. Everything is coated in a thick, greasy substance similar to rubber. More like a bicycle tire filled with cement than a pillow. Since I had no clothes, it was pretty chilly. One of the guys passing by slid some copies of
National Enquirer
under the door. I read them during the day and covered up with them at night. There was nothing else to do in there. It was just an empty room.
    There was a small opening in the door, and sometimes one of the other prisoners on the block would sit by the door and talk for a while. Everyone on the block, with one exception, was a young black guy who had already been to prison at least once in the past. The only exception was an old man in his fifties. His hair was as white as his skin was black, and all the other guys would abuse and take advantage of him. He was given absolutely no respect. He would sit by my door and cry for a half-hour straight at times, like I could help him somehow. He was there for having two children with his own daughter. He was their father and grandfather at the same time. He tried to stay quiet and out of everyone’s way, but it didn’t always work.
    I spent a week in the padded cell, talking to people through the opening in the door and freezing. Contrary to what I had been led to believe by movies and TV, none of the other prisoners seemed like hardened criminals who would kill their mothers for a nickel. Some of them were pretty funny. Every night after lockdown, someone would call to the guy in the