Jean Trounstine : After 18 Years on Death Row

Damien Echols. Photo by Larry D. Moore / Wikimedia Commons.

Damien Echols:
After 18 years on Death Row

Being on death row and in solitary confinement has got to be one of the most inhumane experiences we put prisoners through -- and we justify it by calling them 'the most dangerous prisoners alive.' But what of those who later turn out to be innocent?

By Jean Trounstine / The Rag Blog / February 20, 2013

Texas carried out the most executions of any state in 2012 -- 15 -- with Arizona, Oklahoma, and Mississippi tying for second place at six apiece. As of May 2012, the total number of Texas prisoners in administrative segregation, also known as solitary confinement, totaled 8,407.

Death row and solitary, a brutal combination. Twenty-three out of 24 hours locked in a small cell with a cot and a toilet. Barely any human contact. Knowing you’re going to die.

Two weeks ago, I went to an event at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, to hear Damien Echols talk about his 18+ years in solitary confinement. Echols is one of the so-called "West Memphis Three," all from West Memphis, Arkansas, and falsely convicted for the brutal murders of three boys in 1993. All sentenced to death.

Following a high-profile, celebrity-backed campaign to free the three prisoners, Echols and his two co-defendants were released from prison in August 2011. They agreed to a rare plea bargain that essentially had them plead to guilt and not sue the state in exchange for immediate freedom.

It's a story made for a movie -- and there is one and there will be another. Plus many celebs helped with the case that includes stories to make your skin crawl -- false accusations of Satanism, police corruption, i.e. the works. Altogether another tragic indictment of our system.

But that's not what stirred me to write this blog.

A few days later I came across an article about Echols going back to Tennessee for the first time since he was released from prison in 2011. For whatever reasons, he was invited to talk at a... (ready?) -- technology conference. Now, granted, just having Damien Echols come to your conference could add to the draw, but asking him to talk about his reactions to technology since he got out of prison seems at once fascinating and almost a little cruel.

How overwhelming must it be to get out and find yourself in this world where everything goes so fast you hardly have time to breathe!

The West Memphis Three, June 1993.

And juxtapose this with what Echols said at the talk and writes about in his new book Life After Death – he eventually learned to spend up to six hours a day in prison meditating. He bludgeoned his body to stand or sit in cold and heat and pushed himself through the physical pain. He escaped the bars mentally, found himself through deep soul searching, got a modicum of peace. He said that his spiritual practice as well as his wife, Lorri Davis, who fought for his freedom and whom he married while in prison, saved his life.

So imagine after solitary confinement for 18 years, walking into the Apple Store. The computers. The cell phones. The tweets and whistles. Twitter, Echols says, he likes, because it feels like he's writing poetry. Texting too, a language unto itself. But learning it in a heartbeat?

And what about the other bombardments of the techno-savvy 21st century? Apps? Blogs? Flicker? All the ins and outs of the technological world, not to mention discovering that you can securely (sometimes) use credit cards online and drive straight through those freeway toll booths with Easy Pass. What seems commonplace to us, natural, we actually learned step by step, year by year.

I remember how Dolly, one of the women I taught who spent 15 years at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, said that the scariest thing after release was looking at the prices of shoes in the mall. She said she started shaking and couldn't stop.

Yes, there's reuniting with your loved ones. There's the joy of seeing green grass, the ocean, or a blanket of snow across a mountain. And surely, hot fudge in the free world is as blessed as a bath. But the shock of having been years behind the eight ball, the feeling that you are always trying to catch up, has to take time to deal with, and maybe more years to get over.

So while we (and I speak as much of myself here as you) might envy Echols for having a New York Times bestseller or for having the likes of Johnny Depp and Peter Jackson support him with their fame and opportunities, the truth of Echols's life is not celebrity or fame, but the hard darkness of coming out of the most repressive world in this country where we keep people in intolerable conditions. Coming into the light from darkness -- it is no wonder that Damien Echols must wear dark glasses.

[Jean Trounstine is an author/editor of five published books and many articles, professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, and a prison activist. For 10 years, she worked at Framingham Women's Prison and directed eight plays, publishing Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison about that work. She blogs for Boston Magazine and takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick at jeantrounstine.com where she blogs weekly at "Justice with Jean." Find her contributions to The Rag Blog here.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : The Limbo of Death Row

Image below (inset): ‘Dominoes. Death Row, Texas," 1979. Photo by Bruce Jackson from In This Timeless Time. Image from Prison Photography.
'In This Timeless Time':
The limbo of Death Row

The life and surroundings can be summed up in the words of prisoner Excell White: 'The gloom,' he tells the writers, 'wasn’t anything but emptiness.'

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / May 31, 2012

[In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian (2012: University of North Carolina Press); Hardcover; 256 pp.; $35.]

The death penalty is a fact of life in the United States. Despite the actions of many well-intentioned people, these premeditated murders continue to take place at a shameful pace. The fact that the death penalty does exist has brought many young people to question the morality of a system that supports and even champions execution.

Unlike the other form of murder carried out by the state -- war -- the death penalty is harder to rationalize for many people. The act of intentionally putting an innocent human to death; the fact that life imprisonment is a worse punishment to many; the applied racism of the death penalty's assignments; and the sheer pointlessness of execution by the state has caused many a thoughtful person to come out in opposition.

Those who are condemned to die in the United States wait out their time in parts of certain prisons. Those places are commonly known as death row. Occasionally, these unremembered places are the subject of books and movies. Sometimes, they are also the focus of the infrequent sociological survey.

While the latter surveys do fairly well at creating statistics and prognostications, it is the fictional renderings that do better in evoking the life in these prison tiers of gates and concrete. The despair and dashed hopes; the regret and the lack thereof; even the infrequent joy and laughter.

An exception to the factual/fictional disparity can be found in the recently published book from Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian. Back in 1979 Jackson took his camera into Ellis Prison in Texas and photographed men living on death row there. These photos were an adjunct to a documentary film he and Christian would release in the early 1980s.

The film features interviews, commentary and reflections of the inmates and the filmmakers. The book, titled In This Timeless Time: Living & Dying on Death Row in America, although just published, is also part of that documentary effort. It is a fitting coda.

Designed something akin to a coffee table book, In This Timeless Time is made up of three parts. The first part includes a selection of the aforementioned photographs. The photos are accompanied by text. Some of that text is narrative describing the physical setup of the part of the prison where death row is located. Other bits describe the interior of certain prisoner’s cells and the prisoners. Still other text describes the prisoners' limited lives while still other text includes the words of the prisoners themselves.

The life and surroundings described can be summed up in the words of prisoner Excell White when he talks about his introduction to the row: "The gloom," he tells the writers, "wasn’t anything but emptiness."

The second part of the text is titled "Words." That is what it is. Words from the prisoners talking about the other prisoners. Words from the writers about the prisoners and their particular cases. Words describing the legal limbo of a death row when nobody is being killed (the book was begun during the period following the Supreme Court's suspension of the death penalty in its decision on Furman vs. Georgia), and when executions are taking place.

Last but not least are the words the authors use when writing their impressions of individual prisoners or about the Row itself.

The authors' description of their work on the Row concludes the book. Gaining the trust of the prisoners and fending off the uneasiness of the guards are two of the dilemmas described by the authors. Overcoming their own fears of being alone with potentially psychotic murderers is another. Less wrenching but interesting nonetheless is the authors' description of how they made the movie: funding, legalities and the like.

The grand finale is the showing of the film to the inmates. Jackson and Christian admit their fears of the prisoners' reactions. Indeed, this was present in their minds during much of the process.

There is no way that a subject like death row can be presented with beauty. It is one of the ugliest of humanity's activities. The inmates are not the most beautiful humans and their crimes are ugly. Yet, they too are human. The authors tell of a man on the Row named Arturo Aranda. Aranda who is well-inked. In other words, he has lots of tattoos.

The last tattoo he was getting before he went to prison was of the Lady of Guadalupe. Because he was arrested for murder, the tattoo is without a face. This image serves as a perfect metaphor for the denizens of death row; for the most part they remain faceless. Jackson and Christian's book gives some of those men a face. Therein lays its beauty.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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