Live FROM DEATH ROW
ABU-JAMAL, MUMIA
LivE from DEATH ROW BY MUMIA ABU-JAMAL The last yard of the day is finally called. "Capitals! Fourth, fifth, and sixth tier—YARD UP!" the corpulent correctional officer bellows, his rural accent...
...For several years now I have been assigned disciplinary-custody status for daring to abide by my faith, the teachings of John Africa, and, in particular, for refusing to cut my hair...
...Alight-skinned native of Lenape lineage sidles up to a fellow prisoner in a nearby steel cage for a bit of small talk...
...Ya' know we can't leave y'uns out here when it gits ta thunderin' an' lightnin...
...Now, ain't that the truth...
...Break it...
...No matter that the effectiveness of the death penalty is not really debated...
...For the most part, death-row prisoners are the best behaved and least disruptive of all inmates...
...Indeed, what other court could make the Republican-controlled, Southern-Harlan-Fuller Court of the 1890s seem positively radical by comparison...
...Damn, man," the Indian youth exclaims in his northeastern Pennsylvania twang, "I been here too damn long...
...It's a painful thing...
...Rather, the end of the tunnel brings extinction...
...A few moments of silent observation proved the obvious...
...Over five years have passed since that visit, but I remember it like it was an hour ago: the slams of her tiny fists against that ugly barrier, her instinctual rage against it—the state-made blockade raised under the rubric of security, her hot tears...
...Break it...
...The denizens of death row are black as molasses, and the staff are white bread...
...Ain't that a bitch...
...The political prod is sparking movement, and judges are under increasing pressure to make the final judgment...
...Although staff assured inmates that the pens would be used only for disciplinary cases, the construction ended and the assurances were put to the test...
...Blacks constitute just over 9 percent of Pennsylvania's population and just under 11 percent of America's...
...It is not just a security rule...
...Lemme see both sides of your hands...
...I put on a silly face, turned back, called her to me, and talked silly to her...
...the white-shirt yells, sparking murmurs of resentment among the men...
...Many of the condemned, with Constitutional error rife throughout their records, will soon be executed without meaningful review...
...Her petite fingers curled into tight fists, which banged and pummeled the plexiglass barrier...
...Others live as they are treated—as "shadows of [their] former selves, in a pantomime of life, human husks...
...In milliseconds, sadness and shock shifted into fury as her petite fingers curled into tight fists, which banged and pummeled the plexiglass barrier, which shuddered and shimmied but didn't shatter...
...Why can't we kiss...
...The prisoner is handcuffed and separated by a partition of shatterproof glass, steel trim, and wire mesh...
...To such men and women, the actual executions are a fait accompli, a formality already accomplished in spirit, where the state concludes its premeditated drama by putting the "dead" to death a second time...
...Where do you think you'll get that from...
...Several prisoners have protested to the administration that such searches are unreasonable, arguing that body-cavity strip searches before and after noncontact visits cannot be justified...
...For approximately 2,400 people locked in state and federal prisons, life is unlike that in any other institution...
...Supreme Court, which in 1890 consisted of six Republicans and three Democrats...
...You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else...
...Pull your foreskin back...
...In the Commonwealth I am but one of 123 persons who await death...
...I feel so sorry for them, so ashamed of myself that I get out of the room...
...she screamed...
...One by one, cells are unlocked for the daily trek from cell to cage...
...I still harbored a belief in U.S...
...Ya racist garbage...
...Even in the face of the brutal Philadelphia MOVE massacre of May 13, 1985, that led to Ramona Africa's frame-up, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Clement Lloyd, Allan Blanchard, and countless other police slaughters of blacks from New York to Miami, with impunity, my faith remained...
...Ya freaks...
...Where were the white cons of death row...
...Harry Washington shrieks out of an internal orgy of psychic pain: "Niggers...
...Mv daughter burst into the tiny visiting room, her brown eyes aglitter with happiness...
...Bottom of yer feet...
...The guards adopt a cajoling, rather than threatening, attitude...
...To be found guilty of an institutional infraction means that one must relinquish television...
...Menninger stated: "[Ijt's such a painful sight that I don't stay but a minute or two as a rule...
...Visits are conducted in a closed room, roughly eighty square feet in size...
...The cages were for the blacks on death row...
...I need but look across the nation, where, as of October 1986, blacks constituted some 40 percent of men on death row, or across Pennsylvania, where, as of August 1988, sixty-one of 113 men—over 50 percent—are black, to see the truth, a truth hidden under black robes and promises of equal rights...
...While we both share the deadening effects of isolation, and an environment straight out of the redneck boondocks, Harry, like so many others, has slipped...
...Gallows humor...
...Predictably, permission was denied for security reasons...
...It ain't about "law," it's about "politics" by "other means...
...adds another...
...Only when the cages were full did full recognition dawn that all the caged men were African...
...Habeas corpus, fundamental to English law since the reign of King Charles and to the U.S...
...There is a quickening on the nation's death rows of late—a picking up of the pace of the march toward death...
...Request for typewriter denied...
...For now, as in all the times in the past, I know no one is out near his ground-level cell—I know Harry is in a mouth-foaming rage because of the ceaseless noises echoing within the chambers of his tortured mind...
...She, like my other children, was just a baby when I was cast into hell, and because of her youth and sensitivity, she hadn't been brought along on family visits until now...
...You wear any dentures...
...In the case, In re Medley, 134 US 160 (1890), the Court reached back to old English law, to the early 1700s of King George II, to conclude that solitary confinement was "an additional punishment of the most important and painful character" and, as applied to Medley, unconstitutional...
...The blacks, due to racist insen-sitivity and sheer hatred, were condemned to awaiting death in indignity...
...Tiny, with a Minnie Mouse voice, this daughter of my spirit had finally made the long trek westward, into the bowels of this man-made hell, situated in the south-central Pennsylvania boondocks...
...The additional two hours may be spent outdoors, in a chain-link fenced box, ringed by concertina razor wire, under the gaze of gun turrets...
...Deep, huh...
...the "right" to represent oneself...
...No matter that of the ten states with the highest murder rate, eight lead the country in executions that supposedly deter...
...The death-row block offered direct access to two yards: one composed of cages, the other "free" space, water fountains, full-court basketball spaces and hoops, and an area for running...
...Girl, how can you breathe with all them boogies in your nose...
...add the weight of the falling away of family ties, and you have all the fixings for a stressful psychic stew designed to deteriorate, to erode, one's humanity—designed, that is, by the state, with full knowledge of its effects...
...A bespectacled white-shirt turns his pale face skyward, examining nature's quickening portent...
...Shit, man, we just out here...
...I have stopped the reflexive glance down in front of Harry's cell...
...The political prod is sparking movement, and judges in death cases are beginning to find themselves under increasing pressure to make the final judgment...
...Constitution since its inception, now faces evisceration under the hand of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a possibility unthinkable just a few years ago...
...Don't tell me about the valley of the shadow of death...
...Lift your sac...
...Nearly a century ago, a Colorado man was sentenced to death for killing his wife...
...Amid the rolling trail of tears, a twinkle started like dawn, and before long the shy beginnings of a smile meandered across her face as we talked silly talk...
...Why you say dat, Runnin' Bear...
...For who are people, but for their relations and relationships...
...The three of us laughed and they left...
...I and some forty-five other men spend about twenty-two hours a day in a six-by-ten-foot cell...
...My nose clogged...
...it is a policy and structure that attempts to sever emotional connection by denying physical connection between the visitor and the inmate...
...Once the prisoner is naked, the visiting-room guard spits out a familiar cadence: "Open yer mouth...
...All death rows share a central goal: "human storage" in an "austere world in which condemned prisoners are treated as bodies kept alive to be killed," as one study put it...
...I reminded her of how she used to hug our cat until she almost strangled the poor animal, and Hamida's denials were developing into laughter...
...The rumbles grow louder as drops of rain sail earthward, splattering steel, brick, and human...
...Even if I must do so from the valley of the shadow of death, I will...
...Don't expect the media networks to tell you, for they can't, because of incestu-ousness between the media and the government, and big business, which they both serve...
...Break it,' she screamed...
...Life here oscillates between the banal and the bizarre...
...mix in solitary connnemeni, arounu-the-clock lock-ins, no-contact visits, no prison jobs, no educational programs by which to grow, psychiatric "treatment" facilities designed only to drug you into a coma...
...As I said, it's hard to shrug off, but maybe we can do it together...
...They depend on it, in the way that lonely people turn to television for the illusion of companionship, and they dread separation from it...
...They haunt me.* Mumia Abu-Jamal was a radio reporter in Philadelphia when, in 1982, he was convicted of, and sentenced to death for, the murder of a Philadelphia police officer, a crime he denies committing...
...I turned away to recover...
...But prison officials have responded to this proposal as they have to repeated calls by the condemned for allowance of typewriters: refusal, due to security risk...
...Only men "live" here...
...Here many escape death's omnipresent specter only by way of common diversions—television, radio, or sports...
...For the powerless and the poor, they are chimeras that vanish once one reaches out to claim them as something real or substantial...
...For this I have been denied family phone calls, and on occasion I have been shackled for refusing to violate my beliefs...
...It also is true, however, that we have little opportunity to be otherwise, given that many death units operate on the "22 + 2" system: twenty-two hours of locked in cell, followed by two hours of recreation out of cell...
...But she burst into tears at the glass barrier between us...
...Freedom does not shine at the end of the tunnel...
...For the visitor, too, such visits are deeply disturbing...
...They're not rights—they're privileges of the powerful and rich...
...After months or years of noncontact visits, few phone calls, and ever-decreasing communication with one's family and others, many inmates use television as an umbilical cord, a psychological connection to the world they have lost...
...Bend over...
...In Pennsylvania, as in many other death states, noncontact visits are the rule...
...Hurled by judicial decree into this netherworld of despair, forcefully separated from relationships, overcome by the dual shame of their station and the circumstances of the crime that led them to death's door, a few succumb to the shady release of suicide...
...As murder rates rise in American cities, so too does the tide of fear...
...In the midst of darkness, this little one was a light ray...
...Why can't we touch...
...The notion that human progress is marked by "an evolving standard of decency," from the less civilized to the more civilized, from the more restrictive to the less restrictive, from tyranny to expanding freedom, dies a quick death on the rocks of today's Rehnquistian courts...
...Maintenance and construction staff, forced by a state court order and state statute to provide men with a minimum of two hours daily outside exercise, rather than the customary fifteen minutes every other day, erected a number of steel, cyclone-fenced boxes, which strikingly resemble dog runs or pet pens...
...A young black man, once a correctional officer, now a death-row convict...
...What visitors do not see, prior to the visit, is a horrifying spectacle—the body-cavity strip search...
...In south-central Pennsylvania's Huntingdon County, a 100-year-old prison stands, its Gothic towers projecting an air of foreboding, evoking a gloomy mood of the Dark Ages...
...Well, what do y'all consider a thirteen-inch piece of glass...
...Such a line goes far to explain how courts really function, whether today, or 138 years ago in the Scott case...
...Bear, for the first time in his life, lives in a predominantly black community, albeit an artificial, warped one, for it is bereft of the laughter of women or the bawling of babes...
...no matter that the contention that the death penalty makes citizens safer is no longer seriously argued...
...She burst into the tiny visiting room, her brown eyes aglitter with happiness, stopped—stunned—staring at the glassy barrier between us and burst into tears at this arrogant attempt at state separation...
...the prison official demanded...
...Turn around...
...the prisoner asked...
...From my television...
...Fast-forward nearly a century, to 1986, to the infamous federal court decision of Peterkin v. Jeffes, where Pennsylvania death-row inmates sought to have solitary confinement declared unconstitutional, and one hears a judge deny relief, saying, in the immortal words of now-Chief Justice Rehnquist, "Nobody promised them a rose garden"—that is, solitary is OK...
...Several days ago the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed my conviction and sentence of death, by a vote of four justices (three did not participate...
...For many, loss of television is too high a price to pay for any show of resistance...
...a prisoner asks...
...The three of us talked silly talk, liberally mixed with serious talk, and before long our visit came to an end...
...As a black journalist who was a Black Panther way back in my yon teens, I've often studied America's long history of legal lynchings of Africans...
...There, too, you will find this writer...
...There is a quickening on the nation's death rows of late—a picking up of the pace of the march toward death...
...These are America's death-row residents: men and women who walk the razor's edge between half-life and certain death in thirty-eight states or under the jurisdiction of the United States...
...Keep your twisted Satanic filth to y'allself...
...Each man is pat-searched by guards armed with batons and then scanned by a metal detector...
...One inmate, more interested in his life than his entertainment, argued forcefully with prison administrators for permission to buy a nonimpact, nonmetallic, battery-operated typewriter...
...ladle in hostile, overtly racist prison guards and staff...
...Well, cuz I caught myself sayin' 'poh-leece' insteada 'puh-leese,' (police) and 'fo' insteada 'four...
...Keep my family's name outcha mouf...
...It is a psychic club used to threaten those who dare resist the dehumanizing isolation of life on the row...
...The realization that my appeal had been denied was a shocker...
...the smallest are in Connecticut (two whites), New Mexico (one Native American, one white), and Wyoming (two whites...
...By state action, they become "dead" to those who know and love them, and therefore dead to themselves...
...I could understand intellectually that American courts are reservoirs of racist sentiment and have historically been hostile to black defendants, but a lifetime of propaganda about American "justice" is hard to shrug off...
...Try out this quote I saw in a 1982 law book, by a prominent Philadelphia lawyer named David Kairys: "Law is simply politics by other means...
...I can...
...The ultimate effect of noncontact visits is to weaken, and finally to sever, family ties...
...Keep my family's name outch'all nasty mouf...
...Stick out your tongue...
...Deterrence...
...Spread your cheeks...
...National Public Radio assigned Abu-Jamal to do on-air commentaries last year, but then abruptly canceled the assignment...
...Yard in...
...The first day after completion of the cages, death cases, all free of any disciplinary infractions, were marched out to the pens for daily exercise outdoors...
...Perhaps we can shrug off and shred some of the dangerous myths laid on our minds like a second skin—such as the "right" to a fair and impartial jury of our peers...
...the corpulent correctional officer bellows, his rural accent alien to the urban ear...
...This article was excerpted, with permission, from Abu-Jamal's "Live from Death Row,"published this spring by Addison-Wesley...
...Not so in the Keystone State...
...Increasingly, America's northern states now join the rushing pack, anxious to relink themselves with their pre-Furman heritage...
...Here one has little or no psychological life...
...Once the inmates are encaged, the midsummer sky rumbles, its dark clouds swell, pregnant with power and water...
...the "right" to a fair trial, even...
...The March 1988 execution of Willie Darden in Florida, exceedingly well publicized here and abroad, should have had enormous deterrent effect, according to capital theories...
...Thus prisoners are as isolated physiologically as they are temporally and spatially...
...Some fight Sisyphean battles, struggling to prove their innocence and reverse unjust convictions...
...Why can't I sit in his lap...
...From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal...
...It's true...
...Even in the face of this relentless wave of antiblack state terror, / thought my appeals would be successful...
...Y'all 'fraid we gonna get ourself electrocuted...
...The conditions of most of America's death rows create Harry Washingtons by the score...
...My eyes filled to the brim...
...Her unspoken words echoed in my consciousness: "Why can't I hug him...
...For Harry and I are among the growing numbers of Pennsylvanians on death row, and Harry, because of mind-snapping isolation, a bitterly racist environment, and the ironies, the auguries of fate, has begun the slide from depression, through deterioration, to dementia...
...I'm a bit stunned...
...A few guffaws, and the trail from cage to cell thickens...
...Welcome to Pennsylvania's death row...
...The two men yuk it up...
...Although usually two hours long, today's yard barely lasts ten minutes, for fear that those condemned to death by the state may perish, instead, by fate...
...I continue to fight against this unjust sentence and conviction...
...They must be afraid that if we do get electrocuted by lightnin', they won't have no jobs and won't get paid...
...Television is more than a powerful diversion from a terrible fate...
...As against any regime imposed on human personality, there is resistance, but far less than one might expect...
...Once he wore the keys, now he hears the keys, in an agonizing wait for death...
...Ya filth...
...I remember The Progressive /19 a front page of the Black Panther newspaper, bearing the quote: "A black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect," attributed to U.S...
...Medley promptly brought an original writ of habeas corpus in the U.S...
...C'mon, fellas—yard in, yard in...
...Pennsylvania's death-row regime is among America's most restrictive, rivaling the infamous San Quentin death unit for the intensity and duration of restriction...
...Yard in...
...Her mother, recovering from her shock, bundled up Hamida in her arms, as sobs rocked them both...
...The event provided an excellent view, in microcosm, of the mentality of the criminal system of injustice, suffused by the toxin of racism...
...Mostly young black men...
...Long-termers on the row, those here since 1984, recall a small but seemingly significant event that took place back then...
...Harry continues his howlings and mindless mutterings of rage at no one in particular...
...Ain't that a security risk...
...Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, of the infamous Dred Scott case, where America's highest court held that neither Africans nor their "free" descendants are entitled to the rights of the Constitution...
...Perhaps I m naive, maybe 1 m just stupid—but I thought the law would be followed in my case, and the conviction reversed...
...Get dressed...
...Why not...
...Through this policy and practice the state skillfully and intentionally denies those it condemns a fundamental element and expression of humanity—that of touch and physical contact—and thereby slowly erodes family ties already made tenuous by the distance between home and prison...
...Many of his tormenters here (both real and imagined) have named him "Nut" and describe him as "on tilt...
...Her smile restored, she uttered a parting poem that we used to say over the phone: "I love you, I miss you, and when I see you, I'm gonna kiss you...
...As in any massive, quasi-military organization, reality on the row is regimented by rule and regulation...
...Visits are an exercise in humiliation...
...Thus, for many here, there is no hope...
...I live there...
...On his arrival at Colorado State Penitentiary, James Medley was placed in solitary...
...States that have not slain in a generation now ready their machinery: generators whine, poison liquids are mixed, gases are measured and readied, silent chambers await the order to smother life...
...Oh, why not...
...Perhaps the cruel twists of fate popped his cork—who can say...
...Seems like a lesson well learned to me...
...Really...
...Unlike other prisoners, death-row inmates are not "doing time...
...In Rhem v. Malcolm, the often-cited case on prison conditions in New York, Judge Lasker quoted expert testimony from Karl Menninger, the late psychiatrist, who described noncontact visiting as "the most unpleasant and most disturbing detail in the whole prison," and a practice that constitutes "a violation of ordinary principles of humanity...
...Both politicians and judges continue to ride that tide that washes toward the execution-chamber's door...
...The largest death row stands in Texas (324 people: 120 African Americans, 144 whites, 52 Hispanics, four Native Americans, and four Asian Americans...
...Televisions are allowed, but not typewriters: one's energies may be expended freely on entertainment, but a tool essential for one's liberation through judicial process is deemed a security risk...
...Break it...
...These are America's condemned, who bear a stigma far worse than "prisoner...
...Either allow contact visits, they argue, or halt the body-cavity strip searches...
...African Americans, a mere 12 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death-row population...
...A few states allow four, six, or even eight hours out of cell, prison employment, or even access to educational programs...
...All my family believe in God...
...no matter that of the ten states with the lowest murder rate, only one (Utah) has executed anyone since 1976...
...I have lived in this barren domain of death since the summer of 1983...
...But less than eleven hours after two thousand volts coursed through Darden's manacled flesh, a Florida corrections officer, well positioned to absorb and understand the lessons of the state ritual, erupted in a jealous rage and murdered a man in the maternity wing of a hospital...
Vol. 59 • May 1995 • No. 5
