Where I lie there is despair, but above what demons haunt those who dwell there. As a Lifer who resides in north block, I often wonder about the plight of those condemned men who live on the sixth floor A section. known as North Seg. (North Segregation) a part of California’s death row.
Albert Camus once wrote, “What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared.”
America’s death row residents are men and women who walk the razor’s edge between half-life and certain death. These are America’s condemned who bear a stigma far worse than “prisoner.” Life there oscillates between the banal and the bizarre.
Unlike other prisoners, condemned prisoners are not “doing time.” Freedom does not shine at the end of the tunnel. Rather, the end of the tunnel brings extinction. Thus, for many here, there is no hope.
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.
To such men and women the actual execution is a fait accompli, a formality already accomplished in spirit. The state concludes its premeditated drama by putting the “dead” to death a second time.
To do justice for self, one must consistently battle the harsh reality that this is it and what can I do for the future, a day not yet dawned? Despair not of the “Mercy.”
