Texas death row man claims inmates' numbered days are form of torture

Murderer Danielle Simpson (left) who faces execution on Wednesday speaks about his nine-year term spent locked up in solitary.

Danielle Simpson's scrawled note to the appeal court left the judges in no doubt. "If I can't be free – Kill Me.!!" the Texas death row prisoner demanded in a rambling and sometimes incoherent handwritten plea earlier this year. "I'm tired of being in a institution that's unjust, degrading, and corrupted … I'm tired of struggling to survive in a system that's highly injustices. I'm ready to die!!" Simpson underlined "Kill Me" twice.

The court granted the convicted murderer his wish. It ruled that he was quite reasoned in deciding that life on death row was worse than death itself.

A judge set Simpson's execution date, and on Wednesday, barring a last-minute stay, he will die by lethal injection in the US state that leads the field in official killings, with 21 so far this year. Two other men are due to die along with Simpson this week. They are among nearly 350 condemned men and 10 women in Texas.

The 29-year-old African-American father of two arrived late for our meeting, delayed by the bureaucracy that makes him one of the unfortunate few to know to within a few minutes when his life will be over.

"I was filling out my execution paperwork. What I want done with my remains, who all I want to witness my execution, my last meal. Stuff like that," he said. "I'm still undecided whether I want to be cremated or [have] a service. Probably won't know that until the last minute. As for the last meal, I don't want anything. This place doesn't deserve that type of interest from me to want to have that last meal."

Simpson is brought to the steel visiting cage in manacles. After the door is bolted, he bends and forces his hands backwards through a slot for the guard to unlock the cuffs. Between us is the thick glass that has kept him from any physical contact with the world beyond death row for nine years.

He is dressed in the thin white cotton uniform of the condemned man. He has a closely cropped beard, a soft voice and a gentle manner that is disconcertingly at odds with his unfathomable crime. On 26 January 2000 he led his 17-year-old wife, younger teenage brother and a 13-year-old cousin on a burglary in Palestine, Texas, to find money to buy crack cocaine. Geraldine Davidson, 84, a former schoolteacher, returned home and interrupted the robbery. She was bound and gagged with tape and forced into the boot of her car.

The group drove around town for several hours with the elderly woman trapped in the back, stopping for hamburgers and showing her to acquaintances, none of whom called the police.

The trial heard that Simpson made racist remarks about white people while Davidson was held prisoner.

There was evidence that she was badly beaten. Eventually she was dragged from the boot, a cinder block was tied to her ankles and she was thrown into the frigid Neches river. Davidson's family called her murder a hate crime. Simpson was sent for execution. His wife, brother and cousin were imprisoned for years. For a while, he fought to save his life. But death row took its toll.

"This Texas system is sick. They treat us less than the human beings that we are and it's like, instead of them trying to see us as being a human being, they look at us as being an animal," he said. "It's torture here. I am surrounded by the dying culture. I lost so many friends, I'm pretty much used to it now. This is a bloodthirsty system. We don't have contact with no one. There's so much violence and abuse. It's officers attacking the inmates. That's wrong and they're getting away with it. Anything would be better than being here."

Until 10 years ago, death row prisoners in Texas socialised, worked in the prison garment factory and had contact visits. That changed after a breakout from the old death row in Huntsville by seven inmates in 1998. Six of those condemned men were swiftly captured and the seventh drowned, but the escape embarrassed the authorities, who concluded that the prisoners had used their time together to plot the breakout. Death row was moved to a new prison, near Livingston, where conditions were very different.

Simpson lives in a 5.6 square metre (60 sq ft) steel cell (left), not much bigger than those holding Guantánamo Bay prisoners. For 23 hours a day he is locked in the metal cage, with two plates welded out from the wall as a shelf and a desk, and a steel sink and toilet. Near the ceiling above the bed is a narrow slit that serves as a window. There is another slit in the door through which his food is pushed. His hands are cuffed for his hour of lone exercise. The cells are brightly lit by a fluorescent bulbs.

The condemned man is allowed as many personal possessions as he can fit into two carrier bags and gets approved books and magazines. Those with a good behaviour record can buy a radio.

"We spend 22 or 23 out of 24 hours in a cell that's very small. We don't have no TVs. We're the only death row that don't have TVs or work programmes or religious stuff. They don't let us have none of that here," said Simpson. "The cells are broken. Whenever it rains, leaks come through window seals or cracks up in the ceiling. It messes up legal work, clothes, commissary. Once it gets damp, that's it. They know about it but they don't want to come out and fix it."

Death row prisoners have regularly gone on hunger strike over bad food, over sleep deprivation because of the unending noise created by living inside a network of steel cages, and over the alleged brutality of guards, including the regular use of pepper spray.

Hardest of all is the interminable solitary confinement. There is no physical contact with other prisoners, although Simpson can communicate with them by shouting.

The nearest Simpson comes to cracking up is when he talks about not being able to touch his children, a son aged 10 and a daughter, nine. "I write. My daughter writes back but it's emotional because I miss my kids. I wouldn't mind being with 'em but …" he says, as his face contorts, "now I'm going to die I want to be able to touch them but I can't. Even on the day of my execution. I can't have contact with my family or my kids."

Then his anger spills out. "They say it's wrong for someone on the streets to take the life of another individual, knowingly and intentionally. That's considered to be a capital case. Here, they're doing the same thing. They're contradicting their own law because they're knowingly and intentionally taking the life of another individual. They justify it as being justice. That's not justice. Texas gets a pleasure out of it. I refuse to let the system or the officials see me in any kind of suffering or emotion. I refuse to let them see me like that, knowing they brought on some of that."

The prisoners claim the conditions amount to torture. Michelle Lyons, the Texas death row spokeswoman, says that is not intentional. "It's not designed to be tortuous. There was a time when death row inmates had much more freedom of movement, job programmes, cellmates, they could watch television. Then we had the large-scale escape attempt in 1998. It was determined that their contact with each other would be limited and they would not have that freedom of movement.

"It's done for security reasons. Like with the human contact, you can't change the rules to allow them at the end to hug their family goodbye because this is someone who is facing death and may become desperate and attempt to take a family member hostage or an officer hostage."

Intentional or not, some lawyers for the condemned say they have watched the mental state of their clients deteriorate sharply on death row. Some inmates withdraw completely, refusing to shower or leave their cells for recreation. Others fight back with court appeals and by writing to supporters with angry and bitter accounts of imprisonment and what they often characterise as the injustice of their situation. They are trying to save their lives, not only through a mostly futile effort to overturn a death sentence but by staying sane through the years of isolation.

Simpson has convinced himself he has legions of sympathisers on the outside. "I have a lot of supporters and pen friends, overseas and here in the United States. They're going to do a big protest outside on the day of my execution. They're a lot of people coming from Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, England, Germany, France. It's going to be real big."

His lawyer, David Dow, a member of the anti-death penalty group Texas Defenders Service, says the support is imagined, and evidence of his mental instability. "He is a severely mentally ill person. He has no grasp of reality. He thinks he has hundreds of supporters … it's wrong. He says it with complete sincerity. He believes it is true but he's delusional, he's been receiving anti-psychotic medication inside the prison for years. You would certainly think that the fact that he's on anti-psychotic medicines would alert a judge to do something more than have a five-minute conversation with him to determine whether he's competent to waive his appeal."

But the appeal court, in what amounts to an acknowledgement of inhuman conditions on death row, accepted that Simpson's assertion to the court that the "pitiful" conditions meant he was looking "forward to life after death" was evidence of his mental stability, describing this stance as a "rational choice".

With the execution just days away, Simpson is having second thoughts. Dow has filed appeals with state courts and the US supreme court arguing that Simpson was incompetent to waive his appeals because he is suffering from a "debilitating mental illness" and has "diminished intellectual functioning".

The district attorney, Doug Lowe, accused Simpson of trying to stall the execution by "re-litigating an issue which has been repeatedly decided against him". The Texas board of pardons could recommend to the governor, Rick Perry, that Simpson's case be reviewed, but neither the board nor the governor have shown an inclination to stall executions in the past.

It is a reminder that there are other victims in all of this. The family of Geraldine Davidson lost their relative. Simpson says that he apologised to her children, but he has consistently failed to acknowledge his leading role in the murder, instead attempting to blame his 13-year-old cousin.

Now, in the face of two daunting alternatives, Simpson is torn. Amid the torture of prison and solitary confinement, death seemed like a release. But now the execution is just days away he is reassessing this; he would like to live but he knows the alternative to death is not freedom but decades of being locked up. "I know this is not no type of game. This is something I really have to prepare myself for. I'm pretty much going day to day now until the time comes," he said.

Source: guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 November 2009