"I'm always amazed that all of these guys [DR inmates] are fighting for their lives." -- Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli
WAYNESBERG, Pa. — Isaac Mitchell is an emblem of Pennsylvania's modern death penalty.
Sentenced to die for killing two men in Philadelphia in 1997, Mitchell is now 61 and ailing, confined to the infirmary at the State Correctional Institute Greene, the prison in southwest Pennsylvania where three-quarters of the state's death-row inmates are held.
Lying in a hospital bed alone in a cell, he managed a weak wave July 18 as prison officials and a Morning Call reporter stood before him during a tour in which the Department of Corrections for the first time allowed a member of the news media extensive access to death row.
Mitchell is far more likely to die of illness than of an executioner's needle. But that may be true for every one of Pennsylvania's 203 death-row inmates — even the healthy ones — given a de facto legal halt on executions in the state for all but those who abandon their appeals and volunteer for death.
"He either improves, or he'll expire in this cell," Greene corrections Capt. Wallace Leggett said of Mitchell.
At one point, death rows were way stations holding murderers in the brief period between their sentences and their executions.
But they are increasingly becoming a punishment unto themselves — one not handed down by a judge or a jury, but created incidentally as Pennsylvania and other states keep condemned prisoners in solitary confinement for years, if not decades, awaiting executions that may never be carried out.
For critics of capital punishment, the delays raise questions about whether death row is in and of itself a cruel and unusual punishment, given the severe psychological impacts that extended solitary confinement can bring.
"There's been a decent number of studies looking at isolation and how it is really torture. And that's what death row really is," said Marc Bookman, a former public defender who runs the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation in Philadelphia, which advises capital defense teams.
"It makes people mentally ill and it's the equivalent of torture," Bookman said. "I don't think we as a society should be in the torture business."
Nationally, Pennsylvania is third among states in the number of death-row inmates who have served more than 20 years, its 51 surpassed only by California's 246 and Florida's 137, a review of each state's data by The Morning Call showed.
The last person put to death against his will in Pennsylvania was in 1962. Elmo Smith of Montgomery County was electrocuted just 18 months after he was convicted of murdering and raping a schoolgirl.
In the 1990s, three inmates were executed, but only because they waived legal challenges to their sentences and asked to be put to death. That's the same number as have committed suicide while on death row since 1983 — including one in Greene — compared with the 24 who have died of natural causes, according to statistics the Department of Corrections keeps.
Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, a death penalty backer, said that if the conditions on death row are cruel, he blames federal judges for delaying executions by entertaining lengthy appeals. It doesn't surprise Morganelli that a capital inmate "is going to go stir crazy, is going to go nuts" after years of isolation.
That the conditions are harsh was a key part of Morganelli's argument in 2011 when he won the first of two recent death-penalty verdicts in the county after nearly 25 years without one.
Michael Eric Ballard was on parole for a prior murder when he stabbed to death four people in Northampton, and Morganelli told jurors that a life sentence — the alternative — would be only a homecoming for the prison-seasoned Ballard.
"It is a very, very difficult, tough life and you have to question whether it is worse than being put to death," Morganelli said. "Though, that said, I'm always amazed that all of these guys are fighting for their lives."
Across the nation, solitary confinement is the rule, and not the exception, for capital prisoners. All but two of 35 states that have inmates facing the death penalty isolate them in single cells, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse. (Missouri holds them in a maximum security prison with the rest of the inmate population, while Oklahoma bunks some two to a cell.)
Psychological studies confirm that long periods of isolation can be difficult to cope with.
"We suffer from death-row syndrome. We're locked down way too much," insisted Herbert Blakeney, a Greene inmate from Harrisburg who was sentenced to die for slitting the throat of his 14-month-old stepson in 2000 during a standoff with police.
The syndrome's symptoms include paranoia, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, depression, self-mutilation and revenge fantasies.
Bookman, who has visited clients in Greene and other death rows, said the bleak life can cause inmates to "devolve," especially those already suffering from mental problems.
"There are a number of people on death row who are talking to themselves, pacing back and forth, and pretty mentally ill," Bookman said.
Walter Ogrod, 47, of Philadelphia, was sentenced to death for the 1988 murder and attempted rape of 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn, whose body was found in a cardboard box discarded on the street. His 1996 conviction is one often highlighted by opponents of the death penalty who question the evidence against him and the testimony of a jailhouse informant who cooperated with prosecutors.
In his cell on July 18, Ogrod had lesser problems: his typewriter, which he complained to prison staff "was kind of cheap. It gets (messed) up all the time."
A nervous man who appears somehow vacant, Ogrod even picked the machine up and brought it to his cell window to try to demonstrate the problem.
It's one Leggett said Ogrod raises with him all the time.
"Ogrod, I already answered your question," Leggett told him. "You can't have an outside purchase. Why don't you write the central office and say, 'Hey, why don't you add some (more models of) typewriters to the commissary list?"
Mark D. Edwards Jr., sentenced in 2004 for killing a Fayette County couple and their pregnant 17-year-old daughter, also had small complaints on his mind. Seeing a reporter's pen, he said the ones inmates are given are "trash."
"How can we get some better pens around here?" the 29-year-old asked, before also complaining about his cell's ventilation.
Greene Superintendent Louis Folino said death-row inmates certainly have a heightened awareness of their surroundings.
"If we substitute peas for green beans on our trays, they get really pissed off," Folino said. "Everything is magnified and it's a result of less movement."
But Folino and other prison officials said human beings are more adaptable than psychological studies may suggest. Among the prison's entire population of 1,750 inmates, about 17 percent are on psychotropic medication, officials said. They estimated the same percentage of medicated prisoners among the 157-man death row.
Some inmates "adapted extremely well" to death row, Deputy Superintendent Mark Capozza said. "In fact, the majority of them adapted extremely well."
The U.S. Supreme Courtin 2009 declined to hear a case by a Florida inmate who said his 32 years on death row was cruel and unusual punishment barred by the Constitution, though two liberal justices — Stephen Breyer and the now-retired John Paul Stevens — were troubled by the delay.
Stevens said "delays in state-sponsored killings are inescapable and ... executing defendants after such delays is unacceptably cruel."
That and the rebuttal by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas reflected the debate also being held outside the courtroom.
"It is the crime — and not the punishment imposed by the jury or the delay in petitioner's execution — that was 'unacceptably cruel,'" Thomas wrote.
Previously, the Supreme Court has acknowledged the suffering that solitary confinement can bring. But that was in 1890, 122 years ago.
Writing at a time when Benjamin Harrison was president, Justice Samuel Freeman Miller said "experience demonstrated that there were serious objections" to isolating inmates that way.
"A considerable number of prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community," Miller said.
Dr. Frank Dattilio, a nationally known forensic psychologist from Salisbury Township, agrees that isolation is rough, but said that the condemned can prove surprisingly resilient over time.
When he interviews prisoners on death row, Dattilio said he asks them if they wished they had taken a plea agreement that could have gotten them a life sentence among the general prison population. Many, he said, say no.
To make it, they turn inward, withdrawing into their own thoughts and memories and largely ignoring the world outside, said Dattilio, who estimated he has been involved in 40 to 50 death-penalty cases.
"It's a weird life. It's a very strange life," Dattilio said. "In time, they do adapt because they are going to be less miserable if they accept it. Because there's really nowhere else to go."
That's barring a successful appeal. Since 1973, 140 death-row inmates nationwide have been released after being exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That includes six prisoners from Pennsylvania.
Huge numbers beyond that have seen their death sentences overturned though their convictions for murder were not.
In Pennsylvania, 130 inmates on death row have received life sentences after appeals since 1983, according to the Department of Corrections. Another 12 got even lesser sentences.
Greene holds between 30 and 40 lifers who were once slated to be executed, prison officials said. Though one seriously assaulted a staffer and had to be transferred out of the prison, Folino said most have adjusted well to their new surroundings.
"It's like Paradise Island," Folino said, given the relative freedom.
In the general population, inmates can work and attend educational and vocational programs. Those who do so can be out of their cells and interacting with others for much of the day.
The prison has a basketball court that would make many high schools jealous. Its yard includes softball fields, running tracks and volleyball nets. Among those now able to enjoy the amenities is James W. Begley, who spent seven years on death row for kidnapping and murdering his ex-girlfriend's teenage daughter, whose body was found nude and gagged in a shallow grave in 1995 in York County.
Begley's capital sentence was vacated in 2001 after the state Supreme Court ruled the judge gave unclear instructions to the jury on the law. At resentencing, Begley received life in prison.
The 54-year-old with a bushy, gray-flecked mustache now holds a laundry job at Greene, where Capozza said he folds clothes so meticulously they look as if they came from the dry cleaner.
On death row, Begley only got to see his family through non-contact visits in which he and they were separated by glass. Seeing visitors in a more natural setting — and playing the 6-string bass he keeps in his cell — are the best things about his new sentence, he said.
"Contact visits are good," Begley said. "You get to sit out there with them, hug them."
But Begley also said there are parts of death row that he misses, including the separation from other, sometimes irritating prisoners. And the endless time for reading.
"There's a peacefulness. There's a contentment," he said. "There's peace and quiet."
Source: The Associated Press, Riley Yates, August 11, 2012
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