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| Steve Foster |
LIVINGSTON, Texas (AP) — What Cleve Foster remembers most about his recent brushes with death is the steel door, the last one condemned Texas inmates typically walk through before their execution.
"You can't take your eyes off that door," he says.
But twice over the past year and a half, Foster has come within moments of being escorted through the door, only to be told the U.S. Supreme Court had halted his scheduled punishment.
On Tuesday, Foster, 48, is scheduled for yet another trip to the death house for participating in the abduction and slaying of a 30-year-old Sudanese woman, Nyaneur Pal, a decade ago near Fort Worth.
It takes just under an hour to drive west from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Polunsky Unit, where the state's male death-row inmates are housed, to the Huntsville Unit, where condemned Texas prisoners have been put to death for nearly a century. The last 485 have been by lethal injection; the first 361, from 1924 through 1964, from the electric chair.
On execution day, the condemned inmate waits, usually for about four hours, in a tiny cell a few steps from the steel door to the death chamber.
Foster, however, shared his thoughts of going through the mechanics of facing execution in Texas — and living to talk about it.
The process shifts into high gear at noon on the scheduled execution day when a four-hour-long visit with friends or relatives ends at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston.
"That last visit, that's the only thing that bothers me," he said. "The 12 o'clock-hour hits. A dozen or so guards come to escort you."
By Foster's count, it's 111 steps to the prison gate and an area known as the box cage. That's where he's secured to a chair for electronic scrutiny to detect whether he has any metal objects hidden on his body.
It's the legacy of inmate Ponchai Wilkerson. Wilkerson, asked by the warden if he had a final statement after he was strapped to the death chamber gurney for execution in 2000, defiantly spit out a handcuff key he'd concealed in his mouth.
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| "The Walls", Huntsville, Texas. Holding cells where death row inmates spend their last hours prior to execution. The death chamber is located at the far end of the corridor (steel door ajar). |
"You're in handcuffs, you're chained at the ankles, they give you cloth shoes and you have to shuffle to keep them on," he said.
As he waddles the 111 steps, he gets acknowledgement from fellow prisoners who tap on the glass of their cells.
At the prison gate, armed officers stand by as he's put in a van and secured to a seat for the roughly 45-mile trip to Huntsville that he says feels like a "90-mph drive." There are no side windows in the back of the van where Foster, accompanied by four officers, rides to the oldest prison in Texas. Only the back doors have windows.
"It's like stepping back in time, dungeons and dragons," he said of entering through two gates at the back of the Huntsville Unit, more commonly known as the Walls Unit because of its 20-foot-high red brick walls.
Prison officials then hustle him into the cell area adjacent to the death chamber.
Source: Chronicle, Sept. 23, 2012
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