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| Polunsky Unit, Texas |
In Texas, the condemned are executed at six p.m. Hence minutes before six was the title chosen by Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, a denizen of Texas death row, for the
online journal he initiated in 2007. “This site is about expression. . . living without masks . . . transparency,” Whitaker wrote. “This is also a site about faith in the worst of places, and about how hard it is sometimes to find that faith.”
As prisoners have no access to the Internet, his father typed and posted his entries, in hopes this work would help his son to heal. At the end of a year Whitaker wrote, “This has been the greatest growing experience of my life. I wouldn't change it for the world,” and “You are going to have a rather interesting (I hope) map of what a person goes through during the years preceding an execution. I hope this ends on a much higher plateau of maturity than where it began.” He ruminated, “Sometimes I think that the missing link between animals and a true human being is us.”
Minutes Before Six has expanded to include essays, poems, and artwork from writers in California, Washington, Virginia, and Florida, most, but not all, on death row. Although ironically the writers cannot read it online, the blog has become a writing community.
A series of essays supporting Proposition 34, a California ballot initiative to repeal the death penalty and replace it with the sentence of life without the possibility of parole, inspired three submissions from new writers on death row there.
Source: Pen America, Bell Gale Chevigny, April 30, 2013
