This cell was only 4½ feet wide by 6 feet long. It was furnished with a sink (hot and cold water), a toilet bowl, and a metal bunk with a very thin mattress rolled up on it. He was soon brought two sheets, a pillow case, a towel, soap and a toothbrush that had been broken in half.
He was in the process of making his bed up, when he heard his cell number called out by another inmate. He didn’t answer right away, for he had been previously warned by a friend that other inmates would attempt to find out who he was and from which county he had come. He had also been warned that he should make a strong attempt at keeping anyone from finding out what he had been convicted of so they wouldn’t hold his convictions against him and possibly take vengeful action on him. So he kept quiet and continued making his bed. When he was done, he laid down and tried to take a nap. By taking a nap he knew he could block out the heartbreak that was tearing him apart.
A couple of hours later, he awakened to a loud, reverberating shout that echoed up and down the row and into his cell. “Chow time. All lights on or you don’t get fed!”
He quickly arose, slipped his shoes on and stood at his cell door, waiting for whatever would happen next. He didn’t know if he would be pulled out and taken to a chow hall or if he would eat in his cell like he did in the county jail. After a couple of minutes went by, two officers pushed food carts past his cell to the end of the row. Several minutes after that, they returned, stopping at each cell to feed that particular inmate. When they reached his cell, his food port was unlocked and opened, then a tray of food and a drink was passed in to him. The food was plentiful and palatable, even tasty. The drink, though, was coffee. Lee couldn’t drink coffee. He was allergic to an acid that was in the coffee-bean. One cup of coffee would cause him to start bleeding internally from every inch of tissue which the coffee came into contact with.
When he had been found guilty of the charges filed against him, he almost decided to end everything right then. He was not going to give the state of California the satisfaction of executing him for a crime he hadn’t committed. If he had to die, he was going to rob the state, and everyone else, of their pleasure in executing him. He would drink a cup of coffee, and that would be that—he would die on his own terms.
But, suicide was morally and spiritually repugnant to him. In his mind, committing suicide was almost as bad as taking another’s life! So instead, he promised himself that he’d give his attorneys and the good Lord a chance to prove his innocence. He could always kill himself—there was no need to be hasty. Maybe there was still a chance to get out of this mess, for the truth to be revealed and set him free.
After he finished eating and the trash was picked up, Lee laid back down. He had nothing to read, no writing supplies to write letters with, nothing at all to occupy his time. Lee decided to go back to sleep. Time would pass much faster that way. But it wasn’t easy to go to sleep here. The noise coming from the other cells was deafening. One inmate was hollering to another as loud as he could in Spanish. Others were yelling back and forth to each other in English and Spanish. Further down the row, it sounded like another inmate was yelling at the top of his lungs for his mother. Those cries for his mother were heart-rending and interspersed with heart-felt sobs. They made Lee feel like crying himself. But not for his mother. He felt like it was for too many other reasons to list. Among those reasons, however, was the loss of his daughter, wife and friends, not to mention the loss of his freedom.
Over the following three weeks, with the exception of two days, his routine didn’t change. Those two days, he was taken out of his cell and brought before the Inmate Classification Committee. His assigned counselor told him that he should only be in the Adjustment Center for about a week. It actually proved to be over two weeks before he left that building for good. He was asked a series of questions: Did he use drugs, alcohol, smoke? Was he ever under psychiatric care or prescribed mood altering medication? The counselor actually seemed disappointed when all of his questions were answered in the negative.
“You don’t seem to fit any of the normal profiles of a condemned prisoner,” he said.
“Maybe,” Lee responded rather sarcastically, “it’s because I’m not one of your normal condemned prisoners. Maybe I was actually wrongly convicted!”
The counselor scoffed and answered “Yeah! Sure, and so is everyone else in here.” He spoke as if the judicial system would never make a mistake.
When he was seen by the Classification Committee, he was told that none of the paperwork pertaining to his case or time in the county jail had been received. The only reason the prison had accepted him was because the court paperwork committing him to prison had come up with him in the transportation car. Because of the lack of paperwork, he could count on staying in the Adjustment Center for another two weeks. He told them about all of the death threats he had received and requested protective custody status. He was refused and assigned to an integrated exercise yard. They told him that he would have to identify the persons that were threatening him before they could act on it. Lee thought to himself ‘Guess I’ll have to have a knife in my gut before they believe me!’
During his second week in the A/C, he began to hear his name spoken by some of the other inmates on the floor. They were speaking Spanish and he was able to pick up the word “muerte”. He had taken a year of Spanish in high school. He didn’t know a lot of Spanish, but he knew that word! Requesting to see his counselor again, he related the new threats to his life and renewed his request for protective custody status,
“You know,” his counselor said, “once you’re assigned to the PC yard, no change in status will ever be allowed,”
Lee looked directly into his eyes and spoke softly, “If it’s a choice between spending the rest of my time here on a PC exercise yard or going to an integrated yard and having my throat cut, it’s not a hard choice for me to make!”
The next day, he saw the committee again and his request for protective custody was finally granted. He was then told that his paperwork still hadn’t arrived, but that it was no reason that he should be punished by being forced to remain in the A/C. He was told that he would be transferred to the condemned row building later that morning. At 11:30, he was told to pack up his gear… it was moving time.