#DEATHROW SHIRT FREE#
Even when the men manage to nurture relationships with girlfriends or wives in the free world, they’re never able to touch. Their only regular physical contact with another human is when the guards put them in handcuffs. (The Texas Department of Criminal Justice denies these claims.) The prison permits one five-minute phone call every 90 days. Sometimes, the men say, they go weeks without setting foot outdoors or being able to take a shower. Polunsky Unit have spent their days in near-total isolation, only allowed to leave their cells for two hours of recreation, three days a week, alone, in day rooms or fenced-in cages - if the guards feel like letting them out or aren’t too short-handed. In the decades since then, the men on death row at the Allan B. As Ford remembers it, he was on the second bus there. Officials spoke of imminent transfers to a new, higher-security death row in Livingston. Off-duty prison workers found his body a week later, drowned in a nearby stream.īy the time the following summer rolled around, the men on Huntsville’s death row knew their lives were about to change for the worse. Only one made it all the way into the woods. When the guards spotted the men and started firing at them, six surrendered. One person stayed behind in the rec yard to shoot hoops, making enough noise to cover the sound of a purloined hacksaw cutting through a chain-link fence. The night of Thanksgiving, seven men staged a breakout.
The death row that Ford entered in Huntsville offered some of those freedoms until an incident in 1998 changed everything. In North Carolina, they can take prison jobs in Florida they can have TVs in their cells and in Louisiana, they’re allowed to have contact visits, where they can hug their friends and families. In Arizona, people on death row can go to the rec yard and day room in groups for a few hours a day. Some prisoners sentenced to death in Missouri and California, for example, are mixed with the general population. Not every state keeps its death-row population in solitary. Some simply drop their appeals and volunteer for execution. Prisoners living in severe isolation - like the men on Texas’ death row - turn to suicide at a higher rate than those in the general population. Decades of research shows long-term isolation can cause hallucinations and psychosis. “All international standards and norms say that the use of isolation should be a last resort,” says Merel Pontier, a Texas-based lawyer who has researched death-row conditions. In many states, prisoners spend those years living in isolation so extreme the United Nations condemns it as torture. In the early 1980s, prisoners across the country spent an average of six years on death row before they faced execution. Lawyers can spend years arguing that their clients have such low cognitive capacity that it would be cruel to kill them or that new DNA technology could prove their innocence. Some states have had difficulty procuring execution drugs, and landmark court rulings have banned executions of people deemed “insane” or intellectually disabled. While fewer prisoners arrive on death row each year, they languish there far longer.
The number of people sentenced to death each year has declined over the past two decades in Texas and across the country as the cost of prosecuting and defending death-penalty cases has ballooned and public support for capital punishment has dropped. Roughly 200 people are on death row in Texas today, less than half the peak population in 1999. That was how, one day, Ford caught familiar words drifting down from the cells above him, phrases like, “I’ll cast a spell!” “Aren’t there too many of them?” “I think you have to roll.” And because they were locked behind bars rather than solid doors, they could call out to one another and talk. The men were allowed to hang out together, watch television, play basketball and go to work at prison jobs. By October, at age 20, he was on death row.īack then, death row for men was located in a prison near Huntsville, where hundreds lived in tiny cells.
#DEATHROW SHIRT TRIAL#
He was so confident that a jury would believe him that he rejected a plea deal and took his case to trial in July 1993.
There was no physical evidence clearly connecting him to the crime. He has maintained that the two men who entered the house were brothers, and that he was outside in the car the whole time. They arrested Ford, who was 18 at the time, the following day. Within hours, police picked up a suspect, who said Ford was his partner.
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