paige st. john The Cost of Doing Nothing · paige st. john The Cost of Doing Nothing Revisiting California’s death row S lotted between steel and concrete, California’s condemned

paige st. john

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Revisiting California’s death row

Slotted between steel and concrete, California’s condemned grow old.

Child stalkers, serial killers, men who maimed, dismembered, and raped are

in walkers and wheelchairs. Graying now are the hold-up men who shot pizza-

joint clerks or jewelry-store managers, and the crack-addicted panhandler who gunned

down the woman who had rebuffed him outside a hotdog stand.

In California, they do not die by lethal injection but by hepatitis and cancer or the

infirmities of time. They overdose on meth or strangle themselves on knotted bed-

sheets and electric cords. Others wait in diapers, with oblivious minds, shipped to

hospital wards and hospice units.

For the rest, there is limbo.

For the majority of condemned men in California, death row is a cavernous granite

warehouse at San Quentin State Prison called East Block. The cells are stacked five

high, akin to containers in the hold of a cargo ship. Here, some 500 convicted mur-

derers wait for executions that never come.

East Block also is shuttered to the forces of redemption. The condemned seldom

leave, and outsiders even more rarely are allowed in. There is no pretext of rehabili-

tation—no prison jobs, no drug treatment, no courses on anger management. The

condemned speak with envy about what they do not know: that ‘‘other’’ San Quentin

with its army of prison volunteers, the Shakespearean acting troupe, the inmate news-

paper, the technology lab, and business incubator.

They live in extraordinary confinement, allowed out of their cells only every few

days, one at a time to shower, or in gang-aligned groups to exercise. The tennis-court-

sized yard is so crowded that many inmates remain in their 4’ x 8’ cells. Vitamin D

deficiency from lack of sun is common.

Every half hour, a guard walks by, to check for suicides.

BOOM: The Journal of California, Vol. 6, Number 2, pps 42–51, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for

permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and

Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2016.6.2.42.

42 B O O M C A L I F O R N I A . C O M

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Untitled-Opus March 2, 2013 (E PLURIBUS UNUM). © 2016 The William A. Noguera Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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State corrections administrators refused to allow journal-

ists access to the state’s death row for years. Then in Decem-

ber 2015, Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard changed his

mind. Death row had become topical. For half a day, he

opened death row to the media—then closed it again.

The impetus for the brief opening was California’s public

comment period on its latest execution protocol—the step-by-

step procedures prison officials would have to follow if the

state were to resume executions. This is California’s third

protocol in a decade, and it is as unlikely as its predecessors

to be used anytime soon. Death penalty opponents and death

penalty advocates meanwhile are preparing dueling ballot

initiatives to repeal or expedite the killing of prisoners.

There will be convincing arguments about the innocents

almost assuredly cast among the condemned.

There will be outrage over the unrequited pain of those

whose mothers and sons were slain.

And the heat will be about a capital punishment system

that exists only in name.

None of this is new in California. It is an old dance

around an older question that never confronts the reality,

the high price of doing nothing.

Kenneth Friedman didn’t pretend to be innocent.

He admitted to kidnapping and murdering two men in

Torrance in the early 1990s—one of them apparently

a bystander—on the order of one of Miami’s petty crime

bosses. He sat on their chests and strangled them slowly,

one at a time with a phone cord. Already serving a life sen-

tence in federal prison for the interstate aspects of the kill-

ings when he pleaded guilty in California, Friedman

expected a return trip to the more comfortable confines of

the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

What the hit man from Queens, New York, hadn’t bar-

gained for was San Quentin.

When he arrived in 2005, conditions on death row were

deplorable. Pigeons free-ranged in the granite cell block and

their dung encrusted the steel railings and catwalks of the

five-story tiers of cells. The rest was rust. Sewage dripped

from the open showers and inmates flushed their houses

clean by flooding the cell floor with toilet water, then releas-

ing a dam of towels with a shouted warning—or sometimes

not—to those in the cells below.

The insane on the row ranted and screamed so much

above the general din of steel upon rock that a federal mas-

ter ordered the installation of noise monitors.

Friedman had been an athletic figure who practiced mar-

tial arts. On East Block he was crippled by a degenerative

joint disease. His legs swelled. He tore a rotor cuff that went

unrepaired and contracted hepatitis. He became reliant on

a walker and painkillers. When medical staff believed he

was dealing his fentanyl patches to other prisoners, they cut

him off the powerful opioid so abruptly while simulta-

neously tapering his morphine prescription that they were

chastised by a federal court monitor for failing to provide

a substitute painkiller.

Then, prison doctors wanted to amputate Friedman’s

foot.

He saw his future in the other crippled men in the cells

surrounding him on the bottom tier, where San Quentin

put the elderly, the lunatic, and the crazed. Eight years after

conviction, with the deadline to file his state appeal extended

thirteen times, Friedman’s California taxpayer-funded law-

yer had just turned in the opening brief of his bid to return

to federal prison.

He told his cousin in New Jersey that death would be

better. ‘‘He said ‘Fuck these people. I’m going to do it my

way,’’’ said Charlie Heller.

Just before dawn on 26 August 2012, a patrol guard

found Friedman strangled by a bedsheet stripped into rope

and strung to a steel shelf, knotted around his neck, hands,

and feet. The rigging was so complex it stuck years later in

the mind of the Marin County Sheriff’s coroner who han-

dled the report. At the time, what the deputy noted in his

report was that after cutting Friedman free, or perhaps even

before, the guards had shackled the corpse.

It is an old dance around an older question that

never confronts the reality, the high price of

doing nothing.


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Untitled-Opus March 9, 2013 (E PLURIBUS UNUM). © 2016 The William A. Noguera Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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It’s a hallmark of California death row. In nearly every

suicide report—and there are many; until 2013 the state led

the nation in condemned suicides—coroners arrive to find

the dead men in cuffs.

In a wilder California, from 1800 to 1941, 510 con-

demned were hung or shot for offenses as minor as theft

and sodomy. The state began to gas condemned prisoners in

1938, executing another 194.

But modern California’s appetite for execution is no

match to its even greater passion for the death sentence.

Since 1978 when California voters restored the death pen-

alty after courts had decreed it unconstitutional, prosecutors

have convinced juries to condemn more than 900 mur-

derers to death. The sentences are trumpeted in headlines.

Jurors are congratulated on their civic duty and their cour-

age, and discharged back to their ordinary lives. Only the

prosecutors go on, adding up capital convictions like coups

to roll out at election to remind voters of their championship

of justice.

And at that point, the vengeance of California looks away.

In thirty years, only thirteen of the condemned have been

executed by the state, and none for a decade while lawyers

argue whether the state’s execution methods are painless

and merciful. There are few who are eligible, anyhow.

The California Supreme Court upholds nearly every

death penalty conviction it hears but federal judges reverse

a large percentage of cases that make it that far—not

because they find the appellants innocent, but because they

find their trials flawed. The cases are sent back for retrial,

and, if prosecutors want to attempt it, the process begins

again. There is no statute of limitations on second chances

to get it right. Douglas Stankewitz, condemned thirty-seven

years ago, longer than anyone else on death row, is now

awaiting a new trial in Fresno.

Some men have been reconvicted three times. Others win

on appeal and are converted to life prisoners. By that change

in status they are suddenly afforded much of what California

had denied—prison employment, open cell blocks, extensive

yard time, the ability to walk without chains. Life.

For an appeal to get that far in California requires now on

average almost three decades. So few condemned cases have

run the gauntlet that a federal judge in 2014 deemed the

state’s capital punishment system was unconstitutionally

random, but his ruling was overruled in 2015 by a federal

appeals panel.

Only 16 of the current condemned class of 747 are eligi-

ble for execution, if the state did such a thing. The eldest of

them is seventy-eight. He has been waiting thirty years.

Killing time then becomes the objective.

California has scant provisions to occupy the con-

demned, fewer still that might pass as a form of human

enrichment. Each man may buy himself a television, but

it must remain silent, listened to through earphones.

Inmates may also own a guitar or a flute or a harmonica,

and playing hours are restricted. The rest is books, corre-

spondence classes, and paper crafts. A major object of nego-

tiation last year for the death-row-inmate advisory council

was to seek restoration on the exercise yard of a deck of Uno

cards.

Enrichment then, for Clifton Perry, is the poetry circle he

happened into through death row’s psychiatric program—

a program once infamous for running therapy sessions that

consisted of nothing more than movies. To read and cri-

tique each other’s work, a small number of men gather in

a semicircle of booth-sized cages, death row’s version of

group interaction.

Through this outlet, Perry has found a pursuit that carries

him forward. His poetry is contained in a collection housed at

the State Capitol, bound in a collection of California’s best

works. He is competing for international recognition.

Once a member of LA’s 59 East Side Crips who came of

age in juvenile detention halls, he’s the son of a heroin

addict. He enrolled in college but between classes, he

robbed stores. Once, his case files show, he resuscitated

a child. In 1995, at twenty-five, Perry shot the owner of a Stop

and Shop.

Twenty-one years later, lawyers in state and federal

courts still argue over whether the gun was fired in panic,

while Perry tries to not obsess about just having lost a shot at

one of East Block’s rare custodial assignments. After a hiatus

of several years, San Quentin recently decided to return

work privileges to death row. Fourteen of the more than

500 men on East Block are assigned as ‘‘porters’’ to scrub

the showers or clear lunch sacks or stray balls from the

exercise yards. But Perry, having been deemed so lucky, lost

his spot even before his first day after he sent himself to the

mental health program for a cooling-off spell.

He speaks in the careful fashion of a long-timer, break-

ing off anything he has to say at the slightest interruption.


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Untitled-Opus May 20, 2013 (E PLURIBUS UNUM). © 2016 The William A. Noguera Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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‘‘Go ahead.’’ It frustrates him that a state that holds the fate

of men in limbo for so long puts no effort in their reform—

as if the lives and souls of those to die do not still matter.

In a legal sense, they don’t. Federal rulings hold that the

US Constitution requires only that prisons be ‘‘safe.’’ There

is no right to rehabilitation.

Thus, the ‘‘constitutional minimum’’ of existence for

California’s condemned has been governed by federal

judges from almost the start.

The year after the death penalty was reinstated, a briefly

condemned man named Maurice S. Thompson (he was

resentenced the following year) filed what became a twenty-

year class action lawsuit to force the state to provide a prison

life approximating that of other inmates. In a series of con-

sent decrees beginning in 1980, the state was required to

provide exercise, access to the law library, typewriters, sani-

tary conditions, hot meals, tolerable noise levels, and reli-

gious services. In 2006, it was ordered to quiet the

screaming psychotics and remove the dung of pigeons.

The death row chapel speaks to the minimalist reading of

those decrees. It is a converted shower bay, fenced to resem-

ble a holding cell. The clergy stands in his own cage, in

bulletproof vest, beneath the water pipes.

‘‘I believe the saddest thing for me is when I was seeing

the languishing Men here, Men like Horace Kelly & Mack

Man,’’ Perry wrote in a letter last July.

‘‘Mack Man would walk around so filthy that it grieves

me as a proud Black Man to see another Brotha that deteri-

orated! His hair was so crunchy that he had lice that made

a home in his hair. They said when they cut his hair, about

40 bugs just started scattering because of the light.’’

The men he referred to were the delusional and psy-

chotic inmates who lived on death row before the 2013 fed-

eral order for California to provide the condemned with full

psychiatric care.

Since the 1980s, they had been left on East Block, ranting

and delusional in their cells, rolling feces into imaginary

confections. Horace ‘‘Smelly’’ Kelly, who raped the women

he killed, had lived unwashed amid garbage to his knees.

Mack Man was Jeffrey Jones, the real-life version of a Holly-

wood psycho killer who prowled bathrooms, using a ham-

mer to bash the heads of his victims. Prison records show

Jones often fell catatonic, lying naked for days at a time on

the floor in his feces. At other times, he rambled in endless

nonsensical wordstreams, promising to ‘‘kill again with

a black-handled buck knife’’ as soon as he was paroled, ‘‘a

217-pound muscle with sperm.’’ As recently as 2011, a note

in his psychiatric files shows, Jones, still shitting on himself,

had maggots living in his beard.

In 2014, a federal judge added full psychiatric care to the

‘‘constitutional minimum’’ of the condemned. In 2015, Cali-

fornia opened the nation’s first psychiatric death row unit.

In less than a year, the forty-cell floor had only a single

empty bed.

With a death penalty that exists in name only, California

whittles away at its condemned with time.

Simply wait long enough, and terrifying men like Teofila

Medina become nothing. The gigantic killer’s capacity for

violent rage was infamous. His frightened sister turned him

in to police in 1984 after he killed four people in four rob-

beries in Orange and Riverside counties. In prison, he had

terrified two doctors, smashing the glass partition separat-

ing him from a psychiatrist and proposing sex with another,

right before his attorney. His lawyer, a man with some

humor, relished in calling his towering client ‘‘Junior.’’

In 1987, at conviction, two doctors testified Medina was

schizophrenic and hallucinating but three doctors said they

doubted it. Four years later, a prominent expert on serial

killers, neurologist Dr. Jonathan Pincus, examined Medina

on death row. He described a man unable to carry on a con-

versation, rutted in ‘‘reiterative, pressured speech regarding

hemorrhoids.’’

Prison medical files show he had chronic bladder pro-

blems written off as ‘‘benign prostatic hypertrophy’’—an

enlarged prostate. When his belly swelled with urine in late

The state that holds the fate of men in limbo for so

long puts no effort in their reform–—as if the lives

and souls of those to die do not still matter.


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Untitled Opus July 19, 2014 (E PLURIBUS UNUM). © 2016 The William A. Noguera Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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2014 to the size of advanced pregnancy, Medina was driven

to a local hospital where a urologist quickly surmised can-

cer. No one informed Medina’s lawyer back in Los Angeles

who was still working on an appeal that argued Medina’s

mental illness merited him the mercy of a life sentence.

Months after the diagnosis, a state lawyer who came to

visit found a confused man refusing treatment for normally

treatable prostate cancer. He said doctors who sought to do

a bone scan were trying to kill him with radiation. He

became so frail another lawyer who came to check on him

asked the guard if he had brought the right man to the legal

visiting room.

A San Quentin physician tried one more time to con-

vince Medina to accept treatment and then when he still

refused, referred him to California’s praised hospice pro-

gram at another prison, where dying inmates are visited by

family without the tight custody of incarceration. The staff

there said he never made it.

The warden wouldn’t allow his admission. Junior

Medina died in March 2015 under high security down the

hall. Coincidentally, the very next day the Ninth Circuit

Court of Appeals rejected the dead man’s appeal—thirty-

one years after conviction. By then Medina was headed to

the crematorium.

A month later, San Quentin released Medina’s medical

records. The files revealed that just before his cancer was

discovered, Medina had been diagnosed with ‘‘cognitive def-

icits.’’ A prison psychiatrist declared the mental impairment

cured with vitamin B12 just in time for the prison system to

allow the condemned man to reject medical care because he

feared a bone scan more than death by cancer.

In the end, Californians got no execution, if they had ever

wanted one.

They were spared the wrenching debate and moral chal-

lenge of having to actually kill someone. They avoided, too,

the no-less-difficult moral prospect of extending mercy to

a guilty and cruel killer. Nor were they asked to consider

what California had actually done—still does—with its pre-

tend death penalty and its sentences of limbo.

Medina’s lawyer of three decades was left with a storage

locker stacked with boxes of files and evidence, old family

photos by the beach, and case notes as well as the killer’s

requests for magazines and sappy greeting cards addressed

to the female legal aides who were his only visitors—the

summation of a life on death row.

There was no place to take the next appeal.

There was no one to claim the belongings.

There was no one to pay to preserve any of it.

The lawyer turned in the key and left it to the storage

company to dispose of the remains. B

Note

All artwork photographed by Melissa Ysais and reprinted courtesy

of the artist, William A. Noguera, who is a death row inmate at San

Quentin State Prison.


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Untitled-Opus June 1, 2013 (E PLURIBUS UNUM). © 2016 The William A. Noguera Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Documents

paige st. john The Cost of Doing Nothing · paige st. john The Cost of Doing Nothing Revisiting California’s death row S lotted between steel and concrete, California’s condemned