Date with Death (The Final Week)

It won’t be too much longer until instead of counting down how many days I have left until my scheduled execution, I will begin to count down the hours. As I’m sit at the end of my steel bunk, leaning over the very small “table” to write this, I now have only five days left, and they are passing quickly.

 

If I count it down in hours, it seems like so much more time. That five days will amount to one hundred and twenty hours, and since it’s now almost 10:00 am, and they won’t carry out my execution until 6:00 p.m. on Thursday October 5, 2017, that means that I can add another eight hours – for a grand total of one hundred and twenty-eight hours. And yet with each passing moment, my time on this earth diminishes. By the time I’ve finished writing this, I will be down to about one hundred and twenty-five hours. And by the time you are reading this, I will probably already be dead. 

 

A few days ago I made the transition from “Phase I” to “Phase II” on Death Watch. That is a significant step. This whole Death Watch process is a finely timed process and it’s progress is frighteningly predictable. Florida has had a lot of practice in carrying out executions, and while the rest of the country is backing away from the death penalty, Florida is performing a record number of executions. The current “Tea-Party Conservative” Governor Rick Scott is running for a seat on the U.S. Senate and knows very well that nothing gets more votes in the rural deep south then a good ole-fashioned lynching, and for that reason Governor Scott has already carried out more executions then any other governor in Florida history. And he intends to continue if the courts allow him.

 

I already knew that early Thursday morning, September 28, they would remove all my personal property, even my clothes, from my Death Watch cell and place it all in a steel foot locker outside the cell, just beneath the window through which I gaze morning to watch the sunrise. My property remains there. When I need something, it is retrieved for me, and I am allowed to keep it as long as I’m using it. 

 

“Phase II” consists of the last seven days prior to scheduled execution. At that point, not only is all personal  property removed from my cell, but a guard is stationed directly in front of my cell, so I am under constant supervision now. Officially, it’s comparable to a suicide watch, as State of Florida can’t have the condemned prisoner cheating it out of an execution by committing suicide. But nobody has ever done that. Back about twenty years ago, I had heard that Daniel Reneta tried to cut his wrists with the edge of a plastic spoon. They just took him up to the clinic and sewed up the superficial wound, and then killed him a few days later.

 

But I see this whole Phase II transition as another part of this meticulously orchestrated process intended to mentally move me along towards my date with death so that when the time comes to take me around to the execution chamber, I am conditioned to cooperate.

 

When you think about it, it says a lot about who we are as a society, that so much thought and planning is invested in carrying out this process, which has only one objective – to terminate the life of another human being.

 

A few hours after my property was removed from my cell, leaving me with nothing but my dark blue gym shorts and a t-shirt that has long ago seen better days, the warden, accompanied by members of his staff, arrived. I was politely advised that “the doctor” would be down in a few minutes to examine my veins to ensure they are healthy eno9ugh to absorb the intake of execution drugs.

 

As the entourage of men entered the death watch area, I immediately recognized all but two of the five or six. One man especially went out of his way to conceal his identity. This was the man who, in the capacity of his medical duty, would put the I.V.s into my arms and connect the tubes that carried that lethal cocktail of drugs that would terminate my life.

 

He wore a full body haz-mat-type suit, soft, almost baby blue, in color, with a hoodie-ish veil pulled tightly over his head, and a white cloth surgeon’s mask covering his face, topped by a pair of prescription glasses. Unlike everyone else, he wore no state issue identification, or anything that distinguished who he was.

 

Obviously, this was a practice run. I was instructed to put my right arm though the cell – front bars. The hooded man took my arm and immediately began to run his thumb across the vein at the inner elbow, whispering in a hushed tone so low that I could not even make it out, as another man in civilian clothes took notes.

 

They appeared pleased at the plumpness of that vein in my right arm, gently pushing at it, up and down, watching it spring back each time. I am pretty sure I even heard an expression of satisfaction, something to the effect “this is a good one” … but then again, maybe it was all in my head. Something was whispered and immediately written down. 

 

I was then instructed to put my left arm out, and without hesitation I comply, as that was what is expected of me. But as I do, I mentally ask myself why I am so willingly assisting them as I know that what this is really is about killing me.

 

There, standing in front of my death watch cell, checking my veins, are the very men planning to murder me in less than a week. And as these men proceed to perform this ritual I am expected to facilitate their efforts – to assist them in terminating my life. And It bothers me that I am so willingly to go along.  What I really want is to put my arm back through the bars and tell them in no uncertain terms that I will not take part in this process.

 

But instead I say nothing. Like a cow being let to the slaughterhouse, I slowly take each step towards my fate.  At least farm animals are oblivious to what awaits them when they reach the end of the line.

 

That man hiding behind that light blue haz-mat suit takes my left arm as I extend it through the cell bars and proceeds to perform the same touching motion on the main vein of that arm. But as he does, it was clear that he quickly becomes concerned. He whispers to the man standing beside him taking notes, and now this other man leans over for a closer look. I am instructed to ball up my fist and pump it like I am squeezing a tennis ball.  Again, I comply. The (presumed) doctor ties a latex strip of ribbon to my upper arm and after a few quick pumps of my fist the doctor rubs across and presses down and the vein springs back. Now he is satisfied.

 

And just that quickly, they are gone.

 

A few hours later, the Catholic Priest Father Slawomir Bielasiewicz from St. Mary’s Catholic Church comes by to do communion and talk about what happens as the time of execution grows closer. Unlike Hollywood movies, my priest or spiritual advisor will not be allowed to walk with me into the execution chamber, nor even administer communion and last rites immediately before the scheduled execution. Instead, he will deliver my last communion earlier in the morning.  That is to be the extent of my spiritual preparation.

 

Because nobody has known how to pronounce the priest’s name properly in the years that I have known him, at his instruction, I’ve always simply called him Father Slovic, as does everybody else.

 

In the hours leading up to my scheduled execution, after I’ve had my last visit with my family, Father Slovic and my spiritual advisor, Catholic lay minister Dale Recinella, will be with my family to help them through the execution. They have already met and know my family and I am glad for that. My parents and family are taking all of this hard. It really is so much harder on our family and friends then it is on us.

 

Then I have a phone call from my dear friend Geesje, who has stood by me for more years then I can remember. Like my family and my small group of closest friends, she will take this hard. But when I talk to her, we still laugh and I do what I can to keep her hope alive. How I wish I could just hold her and tell her that it will be alright, but she knows that I cannot tell her that, as we don’t know how all this will end.

 

And it doesn’t help that my state-agency lawyers have already made the decision not to pursue anymore appeals other than what they feel is the strongest – the challenge to constitutionality of the death sentences.

 

That decision may very well have sealed my fate. Like most of us under a sentence of death, it’s hard to have confidence in the lawyers representing us as, with few exceptions, their loyalty is not to us, but to their own personal objective of fighting the death penalty.

 

Effectively dropping my actual innocence appeals rather then pursue them to the federal courts and to the Supreme Court means that now, my only chance will be to convince the Supreme Court that the Florida Supreme Courts ruling that recognized that I (and most other Florida death row prisoners) was illegally sentenced to death but that for no other reason other than our death sentences were imposed prior to June 2002, we would not be granted relief.  All those sentenced after 2002 are having their illegally-imposed death sentences thrown out.

  

I do understand why the lawyers feel that the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately find this partial retroactivity rule granting relief to some, but not others, unconstitutionally arbitrary and fundamentally unfair. But at the same time, I also understand that, historically, the Supreme Court takes its own time to exercise discretion on when to accept review of an issue.

 

That is why I feel very betrayed by my lawyer’s decision to just drop all other appeals but this illegal death sentence issue.  I wish they would have discussed it with me first.  I would have liked a say in it.

 

To borrow from an analogy, “putting all the eggs in one basket” is a good way to get me killed. And at this moment, I don’t feel like they even care. I’ve fought this fight to prove my innocence for thirty-four years and now that I’m in that final stretch, they’ve pulled the rug out from beneath me. For them, it’s all about fighting the death penalty. For me, the only thing that matters is having an opportunity to prove my innocence. They’ve now taken that away from me.

 

So, I will now spend this weekend, which may very well be the last weekend of my life, personally writing up that actual innocence/DNA appeal myself. And on Monday, I will do my best to mail it express overnight to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the time the court receives my handwritten appeal (I don’t have access to a typewriter), I will have only two days until my scheduled execution. 

 

It would be nice to have a lawyer willing to fight for me and not just fight their own fight against the death penalty. But having an advocate willing to fight for our freedom is not a luxury condemned prisoners are often afforded. The most we can hope for, if we are lucky, is to be assigned a lawyer who at least knows what to do, and hope that his or her agenda is consistent with ours.

 

But I don’t have time to allow this unexpected last minute betrayal to drag me down. I have no choice but to accept it for what is and focus on doing what I can to at least try to get my actual innocence DNA issue before the Supreme Court.

 

Years ago I got into the practice of meditating when the stress builds, and am glad that I did, as I need that now more than ever.

 

Sometimes I wonder why it is that I haven’t descended into insanity and lost my mind, as so many others around me have. The irony in that is that if I had lost my mind, the State of Florida wouldn’t be able to kill me, as the Supreme Court declared years ago that it is “cruel and unusual punishment” to kill a person who doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand that he or she is about to be put to death. 

 

By Friday, September 29, I receive the news that the Florida Supreme Court had denied the legal claim on why my death sentences must be vacated. It was a 5 to 1 decision in which the majority said nothing more but that they already decided the issue in other cases and would rely on their earlier decisions in Hitchcock v State and Asay v State.

 

But Florida Supreme Court Justice Pariente strongly dissented, writing her own singular opinion on why the rest of the court was wrong, stating “I dissent. I would grant Lambrix a new penalty phase as a result of the jury’s non-unanimous recommendation of death.” Pariente reiterated her previously stated position that the United States Supreme Court decision in Hurst v Florida (Jan 2015) must be retroactively applied to all those illegally sentenced to death, not just some, stating that “the statute under which Lambrix was sentenced, which only required that a bare majority of the twelve member jury recommend a sentence of death, was unconstitutional, and therefore unreliable, under both the Sixth and Eighth Amendment.,” She explained at length how the record clearly shows that my legal council did properly preserve this issue from the very beginning of my capital case (“Indeed Lambrix’s attorney’s made every argument they could to justify retroactive application of Hurst v Florida to Lambrix’s case long before Hurst was even decided”).

 

Justice Pariente then concluded by stating: “Denying Lambrix relief when other similarly situated defendants have been granted relief amounts to the denial of due process Hitchcock, 2017 WL 3431500, at *3 (Pariente, J., dissenting). To avoid denying two of the most critical constitutional protections on the eve of the ultimate punishment, I would grant Lambrix a new penalty phase. Accordingly, I dissent.”

 

Having the Florida Supreme Court deny relief by a split decision will help when my lawyers now expeditiously appeal this issue to the United States Supreme Court early next week. Maybe that strong disagreement amongst the Florida Supreme Court will be enough to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to accept review and stop my scheduled execution. The next few days will tell. 

 

One thing is now clear. It is now up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether I will live or die. And they will render that decision well before anyone reads what I’m writing today.

 

I have to wonder why I’m even writing this, when by the time I mail this out and it is typed up and posted, there’s a really strong probability that I will be dead. But I already know the answer to that. I write in the hopes that it will allow others to understand what we go through as condemned prisoners. And what I write today will be around a lot longer than any of us will be.

 

The truth of the matter is that I am not afraid of dying. For to many years now I have existed in a state of perpetual limbo, precariously balanced over that abyss that separates the living from the dead.

 

In those many years that slowly passed one long lonely day at a time, I have seen to many others around me succumb to a fate even worse than death – that slow erosion of hope that kills a man from the inside out, until all that’s left is that physical shell of a man who once was.

 

But even if I am dead by the time anyone reads this, I believe without doubt that I will be in a better place. And I will go knowing just how blessed I have been to have had those in my life who made the sacrifice of standing up when it would have been so much easier to abandon me.  I hold on to that measure of faith that those who we connect to in this life though love, and with whom we nurture a spiritual communion of eternal souls in this life will survive our mortal death, and in whatever might lay beyond, find each other again.

 

Although I may have lived and died a condemned man, wrongly convicted of a crime I did not commit, I still have been so incredibly blessed by having these people in my life.  Even on my darkest of days, their spiritual light sustains my faith and hope.

 

And so if I am gone by the time you read this, I ask only that you allow for a moment of silence to honor those I left behind, and pray that they will not suffer in my absence, but find strength and joy in knowing that I will be in a better place, finally free from the suffering and pain that this life has held. I will be at peace.