Death Watch Journal for Kevin Varga – DAY 30

I once saw the stockyards of a local slaughterhouse where the cattle are off loaded into pens to await their turn on the kill floor. A herder comes out to force them into the chute that leads onto the kill floor where a faceless man shoots them in the head and then he awaits the next bovine with a passionless patience. Why should he have compassion for them when they are not worth his worry? After all why waste your emotion upon an unthinking entity, when another will be waiting to face their death as well.

When a man first comes to death row he is placed into the general population of other death row inmates and soon it is easy to forget that you have been sentenced to die here, then every once in a while your lawyer sends you the denial from the courts and for a brief time you think of your sentence, only to lose yourself in the distractions that have become your life in this place, before you realize is that life is turned into the date of your death. That was the day I became cattle. I was moved from the holding pens into the chute that leads to the kill floor, but unlike those mindless cattle, I intend to fight the faceless man who will push that button that will stop my heart. My “fight” is here with these words. I do not wish to be lead to my death on the kill floor with a passionless death at the end. I thought that being moved to death watch was the hard part, but it is not. I must watch each man leave and not come back. Once a man is on death watch they have fourteen cells on the section, as any of the sections on this building where death row inmates are housed, but they have two cells that are equipped with cameras where each man is moved when his date moves forward just like our cattle we are funneled into the chutes that leave us in a position to die. My cell is right next to one of these two cells. Joshua “Moe” Maxwell was in that cell but before his corpse was in the ground they moved another man into this cell. I feel like a man being tortured by having to sit and watch each of these men be led to their deaths. As much as I dreaded coming to death watch, I dread that cell even more.