Bipolarland, Texas part 21

 19

Would we have made it back? We'll never know. All I know is that I stand more of a chance of survival on death row than I do on the roads in a speeding bus being chased and possibly shot at by the cops.

Yes, that's right... death row. I'm not there yet, but there's something in Texas called the Law of Parties. If your friend kills someone and you're there and don't stop him, you're held equally responsible. The Polunsky Unit is full of death-row inmates who never actually pulled the trigger. They say they're innocent because of this, of course, but they are just as guilty.

I'm just as guilty as Geoffrey.

But Geoff had to do what he had to do. And so did I. To get Ana out of there. To save her from indefinite detention. We were basically saving her life.

Geoff, my wonderful sweet Geoffrey, shot an innocent man. And I encouraged him, helped put him in a situation where he had to.

Then why do I feel so ashamed?

I'm brainwashed. That's it.

No. That cop was just doing his job to feed his family. He actually died. Ana would just have gotten indefinite detention. And she would probably have gotten out sometime. Maybe even soon.

But this is war. If someone was trying to kill you, or put you away for the rest of your life, and your life or permanent liberty (which is basically your life) depended on you killing the people who were trying to kill you or put you away for life... wouldn't you kill them too? They are not innocent people!

But his family is.

So is Ana's family.

I'm so confused.

Tiella, Teresa, Johanna, Bethany, Geoff, Ana, Elton and me are now known as the Houston Eight.

How do I know this? I hear the guards, and inmates too, talking at the Harris County Jail as me, Tiella, Teresa, Johanna, Bethany and Ana, without her baby, wait in a room with twenty others. It's standing room only. There's one toilet for twenty-some people. And it's boiling hot.

After they process us they send us to another room, a big one with concrete benches. Some women in there are sleeping, some are talking, one is praying, one is standing there spinning round and round, one is crying, one is clutching her stomach and moaning.

“Everyone kneel down facing the benches against the wall!” booms a male voice. We do; we are too traumatized to question.

Then two male guards come and literally search us for stuff we might have hidden inside us. Is this even legal?

I'm in a daze. I'm not sure what happened between the search and us suddenly being in the psychiatric cellblock of the Harris County Jail. I wonder how Elton and Geoff are doing. Are they together?

A pudgy woman is sitting on a steel bench at a longish steel table, jiggling her legs up and down. She must be on some kind of medication, and they're not giving her meds for the side effects. Women are screaming. Women are fighting. I look through the long, narrow window on the side of a metal door; it looks into a room with bunk beds. Just in time to see a woman yanking the mattress out from under a woman laying on the top bunk, knocking her to the floor. The woman who just fell to the floor screams; it's deafening. Then the two are all over each other. I shrink away, not wanting them to see me and go after me.

At least I have friends in here, so if someone tries to fight with me someone will have my back. I'm not scared when I'm with them, so I stay with them all the time.

We're sitting at one of the longish steel tables: Teresa, Tiella, Bethany, Ana, Johanna and me. Another woman, Gracie, is sitting with us. She's telling us about what goes on here. Then she tells us she was once at the HCPC too, and that she was on a unit where they treated the patients like HCPC was some prison or military operation. She actually likes it better here.

“Are you kidding?” another woman asks from over at another table. “I'd rather be in a hospital than here.”

“Have you ever been in a mental hospital?” Gracie shoots back.

Gracie has a point. In a way, it is safer here. No ECT. No guardianships. No DNR orders. Or maybe there are. I don't know.

I look in my “inmate guide” they gave me when I was processed for clues about how I'll be treated in here, but all they talk about is “Everybody makes mistakes, blah, blah, blah,” and that a dietician oversees the food and that we wear orange jumpsuits and some other banal everyday stuff.

The staff eventually find out I was the ringleader and organizer of the escape from the HCPC, and they put me in a cell by myself. The toilet is a kind of floor drain that flushes and then backs up, flooding part of the cell with water. Lucky I tested it before trying to use it. I stand here and wait and wait. Where are the others? Are they in cells like this too?

“If you leave me in here more than a day more I'm gonna kill myself!” I scream.

Then I'm on suicide watch, but at least in a cell with two of the others: Tiella and Bethany. They both said they're suicidal. Tiella, normally full of life, is laying like a corpse on her bunk. Bethany chats with me as usual and tries to chat with Tiella; I wonder if she didn't just say she was suicidal to keep Tiella company on suicide watch. There are four women in here that we don't know, too.

And we're constantly being watched, by each other and by guards. As we talk. As we sit on the shitter. As some of the women put in and take out tampons and put on and take off pads. As one woman masturbates in her sleep. As one older fat woman who wears diapers changes them, stinking up the whole room.

A woman with strawberry blonde curly hair breaks down and starts screaming and crying and is thrown by the guards into a side room by herself. She continues to wail.

It's nighttime now. “Hey, stop tossing and turning!” the diaper lady, who's in the bunk under mine, says. “It's fuckin' annoying. You're disturbed!”

“You wear stinky diapers!” I shoot back, then gasp out loud as I realize I probably just started a physical fight.

She gets up, shaking the bunk bed. Oh, God, no.

I know how people like that operate. I'm probably going to get a shitty diaper smushed into my face.

“Chasity, settle down. Go back to sleep,” a female guard who's watching us says.

“Fuckin' HELL, man!” Chasity exclaims, but she gets back into bed and rolls over, shaking the bunk bed again. Double standards? I think so!

I don't get any sleep. In the morning, Bethany says she didn't either. “Did you get any sleep, Tiella?” Beth says.

Tiella shakes her head. She looks really depressed.

Breakfast isn't bad. It's a boiled egg and some fruit and a biscuit. Lunch will probably be slop, though. I just have a feeling. Things like good food are usually just a once-in-a-while fluke.

Before I know it, I'm in the doctor's office. He asks if I'm on any medication. I tell him what I was on before I escaped from the HCPC. He puts me back on it. He's a nice guy. He asks me if I feel okay here. I say “Well, as okay as I can possibly feel in this place!”

“Try not to worry,” the doctor says. “We try to make it as therapeutic as possible in the psychiatric wing. You're lucky you're here... I mean in the psychiatric wing. You wound up in the right place.”

Me, Bethany and Tiella get off suicide watch a week later. We're back in the main area now, with Johanna and the others. Johanna tells us she called her parents and they tried to bail us out but we're apparently being held without bail.

And before I know it, I'm in court.

And no more Harris County Jail. Now it's on to something worse.

The first thing I see as Bethany, Teresa, Tiella, Johanna, Ana and me sit down is Geoffrey and Elton and guards who accompanied them to court.

Tiella is sitting beside me; she looks so depressed that I instinctively know that she wants to die. It's scary. Ana is crying and the lawyer Johanna's parents got for us is trying to console her. But the fact remains that she'll probably be deported once she gets out of jail, and her baby? Who knows?

“Where's your baby now?” I whisper to Ana.

“My husband,” Ana says.

“Do you trust him?” I ask. I don't know Ana, I realize. I don't even know if she has a good husband or an evil husband.

Ana nods.

“Good!” I say. “That's one good thing.”

Our victim’s name is Barry Eugene Dice. He has six children, all with the same wife he was still with when he died. His family all give victim impact statements, starting with his eleven-year-old daughter, April. She can’t stop crying, and she stares us straight in the face without wiping her eyes or anything. She talks about a loving father, a police officer who worked at the hospital, who gave his kids tours of the hospital. She tells us how his kids wanted to be doctors. “And he said,” she says, “’If you work hard to become a doctor by doing well in school, I’ll work hard as a police officer to make money to send you to university to make that happen.’” She blows her nose.

Then they show some videos of Barry. Barry is giving a smaller version of the girl I just saw, April, a stuffed polar bear. “Can I keep it-- can I keep him forever and ever?” she says.

“Yes… that’s why I gave him to you, sweetheart. I love you, April. I love you so very, very much, and I’m going to take you and your brothers and sisters up north to see Canada too to see the snow and the polar bears when I can afford to.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” April says, throwing her arms around him and kissing him and making her new little polar bear kiss him too, complete with sound effects. “I’m going to name him after you. I’m going to name him Barry Eugene.”

I don’t care at this point that the cameras are picking up footage of me bawling like someone who just lost a relative themself.

Next they show him handing April’s little sister Holly her lunch box on her way out the door to school. “Hey, wait!” he says.

“I’m gonna be late,” Holly says.

“First you have to repeat this stuff after me,” Barry Dice says.

“I already did this a hundred million times!” Holly says, giggling. “I know it!”

“Well, you gotta keep knowing it,” Barry Dice says. “Repeat: Nobody else is better than me.”

“Nobody else is better than me.”

“I’m not better than anyone else.”

“I’m not better than anyone else.”

“God loves me and everyone else equally.”

“God loves me and everyone else equally.”

“People who are different are different, not less.”

“People who are different are different, not less.”

“I love myself and Daddy loves me!”

“I love myself and Daddy loves me! I love you too, Daddy.”

Oh, God. Oh, my fucking God.

It cuts to another scene. They’re out camping, sitting around the campfire. April is holding her little polar bear. The six kids are there: April, Robin, Holly, Bobby, Ammon and Jesse. Their mother is making dinner in a cauldron on the fire. “Who wants soup?” she says. “I do, I do!” most of the kids say, running to line up with their bowls.

Barry Dice is sitting with April, and April says, “Sing me a song. Let’s sing.”

“Sure!” Barry Dice says, and he gently takes her bear and makes him climb up a nearby rock, singing “The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain to see what he could see.”

The others join in.

After the videos, his niece Tammy testifies that he was poor but worked overtime to buy toys for his kids.

Couldn’t we have bribed him? Why did we have to kill him to try and save Ana? We didn’t have to!

The prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for all of us. I knew it.

We'll probably all get it. There are no plea bargains to be made in our case. And the judge says as much. They already know that Geoff was the one who pulled the trigger. And that we let him. We keep our mouths shut about planning it, though, or it'll be a first-degree murder charge for sure.

The sentencing is today.

We sit down in the courtroom.

“Teresa Naomi Richardson, I sentence you to life without parole. You were with some very suggestive and dangerous people. I understand that, so I am showing you mercy.”

My anger flares up, but I have to keep my mouth shut. Well, at least one thing came out of the discrimination Teresa is suffering… Teresa isn’t going to die.

“Tiella Shandrina Aguecheek, your crime is especially heinous because you threatened your friends to force them to carry out your crime with you. I sentence you to the death penalty.”

I feel myself going white, then red, then white, then red.

“Johanna Sabina Jorgensen, you were also very suggestible. You are from Germany. English is not even your first language. But you knew what you were doing. I sentence you to the death penalty.”

No. No, no, no.

“Ana Maria Spinoza, you were suggestible, but like Miss Jorgensen, you knew what you were doing. You also knew what you were doing when you sneaked into the United States of America. People have to understand that when you come to America, you have to come legally and follow the law when you’re here. I sentence you to the death penalty.”

No.

“Elton Nicholas Delmar, Anne-Marie JoEllen Kornek, Bethany Jeanne Leclerc, and Geoffrey James Wolf, I sentence you to death.”

The only other thing I remember from the last court date before we have to start appealing is the judge saying, as we got up to leave, “May God have mercy on your sorry souls,” and looking straight at me and Geoffrey for some reason.

Once we're all convicted of capital murder and sentenced to the death penalty, they split us up. I whisper to Ana, who's to come with me and the other women to the Mountain View Unit, “I'm so sorry. I wanted you to be free and be able to raise your child in freedom. That's all.” The unspoken message is, “Now you won't be able to even see your child grow up.”

I'm sitting in my new isolation cell in the Mountain View Unit on Ransom Road in Gatesville, staring at the wall. I try to listen for noises Johanna, Ana, Tiella, and Bethany might be making, but I hear nothing. Teresa isn't here. She will be spared the death penalty because she's supposedly mentally retarded and was supposedly misled. She's here in Mountain View as well, but in the psych ward, not death row. The psych ward and death row are in the same building in the Mountain View Unit. But we never see Teresa.

There are so many things wrong about the fact that she's there. Teresa is not crazy, she just appears a little slow. She doesn't belong in a psych ward. Worse, she's being punished for having a disability by being so close to the death row inmates, some of them dangerous. She doesn't deserve this. They say she's not responsible for the officer's death so she doesn't get the death penalty, then they turn around and say she is so she still has to do life in prison. This is so damn confusing.

But because we never see Teresa, I never get to apologize to her, to tell her I understand the ridiculous and tragic situation we all landed her in. She herself never spoke a word to plan it; she just came with us.

Death row is isolated from the others and lonely. At least, since I agreed to make dolls for sick kids for free, I get to see Bethany, Ana, and Johanna and watch TV and go to Bible study and some other groups. The guards say Tiella is too depressed to do anything but lay in bed, so she has no privileges. In Bible study class, when we're talking about keeping good company; Bethany, Johanna and I all apologize to each other for landing each other in here. Beth and Jo also apologize to Ana because they haven't yet. We get the whole Bible study class crying. Murderers. Imagine.

Indeed, I’m making friends in here. I only have one enemy in here, but she hates everybody and thinks she’s above hanging out with us. Her name is Elizabeth Meadows, and she killed her kids, for fuck’s sake, but she thinks she’s better than us.

Carmen is another Spanish woman who speaks to Ana Maria in Spanish. She killed her abusive husband. Mindy Dubois was a prostitute who killed a bunch of her clients. Yvonne Deschamps killed a friend who she says raped her. He had already been in jail for four years for that, but was then let out on parole and she killed him before he could kill her or rape her again. Felicity Owens encouraged her teenage daughter who was suicidal and dying of cancer to commit suicide, but now Felicity regrets it and feels awful about it and the only thing she’s looking forward to now is joining her.

Then a friendly guard reveals to us that Tiella is very sorry too and that that's why she's so depressed. The guard confides in us that Tiella confided in her that since Tiella was the one that convinced Ana to come along on our escape from the HCPC, it's all Tiella’s fault. I tell the guard that she'd feel a lot better if the guard let her just talk to us once, and then maybe she'd come out and start working and participating in the other activities and talking to us. “Sorry, that's against regulations,” the guard says. “I'm really sorry.”

“Then can you tell Tiella for us?” I ask.

“That I can do.” She smiles.

This whole thing causes me to think a lot about cause and effect, as I sit in my cell once again, listening to people talking about us on the radio. I thought about turning Zygmunt in for hiding us, maybe for some sort of plea bargain, but he had nothing to do with the murder, so it wouldn't work. Anyway, there's no proof he even helped us or that we were even at his place. But I can't be mad at Zygmunt. If it weren't for him, Johanna and I wouldn't be such close friends. Indeed, we may never have seen each other again. And the others would never have known her.

A guard says I have a visitor. We go to the visiting area.

It's Johanna's mother, Traudl.

I know what she's going to say. Why else would she be here?

“I'm so sorry, Anne-Marie. I'm going bankrupt. I can't help you or Johanna or any of the others any longer.” She's crying. “You have to believe I'm trying. Johanna is my daughter! I sold my house to afford to defend you.”

“You WHAT? He said he was working pro-bono!”

“I told him to tell you guys that so you wouldn’t feel bad.”

“WHAT?” I say again.

“Anne-Marie, keep the conversation private, please!” a female guard shouts from across the room.

“But maybe these people can help,” Traudl says. And she produces some printed-out papers. From the internet. Holds them up to the window that divides us, through which we are talking on telephone-like devices.

“The Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty,” I read.

“Get some pen pals, Anne-Marie. I bet that soon you will be receiving mail from people who want to be your pen pals anyway. Maybe they can help with your legal defense fund. Even if they're just crime buffs, just roll with it and humor them and pretend to be their friend. Your lives are at stake here. I told the same thing to the others.”

Maybe I’m a masochist, but I want to see and hear more and more about our victim, Barry Eugene Dice. He was a good man, so I deserve to hurt for him and what I did to him. I sit in my cell, listening to the radio, to an interview with his wife, talking about how his six kids were hugging and kissing his body in the morgue for days after he died.

I wish I had a father like that.

I deserve what I’m getting. Maybe I should drop my appeals.

Another radio show is on. This one is an interview with a person Barry guarded at the hospital whom he befriended. A woman named Tabitha Connor. Tabitha says he was very compassionate and they had long conversations and they remained friends till the day he died.

What a coincidence; I get a letter from her today too. Telling me I should and will roast in hell soon.

I should. And I probably will.

I feel like a real scumbag slimeball shithead. I should never have done what I did. If I hadn't organized the escape from the HCPC, none of this would have happened. I caused Johanna's parents to go bankrupt and have to sell their house. God help me; I deserve to die. How can God help me? Maybe he can at least make it painless.

But it isn't.

Everyone in Texas these days knows the procedure.

First comes the sodium pentothal. It knocks you out, but only for a short while.

The pancuronium bromide comes next. It paralyzes you. You can't move, you can't talk, you can't breathe. The pentothal has worn off by then. You're suffering. Suffocating.

Then along comes the potassium chloride, which burns as it enters your veins and often dissolves the veins before finally putting you out of your misery.

The cop got a quick death, a gunshot through the head. We won't get a quick or painless death. I hate to sound entitled, but it just flat out isn't fair.

The guard named Georgia Fleming tells me that Geoffrey has a date. An execution date, that is.

I knew he would be first, since he pulled the trigger. It's six months from now.

“But we're not done in court yet!” I exclaim.

“Yes you are. You dropped your appeals.”

“No, we didn't. We ran out of money for lawyers so we'll have to represent ourselves.”

“That's not allowed. As far as the judge is concerned, you dropped your appeals. You'll find out when you go to court yourself.”

“Is that even legal?” I shout.

“I don't know,” Georgia Fleming smirks. “Get a lawyer and find out.”