Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (34 page)

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. That doesn’t mean much to me, even though I can feel the energy of it in the air. It almost feels like a really old holiday, perhaps the not-so-bright child that would result from the mating of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. I’m always amazed at how such things gradually take on a life of their own. I’m more interested in the energy of it than the actual game. If I had to articulate it, I’d say it’s like a happy tension. It’s kind of a pleasant feeling, actually. Kind of nice. And there’s not a guard in sight. They’re all down the hall somewhere, watching the game. If you ever decide to escape from prison, you should do it during the Super Bowl.

F
EBRUARY
10

Today I received a letter from Senator John Kerry, asking me for a donation. Much like the one I received last year from Joe Biden, this one also says that if I don’t help the Democrats they won’t be able to stop those evil Republicans from violating my civil rights. After reading it I could only quote the great Elvis Presley when he said, “What the hell, man?”

Lately I’ve been looking back over the past year at how much I’ve learned and improved. My health and strength have improved by tenfold at least. Around this time last year I was worn-out, exhausted, and in extreme pain. I dedicated nearly all of my time and energy to improving healing techniques and mastering my internal energy flow. When I reflect on how far I’ve come in one single year, I’m absolutely amazed. This year I’m doubling my efforts again, and I’m excited to see what will come next. I want to push myself beyond all of my previous boundaries. A great deal of esoteric work is like lifting weights—over time you grow stronger and stronger. You get as much out of it as you put into it. This past week I’ve pushed myself harder than ever before, and when I lie down at night I immediately fall into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. It’s satisfying, though. It’s the kind of satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve put all you have into getting something done.

M
ARCH
21

The hearing has now been pushed back all the way to December. I guess they haven’t had enough of my blood yet. And am I the only one who thinks it’s strange that the state is fighting so hard to prevent any more DNA testing from taking place? Why wouldn’t they want the evidence tested? The whole situation is becoming more insane by the day. In no way does anything happening here fall under the rubric of “justice.”

It’s officially spring. The wheel is turning again. The sun has entered Aries, and soon it will be April. The year is nearly a quarter over. How can you not be amazed by that? Sometimes I can feel time so vividly that I can almost reach out and touch it, like reading Braille.

J
ULY
10

It’s been a while since I’ve written, eh? I just had to take a little time off. I felt worn-out and ragged, angry at those responsible for dragging this situation out for yet another year.

This time of year is always hard. It seems like July and August take longer to pass than the rest of the year combined. I’m longing for those magickal autumn days with every fiber of my being. I ache for the return of October all the way into the core of my bones. I need those short days and long nights when every moment is haunted and beautiful. I want to hear Type O Negative playing “Christian Woman” while I fill the house with candlelight and jack-o’-lanterns. I want to smell cinnamon and dragon’s blood incense burning while watching
The Great Pumpkin
and eating caramel apples. I want to have a Halloween party sleepover.

J
ULY
24

Did you know that Christopher Columbus saw mermaids? In fact, he saw them so often he treated them as nothing out of the ordinary. They don’t teach you that fact in your average public school textbook, but it’s easy enough to find. Just research his captain’s log for the date of January 9, 1493. On that single day he described sighting three of them. And in 1531 the people of a small village near Germany recorded having captured one. They called it a “bishop fish.” It was male and died of starvation after refusing to eat.

My point? The world is full of magick and wonders, most of which are being completely ignored. People like to congratulate themselves for having the world all figured out when nothing is further from the truth. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how so many people spend their lives in front of televisions, dismissing any phenomenon that doesn’t have its own reality show as “unreal.” Think about how many places you’ve traveled to in your car—like the grocery store. But you’ve never actually gotten out and explored the spaces between your home and the store. Who knows what you could find in those “familiar” places if you were to explore them?

A
UGUST
1

The harvest season has finally arrived. Today marks its opening. Our next stop on the wheel of the year will be the autumn equinox. I’ve always seen the opening of the harvest as a kind of stairway we walk down to reach the dark and magickal part of the year where all the good things await. The cool, comforting energy that feels more like home than any place can. Today is the landing at the top of the stairs. All we have to do is put one foot before the other, and before you know it, we’ll be watching
The Great Pumpkin
again. And then . . . the hearing in December. If you come to the hearing, we’ll be celebrating my thirty-seventh birthday together. That will be exciting, won’t it? It will be my nineteenth birthday in prison.

Twenty-eight

T
hat’s the end of my writing from Death Row. I called Lorri the morning of Saturday, August 6, 2011, and her voice when she picked up the phone was completely different. She said, “I need to talk to you about something very important.” My immediate thought was that I’d done something wrong, but in fact it was quite the opposite: Lorri told me that my lawyer Steve Braga had e-mailed her the night before, requesting to talk to her before she and I spoke. Braga and Patrick Benca (the Arkansas state attorney we were working with) had made contact with the attorney general, Dustin McDaniel, and after some negotiation, McDaniel and Scott Ellington (the county prosecutor) offered to release all three of us if we pleaded guilty. Braga refused the offer, which called for my admission of complete and total guilt, period. Braga had countered immediately with the Alford plea: all three of us would plead guilty yet we would maintain our innocence. We would be released but not exonerated by the state.

I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My first reaction was to think:
Tell them anything. Tell them I’ll say I’ve done anything if they’ll let me out.
I had reached a breaking point—my soul was damaged, and my physical health was even worse. Freedom was terrifyingly within reach.

We got off the phone and a week of sheer hell began—I often think it was worse than the previous eighteen years combined. It didn’t help matters that I hadn’t really slept or eaten in days. By the time the offer was made, I knew I didn’t have much time left. I was dying. Every day that passed made me a little weaker, a little sicker. And I was losing my eyesight as well. If I didn’t jump on this deal, then the prosecutors would drag the case out for years—going to trial would be a terrible gamble to take. I would never live to see outside these walls again. I was willing to do whatever the courts and lawyers wanted by that point, just to avoid a miserable death in a filthy prison cell.

When Benca and Jason’s and Jessie’s attorneys arrived at the Little Rock office of the attorney general on Monday the eighth, they were surprised to find a conference table lined with state prosecutors, all wearing their best suits and ties. It seems McDaniel and company meant business. They wanted to avoid the upcoming hearing, which would inevitably have led to a new trial for us. They wanted to put this case to rest, out of their lives for good—at one point, McDaniel said to Braga, “Is this going to get rid of Lorri Davis?” So everyone had turned out to make sure the deal went down, that day. As McDaniel asked each of our lawyers, starting with mine, for a vocal acknowledgment and agreement of the plea deal, things began to fall apart. Benca agreed, Jessie’s lawyer agreed, but when they got to Jason’s lawyer, he said they were not prepared to accept the deal—they hadn’t yet discussed it with their client. McDaniel went berserk, I hear. He said he’d get Jason on the phone from prison immediately. Jason’s lawyer said that wouldn’t do, he wanted to discuss the plea in person with his client. McDaniel said he’d get the lawyer into the prison in a matter of hours that day. Still, Jason’s lawyer refused, saying he had a brief at home he needed to work on. He’d get into the prison to see Jason within a few weeks. We could have been released the next day. Even McDaniel was shocked. He said, “Do you mean to tell me you’re going to allow your client to sit in prison for weeks when he could be out tomorrow?”

So that was it for the day. At that point, everyone from our lawyers, Lorri, our friend Jacob Pitts, and more were camped out at the Capital Hotel, and all efforts became focused on getting word to Jason. By the night of the twelfth, as far as everyone knew he still had not responded or perhaps even heard from his lawyers. If word got out to the media, the state had made it clear the deal was off, so secrecy was a must. On that night, Lorri called Holly, the woman Jason had been corresponding with most often in recent years, and discovered that Jason had in fact heard about the deal, and he had said no.

The prosecutor wanted all three of us—Jessie, Jason, and me—to take the deal or there would be no deal. Over the years Jason had grown to love prison. His circumstances were not the same as mine. He had a job, he had befriended the guards, and was actually looking forward to the next year in prison school. Jason had also said previously that he wasn’t willing to concede
anything
to the prosecutors. I understood that with all my heart, and I also knew he still believed he would be exonerated one day and walk freely through the prison gates. But his attorneys weren’t nearly good enough, and the state was too corrupt to ever let that happen. In many ways Jason was still the sixteen-year-old boy he’d been when we first went in. I was trapped in a nightmare, chained to someone I couldn’t even communicate with.

And Holly’s response to Lorri was cavalier—she and Jason both felt morally superior to the terms, despite the fact that there were no guarantees in our future. Lorri got off the phone and called Eddie Vedder to update him. He in turn called Holly and begged her to talk some sense into Jason when he called her from prison the next morning, as he did every Saturday.

I paced back and forth in my prison cell, two steps to the door then two steps back. Over and over and over I paced, at all hours of the day and night. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t read, couldn’t even sit still. I wept. I cursed. I raged. To see home so close and yet still beyond my reach was pain beyond articulation.

By Monday night, August 16, still no word. Lorri was frantically making preparations for my release anyway: figuring out how to get me an ID, what to do about travel outside the state, not to mention the imminent upheaval of her own life. We had talked often about what would happen if I were freed—she would have to walk away from everything she’d built for herself in Little Rock, because there was no way I could stay for any period of time in the state of Arkansas.

On the night of the seventeenth, word came through to Lorri that Jason had finally agreed. He had finally realized that I was in danger, and that we were all at the end of our rope. He also realized he was going to be left behind if he didn’t come along with us on the deal. My own case had garnered much of the WM3 publicity, and if we managed to be freed without him, there would be very little interest left in his case. The funds were nearly gone as it was. During all this time, I called Lorri constantly throughout the day for updates. I couldn’t eat or sleep and my nerves were raw. There was nothing that could hold my attention—if we didn’t pull this off, Lorri and I both knew this would be it. We were out of energy, out of options. I found out that night, too, that Jason had said yes—and for the first time in days, I sat down on my bed.

We had no idea when we’d be getting out—only the warden and head guard knew what was happening within Varner, and any information leaked would put the media into a frenzy. On the afternoon of the eighteenth, after being seated alone in a prison office for a while, I was shackled and led outside to a van. Jessie was sitting inside and started talking immediately, as though not a day had gone by since we were arrested. He talked about the girlfriend he’d had at age seventeen and going back home to West Memphis. It was overwhelming. We drove to Tucker to pick up Jason. As he got in the van, he looked over at me and I said, “We’re going home.” He replied, “Yep,” and after a few minutes we started talking. There were two guards up front and they wouldn’t stop talking, either. They stopped at a gas station and bought us candy bars and Mountain Dews, and we sat in the backseat in shackles, drinking through straws. It was the strangest celebration I’ve ever been to.

We got to the jail in Jonesboro in the late afternoon. As we pulled up, one of the guards said, “Shit, they’re already here.” Someone had leaked to the media and there was a crowd. We were told to get down as we drove into the garage, where we were unloaded and taken into the jail. We were put in separate cells overnight, no phone calls allowed. Steve Braga, Patrick Benca, and a couple others came to visit that night and dropped off clothes for the hearing. They told me that the word was spreading now, and that Lorri, friends, and supporters from all over were making their way to Memphis that night. They told me to expect a fairly quick hearing—I’d be entering my plea, and the judge would formally accept it. I sat on the edge of the bed all night, waiting for morning.

The hearing started at about eleven on the nineteenth. I was roused by one of the guards, given my clothes and a shaving razor, and after I dressed I sat on a bench waiting for Jason and Jessie. I watched a guard knotting Jessie’s tie for him. We were shackled for what would be the last time, and before we got into a van, a security guard informed us that if he said the word, we were to drop to the ground without thinking. A convoy of vehicles drove to the courthouse. We were taken into the jury deliberation room, and sat, still shackled, for about a half-hour. Lawyers for all of us came in finally, as well as Lorri—neither of us has much recollection, it was so crazed. There was a separate room for family members, and Patrick Benca kept texting photos of us to various people next door—as far as I’ve been told it was emotional pandemonium. My mother and sister were there, though my mother sat in the courtroom throughout, giving interviews and talking to the press. My father didn’t come. He sent an e-mail through the WM3 website with his phone number, in case I wanted to be in touch.

We rehearsed our statements. Originally our lawyers were going to enter our pleas for us, but at the last minute Ellington threw a fit, demanding that we accept the plea ourselves, out loud, in front of the family members of the victims, who were nearly all in attendance. Over the years, I’d corresponded with John Mark Byers, and with Pam Hobbs’s daughter, Amanda. I was so tired that I hardly registered individual presences. The crowd and the noise from reporters was overwhelming as we were walked, finally unshackled, into the courtroom. It was over with very quickly. Everything went off just as we had rehearsed. I remember seeing Lorri and Eddie sitting right behind me, and then I was declared free.

Judge Laser allowed the three of us to be escorted from the courtroom, and then he spoke to the remaining audience. He said that the plea deal was a tragedy on many counts. It wouldn’t bring the children back, and it wouldn’t replace a minute of the time we’d spent in prison. He thanked outside forces—supporters, celebrities, and friends—for getting involved and for their enduring loyalty. When I watched the speech on tape afterward, it was the first time I believed the justice system was anything other than corrupt to the core.