The True Believer

Now

Tick Tock 11:30. They will be coming for me soon. No chance of a pardon. Governor Gordon D. Sumner would love to administer the lethal dose, if he were permitted. Yep, same Gordo. No help from the Supreme Court either. If they were to issue a stay, Sumner has said he would ignore it, just as Illinois did with his extradition order. Such is the state of the union.

Listen:

I have been on death row for 5 years. Lindsey is now 14, Ray-Ray just turned 12. When I was sentenced, I encouraged Elsie to have faith, I would get home soon. I truly thought saner heads would eventually prevail, and I would be released. I was unduly optimistic.

Saner heads are here but, as I have learned to my own peril, the community and family pressure for conformity to a specific world view is overwhelming. My very expensive lawyer, T. Eric Hoffer tried unsuccessfully to introduce evidence in my trial to show that the head of the Mississippi Department of Health was once a strong abortion rights advocate. The switch to being an outspoken defender of the state's draconian pregnancy termination laws wasn't a disingenuous move for money or power. It was a switch in strongly held beliefs to conform with the community and family world view here. It is that societal pressure that doomed me from the beginning of the trial. The community here in Mississippi saw me as antithetical to all their beliefs. I was their boogey man.  

I'm not a psychiatrist but it seems the good God-fearing people of this state view me as a threat to their way of life in some way. Somehow, I have become climate change endangering their southern counties, or African Americans wanting to sit at the same table. Somehow what I did to save Brianna's life has made the devil incarnate. There is some part of the psyche of people here that will only be satisfied by my death, as if taking my life reaffirms theirs. So it goes. 

I have requested my family not be in Mississippi. Why put them thru the pain. I have written Elsie my hope that she put me in the past and find someone to enjoy her life and the lives of our children with. Five years on death row has taught me loneliness is everything it is cracked up to be.

In the long sleepless nights here in the farm, I have often thought that if not for a warning light on an aging Delta Airlines 787, I would be at home right now.