A stark, ‘harsh’ life on death row
Condemned inmates await their fate inside tiers of cells at San Quentin as armed guards stand on alert.
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — California’s crowded death row is as defined by architecture as the legal battles that have blocked executions since 2006.
The original men’s death row, the fourth floor of the north cell block at San Quentin State Prison, filled up shortly after the death penalty was restored in 1978.
Since then, more than 900 people have been sentenced to death but only 13 have been executed by the state. The majority of the 699 condemned men currently housed at San Quentin are in what started as overflow housing in East Block. They live, eat and sleep in two rows of openfront cells, stacked five stories high like containers in the hold of a cargo ship.
The granite structure is straight out of 1930, the year it was built. The cavern is filled with sound: metal echoing off stone, the drone of large air circulation systems, and random shouts drifting down from above. Until a cleanup that took two decades of federal oversight and didn’t end until 2009, the tiers were home to pigeons, encrusted with their droppings, leaking sewer water and rust.
It is now clean but monochromatic. There are a few points of color: red on the U.S. flag hanging in the rafters, and yellow metal boxes at the end of each tier containing crescent-shaped knives for guards to cut down inmates who try to hang themselves. Until recently, California led the nation in suicides of the condemned.
A visitor looking up sees the exposed silver insulation of the high ceiling, coils of concertina wire and armed guards perched on catwalks, rifles cradled. But no inmates. “It looks empty,” a perplexed reporter said when California agreed in late December to the first media tour of death row in a decade.
“Oh, they’re in there,” an officer replied.
The average death penalty appeal in California takes 25 years or more. There is currently no courtsanctioned execution protocol, though a single-drug method is proposed for public comment. The process of regulatory review and then legal challenge is expected to take years.
Meanwhile, opposing sides are circulating competing petitions that would ask state voters in 2016 to ban capital punishment or speed up executions. Inmates on death row were not all that familiar with the details of either.
Albert Jones, 51, was convicted in 1996 for the 1993 stabbing deaths of an elderly Riverside couple. Twentytwo years after the crime, he said, he is still in the early stages of appeal. Jones busies himself with writing and religious studies.
He concedes, “This is a harsh place mentally. You wake up and know the process every day, the guards and other individuals, because you know, they’re mad too.”
Wheelchairs line the wall of the tier. Until last year, the bottom tier cells also housed the most mentally ill of those on death row, including psychotic inmates unaware of their surroundings. Under a federal judge’s order they are now housed on the fourth floor of a prison medical building. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Paul Burton said the nation’s first death row psychiatric ward now has only a single empty cell.
As he spoke, a prisoner with tousled hair and dark circles around the eyes of his confused face paced quickly back and forth before the window of his cell.
A pair of guards stepped in front to block the view.
Most prison officers stood by, watching silently as the pack of reporters moved up and down before locked doors, seeking inmates who would talk. A few officers bantered with the prisoners, sharing small jokes.
“There’s a camaraderie you have with the guys,” said Lt. Sam Robinson, a former death row guard who is now the public information officer for San Quentin. But not friendship. “I know from my perspective, that if a guy gets out of a cell, if he has the opportunity, he may take my life,” Robinson said. “... I don’t think you take it personal. It’s just the place where we work.”
Officer S. Salais has spent 10 years as a San Quentin guard, working his way to the prison’s highest security unit, the Adjustment Center, where inmates are held in isolation for discipline or safety reasons. Before solid cell doors were added to protect guards from urine and feces, it was violent duty.
Even today, visitors must wear spit shields and stabproof vests. Yet Salais said the segregated unit “is about as stressful as you make it.”
“Me, personally, I leave my personal feelings at the gate, regardless of how I feel on why they are here, or not,” he said. “And when I leave here, I leave all my stress here, if I have any. I don’t take it home with me.”
All but four of the 85 inmates in the Adjustment Center are condemned. Some had spent decades in isolation enhanced by the solid doors. As part of a class-action settlement last year, California has returned most of the condemned inmates held for decades in solitary confinement to East Block. A few remain behind. Paul Tuilaepa, 50, with the short, stocky build of a professional wrestler, said he has spent 28 years in isolation. Tuilaepa was condemned for killing a man and shooting three others during a robbery at a Long Beach bar in 1986. His history at San Quentin includes a breakout attempt in 2000, and attacks on officers, the last eight years ago. His threat to officers is considered such that he must wear leg irons when not locked in his cell or a kennel-sized exercise cage. He argued he should return to East Block.
“They don’t care what you do, you can kill another inmate,” Tuilaepa said, “but if you mess with them [the officers], it becomes personal.”
Corrections staff would not permit photographs within the death chamber, built in 2008 and never used.
Beside the single locked entrance is a tall wood lectern, the sort used in funeral parlors for guests to sign the remembrance book.
In the narrow open space is a rope stand like those used to keep customers in line at banks. Behind that are 12 wood chairs upholstered in black, lined up to face a bank of four large panes of glass. On the other side is an intensely bright but virtually empty room, illuminating a garishly green gurney positioned directly beneath a large institutional clock.
Holes in the wall behind lead to the room in which unseen persons, looking through one-way glass, would inject lethal drugs into long IV lines attached to the prisoner. There are two holes for an IV line to run to each arm.
Just in case.