Breaking Down the Cell Walls
For some, ending the death penalty begins with the simple act of writing letters.
By Brittany Aubin
May 22, 2008
(iStockPhoto.com)Donald Jones was alone in a bare room. He lay on a metal gurney covered in a thin sheet. It was 10 a.m. on April 27, 2005. He was about to be put to death.
On the other side of the glass window, his family was waiting. In addition, Sally Vavrek, his pen pal of eight years, stood watching as Jones was given the first of three injections that would end his life. “It wasn’t a peaceful death,” said Vavrek, 56, now a board member of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions (MD CASE).
“I envisioned us holding hands and ushering him into the Kingdom in a loving way. But it was just—an amusement park ride with a black light or something." With his mother screaming, Vavrek said, Jones jumped off the gurney. "It was just the most horrible, horrible few minutes you could even imagine,” she said.
Vavrek had to have seen this day coming almost a decade earlier, when she selected a letter from Jones at a conference of religious groups organizing against the death penalty. Yet, she, like other men and women across the country, still chose to build a relationship with a condemned person.Whether motivated by religion, conviction, or simple curiosity, death row pen pals connect often-isolated inmates to the world beyond their cell walls. While no one knows how many pen pals are out there, they are on the frontlines of a burgeoning anti-death penalty movement, bringing the stories of death row into America’s classrooms and offices. “The most important thing is for us to realize that these are people like everybody else,” Vavrek said. “In some places, those prisoners get locked up and nobody even thinks about them.”
In recent years there has been an upswing in moratoriums on state executions and death row exonerations. Despite the recent Baze v. Rees Supreme Court ruling that upheld lethal injection as constitutional under the Eighth Amendment, individual states have taken the lead in a movement against lethal injection and capital punishment. New Jersey banned the death penalty last December. New York, Illinois and ten other states have holds on executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions across the country have been declining since the start of the century, with 53 in 2006 compared to 98 in 1999.
Yet, even as the incidences of executions fall, conditions on death rows have remained essentially the same or have deteriorated. In the last 20 years, security concerns and social isolation at prisons have only increased, keeping prisoners even further from outside society, said Robert Johnson, author of Condemned to Die: Life Under the Sentence of Death and an expert in social isolation on death row.
“Death row inmates sometimes talk of themselves as the living dead,” said Johnson. “As a general matter, the inmates feel that even the limited social world of the prison is closed to them.”
Death row prisoners are not necessarily bad prisoners or the most violent, said Johnson, but they are placed in high security areas since their crimes, and subsequent sentences, are the most severe. “Essentially, death row is seen as a place to store bodies before execution, so there is little, if any, effort towards rehabilitation and integration,” he said.
“We’d have fewer executions, I suppose, if we came to know and care about everybody in prison, but people don’t. Part of the rationalization is to have distance,” Johnson said.
The letters written by 20-year-old Abby Wihl from her American University dorm room and the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center transformed the college sophomore from observer to activist. Wihl, a journalism student, started writing Maryland death row inmate John Booth last March, after an assignment for a college writing class piqued her interest in death row prisoners. “I don’t think my parents even know that I met a death row inmate yet,” said the pony-tailed undergrad.
At the age of 29, her pen-pal Booth, a heroin addict with a tortured past, was convicted for the murder of an elderly couple in Baltimore. Irvin and Rose Bronstein were found bound, gagged, and stabbed 12 times each in the chest, according to court documents. Their television, jewelry, and 1972 Chevrolet Impala were missing.
Booth came to know Wihl after she made the two-hour trek from American University’s campus to the barbed wire complex in Baltimore that contains Maryland’s death row. On that first visit, Wihl brought Booth pairs of socks and some undershirts—items that are novelties behind prison walls. The two have written to each other about six times in all, and Wihl is now planning her second visit to the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center.
“Having the physical face and just seeing how sad he was, it was difficult,” she said, playing with the religious medallions resting under her collar. Maryland death row inmates can receive eight visits a month, but prisoners usually communicate with guests through a speaker in a glass wall.
Wihl received Booth’s latest letter in her dorm mailbox; it was typed in blue ink and closed with a simple hand-scrawled "John."
“It has been the shadow or memory of that very bright smile of yours, coupled with your willingness to share in this experience, and assist me in this struggle—that has given my heart a reason to smile,” he wrote.
For Wihl, the pen-pal relationship has generated a dedication to social change. She is now the co-president of American University’s chapter of the Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and an active participant in Maryland’s campaign to end capital punishment. She has studied the documents surrounding Booth’s case and sent Booth’s former judge a copy of her findings. After sharing Booth’s story as part of her final class paper, Wihl changed her major from business to journalism so she could continue to tell the stories of those who couldn’t tell them alone.
“My conception changed,” she said. As for her effect on Booth, the 53-year-old convicted murderer, she shrugged. “He got clothes out of it.” But for other pen pals corresponding with “the living dead,” the relationship went deeper than socks and schoolwork.
Bonnita Spikes, the field organizer for Maryland Citizens Against State Executions, considers the prisoners on Maryland’s death row to be her personal friends. She attended Wesley Baker’s execution in 2005 and keeps in touch with his mother. Spikes is a mother of four boys and a grandmother of ten; she has traveled across the country, from Miami to Atlanta to College Park, Md., to advocate against executions. However, Spikes, 54, is also an active member of another organization—Murder Victims Families for Human Rights.
In 1994, Spikes’s husband Michael was shot to death. His killers were never found. Spikes’ son attempted suicide after his father’s death. But rather than seeking vengeance for her husband’s death, Spikes turned to causes she thought Michael would have wanted her to support. She worked with those in hospices and those suffering from homelessness, eventually turning to working against the death penalty. She believes forgiveness is essential to breaking cycles of hate and crime, cycles that won’t be broken by just locking people in the Supermax to await lethal injection. “I understand. I really understand because I lost my husband,” she said. “But I just don’t think that executions are the way to go.”
When dealing with other victims’ families, Spikes acknowledges that not everyone can forgive the way she did. “I say to anybody, I’m not trying to tell you how you should feel about this,” she said. “I’m just saying if you knew the way it’s handled, it’s not handled right. It’s flawed,” she said. “The list of exonerated alone that should let you know there’s something wrong with our system.”
The families of the offenders are also victims and deserve help and support, said Spikes, who plans to write her master’s thesis on helping the families of both murder victims and offenders. “Once people hear how some have actually lived, it gives them food for thought and starts the process of, ‘Okay, maybe I need to change my mind about this,’” Spikes said.
After working with death row inmates, Spikes says she has seen the humanity of the offenders she once hated. She says her relationship with death row inmates has freed her to love her family and her life. “I wanted to find the killers that killed my husband and wanted them to be [imprisoned] and really suffer,” Spikes said.
She believes that holding onto a lust for revenge kept her, and her family, from healing. “Letting go,” she said, “I just wish more people could know that feeling because it’s just not fun living with hate, waking up to hate every morning.”
If groups like Maryland Citizens Against State Executions and Murder Victims Families for Human Rights have their way, pen pals like Vavrek and Spikes may no longer be standing on the other side of the execution chamber’s glass. For Vavrek, however, experiencing the life and death of her pen pal has only cemented a commitment to a larger movement. “I’m still not sure about my motives,” she said. “All I know is that it did strengthen my resolve to keep working until this is gone from the world.”
Brittany Aubin is a recent graduate of American University and a former intern at the Center for American Progress. An earlier version of this article was published in AWOL Magazine, part of the Campus Publications Network.
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Too bad that 1/1000th of the effort indicated here is not spent on working with the innocent victims’ relatives instead of the murderers. Some people have their values messed up. — I’m a retired homicide investigator.
— Bill - May 22, 01:13 PM - #Great piece. Always nice to see the perspective not usually presented. Bill – If I’m not mistaken the entire system is meant to work and care for victims. That’s why we prosecute, convict, and incarcerate. A few people thinking about the souls who are tortured enough to commit such heinous acts wont kill us. Values that exclude some human beings from understanding might.
— Nicole - May 22, 01:30 PM - #Nicole: I know only too well that is what is supposed to happen, but that is not the way it is in real life. If you spend any real time around inmates, there are very few who were “tortured souls” to the point that they committed their acts. Most are only upset because they were caught and spend their time trying to figure out how to “get even” with those who caught them. There are about a dozen who I have “alerts” on, so that I will be told if they get out, paroled, or escape. Most inmates are there because they do not have values that most of the rest of society do have. Their credo is “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” Just be very careful!
— Bill - May 22, 03:56 PM - #The US criminal justice system is a perfect example of this country’s values and method of problem solving. We fear and thus demonize the “other” with now effective programs for social and communal rehabilitation. We need to stop seeing and emphasizing the “evil” in people and instead the shared humanity.
— Jeremy - May 22, 07:24 PM - #I commend anyone trying to stop the barbaric practice of state sponsored murder. Becoming like the persons we ‘condemn’ is not an answer to violence. In the words of Ghandi, “Be the change you want to see in others.” . . . quit using violence to promote non-violence
— Christine - May 25, 12:14 AM - #1st step in the abolition of the death penalty should be to get the murderers to stop the killings, After that there will be no need for that.
— Bill - May 25, 02:06 AM - #How long did it take to come up with that idea? Since Cain killed Abel? And God didn’t execute Cain.
— Christine - May 26, 04:47 PM - #Do you believe verything you read in the Bible? I doubt it and of course which one of about 56 different versions?
— Bill - May 27, 07:04 PM - #Having spent three years in a state prison I can tell you that everyone from the hard core law and order types to the tree hugging love everyone people, be vey glad that there are prisons. An inmate is the very best actor you can imagine. Don’t let your emotion get your throat cut.
— Jeff I - Sep 11, 07:58 AM - #We are glad there are prisons, so glad in fact that we think the death penalty is not necessary because of them. They serve the purpose of taking a criminal out of society. To the point where we should not need to kill them as an extra precautionary.
— Sinde - May 8, 10:00 AM - #