pulled up a chair. He became still and quiet and suddenly looked very worried.
“Well, it looks like I’m back here,” he said with a heavy sigh. “They done put me back on death row.”
His voice was mournful.
“I tried, I tried, I tried, but they just won’t let me be.” He looked me in the eye. “Why they want to do somebody like they’re doing me is something I’ll never understand. Why are people like that? I mind my own business. I don’t hurt nobody. I try to do right, and no matter what I do, people come along, put me right back on death row … for nothing. Nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
He was becoming agitated so I put my hand on his arm.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said as gently as I could. “It’s not as bad as it seems. I think—”
“You’re going to get me out, right? You’re going to get me off the row again?”
“Walter, this isn’t the row. You haven’t been feeling well, and so you’re here so you can get better. This is a hospital.”
“They’ve got me again, and you’ve got to help me.”
He was starting to panic, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then he started crying. “Please get me out of here. Please? They’re going to execute me for no good reason, and I don’t want to die in no electric chair.” He was crying now with a forcefulness that alarmed me.
I moved to the bed next to him and put my arm around him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Walter, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”
He was trembling, and I got up so that he could lie down. He stopped crying as his head hit the pillow. I began talking to him softly about trying to make arrangements so he could stay at home and how we needed to find help, and that the problem was that it really wasn’t safe for him to be alone. I could see his eyes drooping as I spoke, and within a matter of minutes he was sound asleep. I’d been with him less than twenty minutes. I pulled his blankets up and watched him sleep.
In the hallway, I asked one of the nurses how he’d been doing.
“He’s really sweet,” she said. “We love having him here. He’s nice to the staff, very polite and gentle. Sometimes he gets upset and starts talking about prison and death row. We didn’t know what he was talking about, but one of the girls looked him up on the Internet, and that’s when we read what happened to him. Somebody said someone like that is not supposed to be here, but I told them that our job is to help anybody who needs help.”
“Well, the State acknowledged that he didn’t do anything wrong. He is innocent.”
The nurse looked at me sweetly. “I know, Mr. Stevenson, but a lot of people here think that once you go to prison, whether you belong there or not, you become a dangerous person, and they don’t want to have nothing to do with you.”
“Well, that’s a shame.” It was all I could muster.
I left the facility shaken and disturbed. My cell phone rang as soon as I stepped outside. The Alabama Supreme Court had just scheduled another death row prisoner’s execution. One of EJI’s best lawyers was now serving as our deputy director. Randy Susskind interned with us as a law student when he was at Georgetown University and became a staff attorney right out of law school. He proved to be an outstanding litigator and an extremely effective project manager. I called Randy and we discussed what we would do to block the execution, although we both knew that it was going to be difficult to obtain a stay at this stage. I told Randy about my visit with Walter and how painful it had been to see him. We were silent on the phone for a while, something that happens a lot when we talk.
The increasing rate of executions in Alabama went against the national trend. Media coverage of all the innocent people wrongly convicted had an effect on the death-sentencing rate in America, which began to decline in 1999. But the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001, and threats of terrorism and global conflict seemed to disrupt the progress toward a repeal of capital punishment. But then a few years later, rates of execution and death